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What do u think of the impact potential/risk of a legal crowd-sourcing platform?
TL;DR: I believe that each of us has unique perspectives to offer and therefore, collectively, we know what needs to get done and can figure out how. We just need a place to do it. So I want to build a legal crowd-sourcing platform to provide such a place.
Some time ago, I came upon an idea during a conversation. This person had an interesting idea as to how to organize a law to specifically address a social issue and I figured that there must be many "regular" people on this earth with great ideas but no easy way to refine and get them to actionable status. Recognizing this untapped potential along with my experience with open source, I combined this hypothesized need with an older idea I had concerning forum reorganization and came up with ideapackets.
It doesn't have to be a place just for bill propositions but also for charters and protocols, anything which can help reorganize our collective knowledge into actionable outlined courses of action.
Practically, it would have a user submit a proposal using a form designed to identify its components so that the community can comment on each one. Each component (provision) would have its own own thread. This organization can hopefully help keep refinements focused on the specific small part at hand so that, overall, the proposal comes out with accurate, expert-driven steps to action. Each of these threads would allow viewers to vote on the refinements - that's the "merging" part of the process. Eventually, the community as a whole would have proposed, voted on, and put together a community-sourced plan of action to tackle any organizational issue, I hope.
If you think this shows potential, let me know. I'll be posting my progress and asking for input so you will have a direct impact on how this tool turns out.
pic of the form to help with visualization:
https://www.reddit.com/user/ideapackets/comments/cdnnru/what_do_you_think_of_the_impact_potentialrisk_for/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
- vikramkr 7y agoIts a good idea- citizens on the ground likely know local issues better than most politicians. Especially for local issues this could be powerful. I wonder though, Its going to get very political very fast, with each side brigading the other. I don't know how you deal with a community that will be instantly bifurcated and at war with the opposing side. And for the platform to have value, it would have to generate concepts ultimately turned into law or made official in some way. How is an online platform going to be able to get policies implemented? Any thoughts?
- ideapackets 7y agoHey vikramkr, thanks for your comment and good points. I've worried about political warfare devaluing something like this fast. I would lean heavily on requiring evidence or sources for each paragraph written (at first, I'm thinking requiring at least one source), maybe eventually curating a whitelist/blacklist of domains to make sure the sources are reputable to a satisfactory degree. I would hope actually that heavy stress on the need for supporting evidence would perhaps foster greater understanding between opposing sides, assuming that participants are ego-controlled enough (some website features may help with that? like karma?) to consider what the other side is proposing as support. So maybe the energy fueling political warfare can actually be channeled into cooperation when the battlefield is fine-tuned towards that? As for how policies can be implemented, if a given well documented plan of action can reach a certain level of maturity on the platform, it can either be picked up by (or, in the beginning, proposed to) activist groups searching for solutions on the given topic. Assuming that such crowd-sourcing yields a wealth of perspective on the nature of a problem and creative solutions to it, activist groups may come to find such proposals to their liking, maybe even proposing bills of their own on the platform for community perspective to refine. Once groups start accepting bills then their methods of marketing (social media, lobbying) would carry the bills the rest of the way. I'd envision that a platform such as this should restrict itself to facilitating discussion and data collection as a matter of principle, to remain apolitical, as much as it can be. If some other mechanism comes to mind, I'll post. What do you think about such a mechanism as I've described above? I've also considered what an effect this can have in slowing climate change. Perhaps, if participants from diverse backgrounds work on detailed international or regional legislation, the end result can be a creative, more easy to swallow plan of action than other propositions out there right now? Any thoughts on that use case?