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Its 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 thou

Its 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 ago
Hey 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?

ideapackets 7y ago

Hey 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?