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For all the naysayers, I'd like to mention that the rally is a much more effective political tool than say online petitions, precisely because it requires signi
by zeteo 13y ago
For all the naysayers, I'd like to mention that the rally is a much more effective political tool than say online petitions, precisely because it requires significant effort to attend. It's very easy to ignore a bunch of people who clicked links online, much harder when they abandon their Sunday plans and show up downtown to make a lot of noise.
However, the age of the rally is waning these days. It was all the rage during the French Revolution, but telephony and television have created much better influence tools; such as the phone-in campaign or the political ad buy. It would be good to at least upgrade to '50s style politics and organize people for either phoning in to Congress ("OK Bob you want to help? You can call congressman Goodlatte's office around 3pm this Friday, here are some possible talking points") or running Kickstarter-style ad buys ("Donate $5 for running this ad on prime time national TV and we'll post your name on our wall").
Of course, the Internet offers new possibilities for politics that have barely begun to be scratched. Everyone uses Google, and Google is a democracy of sorts allowing for tactics such as Google bombing. It's hard to quantify its effect on the presidential campaign of senator Santorum (Republican runner-up last year), but it was probably out of proportion with the small number of people involved. And I'm sure there are many other things possible, if only more smart people directed their attention towards such issues. Politics is important - it won't make you as much money as a successful app, but can change the world a lot more.
- 00rion 13y agoI'm currently working on a social network that helps groups of people make decisions and build consensus. In most organizations, decisions are made from the top down and then implemented by small groups within the organization. The goal will be to enable large groups to make decisions involving broad-based goals and provide a mechanism to form working groups to carryout the actions necessary to implement those goals. What does HN think?
- tocomment 13y agoI've always wondered how a system like that could work. If you do it right, it could be very useful. It would be interesting if for example Hacker news discussion threads could something decide on collective actions to take.
- newnewnew 13y agoIt seems like every few months a democratic idealist looks around and realizes that nobody chooses democracy as a decision making method when they have the choice, and goes about making tools to try to fix this peculiar fact. The reason why nations use democracy as a decision-making method is 1) it has populist appeal and 2) they have a lot of resources to waste on bad decisions. The intelligence of a decision goes down with the number of people involved, until we arrive at the ideal of universal suffrage.
- 00rion 13y agoThat's why broad, not specific, goals would be decided by large groups. One broad goal might be to "end domestic NSA surveillance". Specific actions could be decided by teams of people in working groups which is similar to the way actionable decisions are made in many businesses.
- thangalin 13y agoThere are many possibilities; here is an extensive list of online political systems and related technology: https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Related%20Links https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Related%20... The main page links to mock-ups for a political system that aims to eliminate corruption within policy-making while espousing dissemination of information and knowledge: https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/wiki/Home Comments and critiques of the idea are most welcome.