Hunting The Muse

Social Organizing

I want to organize a better discussion system. Discussion boards are good but it's all talk usually. Blogs are better, but it's hard to organize groups. Both are too ephemeral. Wikis are good, but they don't really invite in new viewpoints.

I want a discussion system - no, a participation system - centered around three main ingredients:

• Ideas bubble to the top: Anyone can suggest an idea. If it's good, it picks up steam, it gains life. Whether through linking, rating, popularity, I don't care; although I don't really like popularity because it's susceptible to the power law. Decentralized moderation is better.
• Education: Ideas that are hashed out by the community are made permanent, to be reviewed by new entrants later. A curriculum dynamically grows. The documents are living.
• Action Items: Discussion yields ideas. The ideas need to become action, however. Action Items are identified, and associated with projects. Discussion topics may or may not be associated with multiple projects.

It should be an open system, so someone can just start talking, and then the community would route the user to what he'd be interested in. Passion starts with venting, which is unstructured, and that should be channeled rather than denied. Worst thing to do to a new user is require them to jump through hoops before they can indulge their interest. Better to help them feel welcomed and then lead them to where they are useful.

As ideas crystalize into causes, polling could be frequent. A user could be associated with several causes and beliefs, on which they are active to various degrees.

Location information would be stored, so interest in issues could be reported by location - by state, by congressional district, by zip code. It could end up feeding viewpoints to elected representatives.

The other entry point into the system would be through education - reading the living documents created by the community in a choose your own adventure fashion. Eventually the path of finalized preparatory documents would lead to an open discussion, or to an action item that the person could complete.

It would be nice if the site could be structured so that it wouldn't necessarily only attract like-minded people. But that is probably more up to the branding of the site than the actual functionality. Posted by Curt at December 19, 2003 09:17 PM