Posts filed under 'Platform-In-Progress'
December 4th, 2006
One bad thing about PHPBB, I’m discovering, is that it is very susceptible to spam. It seems like I prune about a dozen posts a day from the forum. Either they are blatantly so (links to viagra, PC software and Britany Spears nude), or they are honeypots for future spam (authentic posts scraped from other forums elsewhere on the web, hoping to be changed to blatant spam later). The RSS feed that shows the most recent changes on the front page has been a great help, as I can very easily check new posts for content before deleting the crap. I had to impose an inconvenient time limit on post frequency to discourage the massive submissions, and that has helped keep the problem from being worse.
There are two problems here. First, in a way the low use of this site by actual community members helps keep the deletions manageable. Frequent daily checking of the site coupled with infrequent contributions of value means I don’t have to go off the bookmarked home page to check for new stuff. If future changes pump up the site volume, the current method of spam patrol will get a little more inconvenient. Second, the site seems to be on some spammer list now as a free place to post crap. The variety and frequency has picked up, even if the effectiveness has not (the posts aren’t lasting long). Spammers automate and thus don’t worry much about checking for anything more than success of a post.
Among the to-do list items is a reworking of the submission process in PHPBB to give denials to more crap posts. The best solutions, though, would be a tool for PHPBB that works like Akismet does for WordPress blogs. That is, similar posts show up all over the web. Having all posts go through a central database check can flag them as spam if someone has encountered and rejected a post as spam previously, and then quarantine them. Collective action works miracles for the blog, but wikis and forums need the same kind of protection.
August 21st, 2006
Here at WikiSym 2006, I’ve had a chance to take a look at what is happening elsewhere in the wiki community. While there are still reasons to continue to work with our own wiki area for platform construction and research, it might be worthwhile to open up the idea of joining another wiki community with similar goals and moving our content efforts there.
On the pro side of leaving, we have benefits from less code to maintain here and greater exposure to ideas and usership. On the con side is the need to have another password and login (avoiding that was one of the big technical focuses this past summer), we wouldn’t control content or mission as a community, and traffic has one less reason to come here.
I’d be interested to hear from members about the pros and cons.
August 18th, 2006
Not long after PoliticWiki was launched last summer, I stumbled upon a paper by Kate Raynes-Goldie about another wiki being used for an online platform. The “Living Platform” was the first attempt to use a wiki to create a bona-fide party platform, for the Green Party of Canada. They represented a small percentage of the Canadian populous, but the project drew over 800 participants, about 50 of whom were considered active. Political issues, not technical or communal ones, eventually doomed the Living Platform. While that site still exists, version 2.0 has been taken to another place: Open Politics.
The mission of Open Politics is to support civic engagement through the Internet. Running off of a TikiWiki engine, this site aims at a more general approach to developing issues into positions. It’s Issue-Position-Argument (IPA) structure of political content is something we emulate, although they are trying to eliminate all rhetoric (the “A” in IPA) from the equation. OpenPolitics.ca is intended to make it easier to learn, deliberate and decide complex issues in public policy.
The project specifically aims to maintain an online environment where:
- anyone can participate
- people participate as equals
- all actions are transparent
- all contributions are recorded
- eliberation is rewarded and and rhetoric discouraged
- multiple points of view are conveyed quickly and fairly
- issues and positions are “living documents” that can reflect what the community thinks today
Something else our own PoliticWiki can emulate is a clear “get started” page. One of the comments I received early in our summer site upgrade was that our 3rdParty.org site fails to do this right now. We’ve got all of these possible channels of communication, but it isn’t clear what it is someone new can do to help out. Part of the next redesign (which should have mockups ready by the end of August) is going to be to attempt to add clarity to the presentation.
There are a number of political wiki projects starting to surface. None really do what 3rd Party is attempting. A few are close, and a few others do parts of our mission better. One thing we might consider is collaborating on content in those communities.
August 8th, 2006
I added a news feed that will allow us to bring in some published content elsewhere on the web as blog posts here. The first test was done last night with Politics1, the very cool campaign coverage site that has been running (more successfully) as long as we have. In addition to disseminating news on congressional elections (and other campaigns) throughout the States, Ron Gunzburger also sells — or at least sold — me some Jimmy Carter campaign buttons. It should be one of our goals to get listed on his site.
This new news feed will evolve over time to include other useful information from other sources. In the future, the posts will likely be better marked than they are now to indicate an external content source. (Just to clarify, Ron isn’t coming here and posting … although that is a privilege that can be opened up to interested 3rdparty members.)
Below is a list of political blogs Ron lists in his blogroll in the lower sidebar of his site. You might want to take a look at some of these and see if there are ones worth adding to our own feed.
POLITICAL BLOG ROLL:
August 5th, 2006
If you are looking for some inspiration in asking questions, answering the same, or just some motivational hooks to get your mind thinking in a new direction, try The Edge. It is a loosely organized collection of interesting thinkers who ask each other questions.
One of the recent entries (circa May 2006) is DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, written by Jaron Lanier. There are a host of responses from others, as well, including Fernanda Viegas, Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia), and online communities researcher Howard Rheingold.
In essence, Lanier criticizes Wikipedia not for its experimentation in collective authorship and shared information but for the excess heaped upon it (and other “hive mind” efforts) as being all-wise. He laments what he sees as a mutually exclusive battle between collectivism and individuals, where anonymity swallows up any recognizable voice. There is some truth to that, and to the observation that groups are not infallible. However, Lanier doesn’t seem to go far in looking for ways in which a medium like a wiki can be a companion to individual contribution.
PoliticWiki began as an experiment in the collective’s take on opinionated events. Unlike Wikipedia, where the stated goals are to amass as much knowledge as possible and present it in the most neutral voice possible, PoliticWiki was looking as a wiki as a new way to discuss politics through editing. The act of editing, of changing a phrase to rearrange the meaning, is a form of dialogue. It carries with it response and proposal, inviting others to do the same. Where the early effort may have failed it lacked leadership, focus and vision. We are not attempting to collect all of the worlds knowledge on politics — even as we do strive to collect some, as a means to our ends. We are attempting to leverage the strengths of the medium — a wiki’s ability to easily facilitate collaborative writing and quickly rearrange structure — to give our community a workspace for our ideas.
For those of you who find yourselves asking, “What is a wiki, and why is it part of Third Party?” the debate above might be helpful. (Or for liks to lighter-side diversion, try this post from my blog.)
August 3rd, 2006
Just a quick personal note …
Yes, the response recently has been disappointing. While the election season and aftermath has always been the most active time of our year, I was hoping for more participation in the development of this site. There have been a handful of people willing to contribute on this site and offer suggestions, and for that I am grateful. But it is frustrating not to have more daily activity, even if in very small doses.
It is a busy time for me, too. In addition to prepping for a doctoral program at Indiana University, I am also swamped in several little projects that make it difficult to stop by with any regularity. Moreso this past week, which was complicated by a three-day trip to a funeral service. The days before and since have been compressed into tight, long workdays. I would like to figure out how to keep myself involved. This blogspace helps, in that regard, since it is a managable option to invest 30 to 60 minutes a day and write a little entry on something related to these projects.
What I tell myself is this: The Third Party vision for political change is a long, slow trip. It won’t happen overnight, or even with a couple weeks devoted to doing nothing but site and content development. It will happen, eventually, if I look at this project as a chance to change my own routine and incorporate political engagement in my life every single day. My circumstances are such that 30 minutes is a huge investment of available time (because I really don’t have any available time). It is only by continually deciding to invest that small amount will our goals be accomplished. In this case, I am trying to turn a mountain of work into a molehill of interaction.
August 2nd, 2006
One of the advantages of travel is the opportunity to read. Books don’t require batteries or much space. I recently got a chance to read Freakonomics
by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The book is a collection of (mostly) unrelated questions grouped into chapters by their statistical similarity, so you get things like a history of the Klu Klux Klan mixed with biases in home sales. The thread for all of the studies is this: Conventional wisdom is conceived from biased self-interest and rarely reflects what actually happens in the world.
The two most controversial ideas in Freakonomics are:
- Abortions are most responsible for reduction in crime
- Parents have no effect on improving their kids’ education
This isn’t an argument to further politicize abortion by making it a crime control policy, or to save resources on schools and parent support by accepting that test scores are predetermined by social class. Rather, it is an opportunity to look at issues like crime and education from a new perspective — under the dispassionate lens of Levitt’s economics — and find the heart of some misconceived problems.
The Freakonomy of crime may credit Roe v. Wade with trimming the 1990s population of a bunch of high-risk youth, but that really just underscores the fact that crime is closely tied to socio-economic circumstance and early childhood experiences lacking unconditional love and support. Education has such a focus on testing outcome today that its role as a means of social mobility is completely undercut. Perhaps the message in Levitt’s numbers is not “Parents don’t matter” but rather “Parents should matter more.”
For a more detailed review of Freakonomics, read my blog.
July 18th, 2006
While trying to answer some of my own questions about education, I stumbled across this site. World Prosperity is a non-profit group over a decade old with similar ideas as ours about the accumulation of knowledge. The site is a very nice launchpad for a number of issues, including:
Well worth a look, if you want to try to research any of these areas.
