There are forms of this that already exist. But not enough. Every city or population center should have a schedule of such conferences being held in its immediate area.

Although the participation will always be a small minority of the population, it should somehow be made open to eveyrone, and publicized, so everyone knows they can attend and participate if and when they wish to do so.

One type of person who needs to attend is someone who listens to talk radio shows (or the mainline news) and gets mad at what they hear and wants to react to it but can’t get past the call screener when they call the program (or gets cut off by the talk show host after having only 30 seconds to make their point).

While there are countless incarnations of political “open houses” and “town hall meetings” and the like, what makes this different is the lack of a prescribed agenda or experts. This is, quite simply, a room and a format for creating small discussions and relating those experiences to a larger group.

In my interpretation of RootsCamp — which, I should point out, is not exactly the same as the people who started the site: to be a forum for progressives to reflect on the past election and strategize about grassroots campaigning — I am looking for an all-inclusive, learners-as-experts-as-learners kind of atmosphere. I am talking to progressives, libertarians, republicans, democrats, senior citizen living communities, college organizations, etc., etc. I don’t know what kind of turnout there will be, but I hope to put a lot of people of diverse backgrounds in the same room with the charge to explore and understand other perspectives and compare them to your own.

You are implying the very thing that I feel is problematic about American politics — the need to arrive at consensus or convince others of a position. Those kinds of motivations, ideally, have no place in my concept of mutual politics, an idea I hope to discuss in this forum. The goal is understanding not persuasion.

To qualify, you just have to show up. Nothing more.

It sounds good.

There have already been experiments of this sort for many years.

There was a movement several years ago called “Planetary Initiative” which held such meetings and tried to bring them all together to create a “Platform” statement.

To be effective and appealing to everyone, there has to be widespread inclusion of all such groups, whatever they may call themselves.

In other words, there may be such groups already taking place, but which call themselves something other than “RootCamp” or any other term.

The goal then is to somehow bring them all together into a common project. And this project must be designed to appeal to all of them.

What criteria would each group have to meet in order to “qualify” for inclusion as a RootCamp?

I like the word “conference”. But I’m not sure about the “RootCamp” term.

In order for the concept to succeed, there can be no authoritative leadership of the movement. It has to be spontaneous without appointed leaders.

Somehow decisions have to be made. Perhaps each “conference” could hold a vote on one matter or another, and the result would somehow be official, at least for that particular “conference”.

But then how would the whole network of conferences adopt any measure? Would it require unanimous agreement by all the conferences?

Could an earlier decision be revoked by a new conference that meets?

This idea needs to be developed further.

I’d like to try working there for a while, for a couple reasons. Mainly, I like the idea of parallel communities. My research on PoliticWiki (PDF) pointed to the branding of the wiki with our logo as an obstacle to participation. I would rather get many people contributing there in as open and inclusive manner as possible, and then use our site to discuss our own contributions, decide on what we take out of that work, and worry about our organizational needs.

And, it is also a needed excuse to play with the controls of a new wiki.

any conclusions reached by the authors are different from conventional wisdoms because these conclusions are all qualified, and any new data might change them.

another example, referred to in the introduction of the book, is the whole conventional wisdom about how money influences politics.

this is an example of another conventional wisdom, it sounds like it might be true.

but consider this; does the candidate with the most money win because of the money, or did the wining candidate win, and raise the most money, because of their appeal in the first place?

their data says that money doesn’t matter at all. that the winning candidate could cut his campaign spending in half and only loose about one percent of the vote.

food for thought.