Open Politics
Add comment 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.