Wikicracy

Wikicracy, or Wikidemocracy is a model of government based on the open source and "wiki" concepts that have already been brought to the private sector, i.e. Wikipedia. Some people think it is the future of democracy. The idea, at its most basic level, is bringing common citizens to the law, and allowing for a transparent law process and maximum public input using the latest technology. The pinnacle of this theory is allowing community members in any given jurisdiction direct access to its laws. Using wiki style editing, people can actually edit their demands into laws.

This is wiki, please contribute to this paper if you feel you are able to add value. Thank you.

Collaboration using wikis is one of the few revolutionary inventions of the last few years in the social field. The philosophy behind the tool itself is at the same time simple and extremely powerful - everyone can contribute, in their own language, to the building of human knowledge.

Wikis help people to participate together efficiently without having to hold frequent meetings somewhere specific. Everyone can participate, wherever they may be, provided they have access to internet.

And even more extraordinary, is that contrary to forums, chats, e-mail or telephone conversations, wikis build upon what is previously stated; the first contribution made by someone is not forgotten. Over time the information on wikis is corrected (usually), modified, completed (sort of) by all the contributors that will be reading and editing the articles afterwards. Wikis also provide safeguards if someone intentionally or not had come and deleted useful information.

Wikis are already a success:

• for the global encyclopedia (wikipedia)
• for the dictionary (wiktionary)
• for the educational institution (wikiversity)

And other new projects, all having their own part in building a mankind-made information access for mankind.

Wikis are helping to build a global database that can be freely used by all humans, for photos and other media (wikimedia commons).

Wikimedia projects have mainly succeeded where information shall be according to the facts, and has focused on the efficient building up of knowledge.

Why?

Information is always biased in some way, more or less depending on many things. Sometimes, one may focus on one aspect of reality and forget about other aspects; and, in the worst case scenario, false information may be delivered by someone too close to the subject of an article.

Thanks to the community and the wiki tool, a large amount of people check the articles, and thus can complete the other aspects not mentioned in the article, or put a warning if the article is thought to be biased. The more people that are watching the article, the more likely experts in the field will be looking at it, and the less chances are that errors won't get noticed.

This is the key for most perfect information, once we understand that like everything in this world, nothing is perfect, but everything can be improved and can converge to the (unreachable by definition) ideal of perfection.

Are you satisfied with how decisions are made in your community? Would you like to see more transparency?

Just like the facilitation of knowledge creation by wiki that occurs in an article, the wiki tool can become, if adapted, the ultimate tool for building political platforms, public budgeting, and all kinds of public consultation processed. That is, it can become a basic tool for more powerful, more efficient forms of democracy. The efficient facilitation of wide consensus could be achieved. This arguably could be the future of democracy.

Today, what I propose is to build together the tool that will allow a better democracy, this has been called by others political wiki

Requirements:

• Accessible from anyone in the world with internet access
• Enabling efficient online proposals study/amendment
• Vote/adoption procedures and elections
• Robust for virtually any kind of group, association, political party, city board, country, international institution
• Adaptable to business e.g. shareholders meeting.

• Discuss name of the project: wikacracy? wikicracy? wikiocracy? wikidemocracy? democracy 2.0? Supercracy? ...
• Studying websites related to wiki and software, to democracy and to decision making.
• At the same time, listing all the feature that implies this project.
• Working on translations of a short resume of the project. Vmandrilly I can do it for French, and maybe Chinese
• Designing the interface.
• And then later we will need to translate this into computer code...

Existing tools and add-ons that may be usefull for this project The fundamental base of the project

• MediaWiki --- Here is the available extentions page for MediaWiki.

Vote / poll systems

• ...
• ...

Others

• ...
• ...

(please post here the functions you would like to see implemented in Wikicracy betas)

Community Knowledge Interactive Cartography http://www.ligamen.fr/index.php/Accueil http://ligamen.org/mediawiki/index.php/CompetencesGroupeApprendre2

Guidelines and important related texts:

• Open Politics article on wikipedia
• ERulemaking article on wikipedia
• A speech (video) from Ecuador President Rafael Correa to encourage Web 2.0 democracy! - proves clearly there is a big interest in democracy tools for the internet. Let's build it!

These are websites based on wiki and/or democracy principles. They may develop tools for their own wiki that could be used in this project. These websites/wikis may also be the firsts to wish to test Wikicracy betas. See also: List of political sites on a google doc

• Aktivdemokrati Swedish party running for the national parliament -Riksdagen, using only member e-democracy as decision making tool.
• New Zealand Police Act wiki - NZ governmental wiki allowing the internet to input on their police code. While they take input from the wiki, the final decisions are still up to politicians.
• Socialtext.com / The Socialtext article on wikimedia / Joi social workspace (a wiki project sharing similar interests) - A wiki developed for businesses / projects. Seems very close to this project.
• Metagovernment - More complex that a wiki, but still a mass-collaboration initiative built on openness and transparency. Meant to scale from tiny organizations to major governments. Appears to use something like Slashdot karma to weight users' input. They also maintain a list of related projects.
• DemocracyLab - interactive online think tank, similar to Metagovernment
• ProtoForge (a similar tool, not based on MediaWiki, meant for organizing engineering laws (requirements))
• openpolitics.ca. Note: this project seems advanced, and they have probably made changes/add-ons to their wiki that could be use in this project
• DellIdeastorm.com Non politic, but intended to bring democracy in public opinion and gather ideas from the users. The main idea seems to be this 'digging' system in which you can vote to make the issue more or less visible in the ranking. This looks much like the idea of 'priority' flag Vmandrilly designed on the proposal. (see above in 'example' section)
• ¿WhyNot? Another interesting tool, that integrates some style of debate. and Voting for popularity of ideas flow.
• July 2008 P2PFoundation:Deliberative Democracy
• Debatepedia.org - a wiki for people in competitive debate
• Mass-collaboration.net - Well put together, but low-traffic site
• democracy.wikia.com - Another similar site, low traffic
• Wikiparty international / Finnish wikiparty - (currently overrun by spammers)
• http://wikitution.org
• http://our-constitution.org
• http://www.policeact.govt.nz/wiki/
• http://campaigns.wikia.com
• http://change.gov/
• WikiPartido - WikiPartido is a project of political party in Spain with a free ideology based on sustainable development and the noocracy. It utilizes a new political system, wikicracy, in which all citizens can perform so bills (law proposals) online through the official website, made with wiki technology, or so offline by mail, telephone, fax, home...