An Online Collaboration Prototype

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In response to my observations that The GA Process is totally awesome! (but has some limitations including:)

  • The management of the GA agenda is a difficult process
  • There is a practical limit to the number of people that can participate in a GA
  • There are real difficulties (work, family, location, etc.) that prevent all interested parties from being able to participate in every GA
  • Some issues evolve over time

I agree that an online tool is needed to help manage all the Occupy Information.

In addition after attending the OB Summit, and seeing all the great information presented, the questions I walked away with included:

  • How can this process continue?
  • What (if any) conclusions can be drawn?
  • Can all this information be aggregated?
  • Will all this information be aggregated?
  • How should all this information be aggregated?

In order to facilitate a discussion of these questions I'd like to propose interested parties to take a look at a scalable consensus tool that could be used to try extend the Occupy conversation.

It can be accessed from:

http://www.commonsenseus.com/issues/category.php?uku=true&categoryId=64

The current implementation includes:

  • A registration process is defined for Users
    • Currently identity is really minimal but has been set up to be more rigorous if needed
    • Most of the site is not accessible until the user "registers"
    • Currently to register the user only need to provide
      • an email address
      • a password
      • a site name
      • a self assessment of their location on the political spectrum (liberal vs conservative)
  • Issue categories are used to organize Issues
    • Two types of Issues are currently supported
      • Basic Issues allow the user to select only one of the positions defined for the issue
      • Ranked Vote Issues allow the user to select their top three preferences of the positions defined for the issue (with a weighted calculation determining the "winner".
    • Users can add new categories to the system
    • Users can add new issues to an existing category
  • Issues define concerns that users have differing opinions on
    • Users can Select their position on an issue
    • Users can Add more descriptive information (text or links to relevant external data) to better explain the complexity of the Issue
    • Users can Add addition positions to the issue (when the set of positions for the issue is inadequate)
  • Positions define a specific opinion on an Issue
    • Users can Add more descriptive information (text or links to relevant external data) to support the position's opinion
  • In order to control spammers additions to the issue database currently have to be confirmed
    • Several layers of "privileges" are built in to allow different users to have more or less ability to approve changes