An Online Collaboration Prototype

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