I work on a very successful high volume political website in Northern Ireland. We have the audience and the capacity to make an idea like this work and we are currently bidding elsewhere for the funds to do this - we'd be interested in discussing any outcome you achieve?
Thanks for the feedback, I'd love to hear more about the project you are working on and what you are trying to achieve. What are some of the topics you are trying to build consensus or awareness around? Please do share the link to your existing site -- how has your community debated political issues so far?
Thanks for that. The community we're most engaged in is in Northern Ireland. Slugger O'Toole is easily the most active political blog in the UK if you look at the relatively small polity that it serves (about 1.75m people).
A political blog-watcher made the point better than I could here:
The issues we've dealt with are those around the need to build a democratic dialogue in a highly divided society, so the site has covered sectarian parades, paramilitary violence, the emerging faltering parliamentary process in Northern Ireland among other things.
That said, I want policybrief not to have a 'community' of it's own. The idea of 'our' community smacks of the kind of hubris that causes projects like this to fail. All I want to do is ensure that any online community can find a comprehensive set of policy outputs and that they feel confident to discuss policy as much as they currently discuss politics. For me, too much public debate is about the 'sizzle' and not enough is about the 'sausage' (if you'll forgive the carnivorous image there!).
I think we're definitely on the same page with the necessity of building up a community. For this project, my natural inspiration is Wikipedia which certainly has a large community of editors and its own distinct culture and norms on how they should behave. However, one statistic we see quite often for Wikipedia is that these editors make up only about 2 percent of the total population and are responsible for over 70% of the edits (Source: http://www.collegeotr.com/college_otr/734_percent_of_all_wikipedia_edits... ). This doesn't count the thousands of many micro-communities that spring up around a single page / topic as users keep coming back to monitor the pages they have edited and discuss changes. The point being that to create a successful crowdsourcing project, you don't necessarily need to create a large community of users who understand the entire realm of the system, just ways for users to see the impact of their individual effort and feel responsible for its care.
For the open debate engine project - these communities could form around an individual argument (ex. "Solar Variability is / is not Responsible for Global Warming"). In your project, I could see these forming around a specific policy or topic area as users. Does this sound right?
Comments
Greg,
I work on a very successful high volume political website in Northern Ireland. We have the audience and the capacity to make an idea like this work and we are currently bidding elsewhere for the funds to do this - we'd be interested in discussing any outcome you achieve?
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Paul Evans
http://memeserver.co.uk
Hi Paul -
Thanks for the feedback, I'd love to hear more about the project you are working on and what you are trying to achieve. What are some of the topics you are trying to build consensus or awareness around? Please do share the link to your existing site -- how has your community debated political issues so far?
Thanks again,
- Greg
Thanks for that. The community we're most engaged in is in Northern Ireland. Slugger O'Toole is easily the most active political blog in the UK if you look at the relatively small polity that it serves (about 1.75m people).
A political blog-watcher made the point better than I could here:
http://www.poliblogs.co.uk/blog/2008/10/market-penetration-by-uk-politic...
The issues we've dealt with are those around the need to build a democratic dialogue in a highly divided society, so the site has covered sectarian parades, paramilitary violence, the emerging faltering parliamentary process in Northern Ireland among other things.
That said, I want policybrief not to have a 'community' of it's own. The idea of 'our' community smacks of the kind of hubris that causes projects like this to fail. All I want to do is ensure that any online community can find a comprehensive set of policy outputs and that they feel confident to discuss policy as much as they currently discuss politics. For me, too much public debate is about the 'sizzle' and not enough is about the 'sausage' (if you'll forgive the carnivorous image there!).
----------
Paul Evans
http://memeserver.co.uk
Paul -
I think we're definitely on the same page with the necessity of building up a community. For this project, my natural inspiration is Wikipedia which certainly has a large community of editors and its own distinct culture and norms on how they should behave. However, one statistic we see quite often for Wikipedia is that these editors make up only about 2 percent of the total population and are responsible for over 70% of the edits (Source: http://www.collegeotr.com/college_otr/734_percent_of_all_wikipedia_edits... ). This doesn't count the thousands of many micro-communities that spring up around a single page / topic as users keep coming back to monitor the pages they have edited and discuss changes. The point being that to create a successful crowdsourcing project, you don't necessarily need to create a large community of users who understand the entire realm of the system, just ways for users to see the impact of their individual effort and feel responsible for its care.
For the open debate engine project - these communities could form around an individual argument (ex. "Solar Variability is / is not Responsible for Global Warming"). In your project, I could see these forming around a specific policy or topic area as users. Does this sound right?
- Greg