...means your important posts never 'sink to the bottom' as they do in this format. Of course the unthreaded format makes it kinda hard to argue though, so our disagreements and any deliberative process for managing them may wind up back here on the forum, or in areas of the new drupal pages not yet created.

But anyway the main reason for deploying a content management application is to have content not disappear down the memory hole as discussion proceeds.

So be sure to visit the main page http://populistindependent.org and help us build the site's content.

I am getting drupal setup on the server.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/Drupl_icon.png

Drupal is a free software modular content management framework, content management system and blogging engine which was originally written by Dries Buytaert as a bulletin board system. Today, it is used by many high-traffic websites, including The Onion, Spread Firefox (CivicSpace, see below), Ourmedia, KernelTrap, and the Defective by Design campaign. It is particularly popular for building online communities, and has the tag line "Community plumbing". Drupal is written in PHP. As of January 29, 2007, the current version is 5.1.

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

* Content Management Systems
* Blogs
* Collaborative authoring environments
* Forums
* Peer-to-peer networking
* Newsletters
* Podcasting
* Picture galleries
* File uploads and downloads

http://www.drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform.

Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

Drupal 4.2 [14] was the basis for DeanSpace, a content management system used to power many independent websites supporting the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. After the Dean campaign ended, the DeanSpace project grew into CivicSpace, a Drupal-based "grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters." CivicSpace[15] includes CiviCRM and other features useful on websites for nonprofit organizations and political campaigns.

http://civicrm.org/images/logo.png
CiviCRM: A Free and Open Source eCRM Solution

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

CiviCRM is a powerful contact, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Track and execute donations, transactions, conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one, easily accessible and manageable source.

http://civicrm.org/

The open politics theory combines aspects of the free software and open content movements with multilateral assumptions of postmoderism. It promotes decision making methods claimed to be a more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues. The cost for these advantages is reliance on social software, with accompanying systemic biases that open politics advocates seek to overcome in various ways.

While it can be confused with the vaguely defined idea of "open source politics", open politics is not so much a movement as a theory based on participatory democracy and deliberative democracy, informed by e-democracy and netroots experiments, applying argumentation framework for issue-based argument as they evolved in academic and military use through the 1980s to present. Some variants of it draw on the theory of scientific method and market methods, including prediction markets and anticipatory democracy, even on wiki troll culture.

Online services that include or included some elements of open politics include makethecase.net, openpolitics.ca, dkosopedia.com, sourcewatch.org, anarchopedia.org, debatepoint.com, wikocracy.org, yoism.org, longnow.org, Imagine Halifax and Green Party of Canada Living Platform. wikinfo.org and Wikipedia are also sometimes cited as examples, though opinions vary widely.
Deeper links @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_politics

http://www.groupspace.org/DemeWiki/Onli ... ationLinks (http://www.groupspace.org/DemeWiki/OnlineDeliberationLinks)

This is what Paul Thompson's excellent 9/11 timeline at cooperativeresearch.org does:

A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

A snip of an interesting little article:

Liberty when construed as "freedom from" has the important advantage of tending to organize a commons: a space where mutual, overlapping, conflicting or unilateral interests may be negotiated. Accordingly, "though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence."
http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=339

I think a mere discussion forum will never avoid the communication breakdowns that have happened here. Nor will it provide the robust connection of the contributors' 'dots' or a meaningful resource for research and reading (rather than simply discussing).

So far though, it appears no one is very interested in tackling the discovery and discussion of alternatives but me. Meanwhile, there have been many other things vying for my time, not least controverting all this 'feelings' crap. That and REAL LIFE. http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... =1515#1515 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1515#1515)



We have to avoid the false consensus effect:

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. People readily guess their own opinions, beliefs and predilections to be more prevalent in the general public than they really are.

This bias is commonly present in a group setting where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

One of the most notable examples is the possibly apocryphal quip by The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who reportedly said she couldn't believe Nixon had won since no one she knew had voted for him.

There is no single cause for this cognitive bias; the availability heuristic and self-serving bias have been suggested as at least partial underlying factors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

That cannot be achieved but by a deliberative process not unlike the one being employed in the real world in Cuba and Venezuela. Wolf pointed out an article all should read about that real world process we need to emulate here:
http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/vi ... =1343#1343 (http://populistindependent.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1343#1343)

Open politics can be reduced to a list of criteria:

* anyone can participate, including anonymously
* all participants are equals, and resolve disputes via equal power relationships
* all actions are transparent, and no one has more power to review them than anyone else
* all contributions are recorded and preserved, and these records cannot be altered
* all deliberation is structured, or can be put in structured form to resolve disputes
* all content is re/organized and refactored by participants
* partisan behavior is limited by the format, rules set by factions themselves, and laws extant in the society or community which will be affected by the political decision
* control of the forum can, at least in theory, pass to the most trusted users, not the ones who started the forum

Some experts apply strict criteria of democracy, rootedness, legality, equality of access, and even ecological integrity, so as to ensure that there are absolutely no rights lost in moving polity into an online arena. In other words, they wish to expand participation to mobile and remote persons, including disadvantaged ones, and undo some of the inequities inherent in using electronic media. Including the danger of disenfranchising local voices.

Underlying preferences and ideals

Underlying these criteria in turn are ideals and preferences that resemble those of other democratic political movements:

* decentralization of authority: giving the widest and most potent franchise to citizens is thought to minimize what economists call the principal-agent problem, or the tendency for managers to abuse authority.
* centralization of information: the use of information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process.
* equality of opportunity: anyone can participate in deliberation, with the expectation that people themselves select to participate on issues in which they have the greatest stake, expertise or both. Open politics treats the expert and the citizen as equals, implying that the experts are obliged to convince the citizens directly, rather than using representatives as intermediaries/brokers of policy. This use of peer review is emphasized as the best method to determine what is true or good (with the understanding that this should change over time).
* encouraging diversity of thought, such that multiple positions and arguments are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.


Implementation

These criteria are generally satisfied by a wiki or some other collaborative workspace in which multiple points of view are conveyed and reviewable in "living documents" that reflect, on an ongoing basis, what the community thinks.

They are not generally satisfied by any type of blog or other threaded media, which have editorial problems that prevent equal power relationships from operating.

Some theorists believe open politics ideals require wiki troll culture to be fully implemented - a group of persons actively conspiring to reject all authority involved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_politics

Swiss citizens first practiced citizen lawmaking mixed with representative government in their local communities since the 1200s. European aristocracy has been criticizing and isolating Swiss governance ever since, in both gross and subtle ways.

Against the tradition of aristocratic governance across Europe, and to correct for the causes of their 1847 civil war, Swiss governments and citizens established their national level fundamental rights in governance with their 1848 constitution.

The 1848 constitutional renewal instituted the mandatory referendum for constitutional amendments and the constitutional initiative for total revision of the constitution.

The national-level legislative initiative, for formulating and approving/rejecting individual laws, was added in 1891. It wrote law only into the constitution. Since govt could not amend the constitution without the people's approval, civil society became automatically sovereign over the elected representatives.

To this day, Swiss re-write their Constitution every two years. It is a work in progress continually. Law, tax, all things politics are constantly amended improved with Swiss initiative. The people bring an initiative, if a majority agree it is placed on Referendum for all to vote for or against. If approved it becomes law instantly. The people truly make all political decisions. If Parliament makes a law which the people don't like, an Initiative, followed by a Referendum defeats it.

Swiss have Direct Democracy. This is their Swiss Nation Home page http://www.admin.ch/
From here also try the Washington DC page for English information. Scroll down a bit to the DD area and it explains Swiss DD.
http://www.eda.admin.ch/washington_emb/ ... litic.html (http://www.eda.admin.ch/washington_emb/e/home/politic.html)

The only goal of the Populist Party of Canada is to establish Direct Democracy in Canada....

The time has come to change our political system. We are powerless to the decisions our politicians take. Our "representative government" gives the illusion that we are part of a democracy, but we do not have any real decision power. If we are against some decisions of our government, the best we can do is wait for the elections and put another party in power.

Politicians are guided by their own interests and forget that their mandate is not to defend their ideas, but to defend the ideas of those who elected them. We allow a small number of individuals to decide in the name of all the citizens of this country. We even give them the power to hide things from us.

The era of compromises is over: it is time to establish a real democracy. We all know the corruptness of our elected officials. Money and power too often influence the decisions of our government, and there are of course secrets we will never know.

Let's unite for liberty, and show the world what democracy really means. Let's fight for justice, and give ourselves the right to decide on what concerns us.
http://populist.ca/

Many more direct cemocracy links here
http://democracy.mkolar.org/DDlinks.html