WRITTEN ON December 19th, 2004 BY Not waving but drowning AND STORED IN Ideal Goverment - project

So many minds seem to be working for the same common good. Browsing to get some training on how to install a php database on a web server, I came across this very exciting news:

FOR THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE…

Participatory Democracy Networks (pdf 575Kb)
Building on the ideas presented by Roy Madron and John Jopling in their inspirational book, Gaian Democracies, this paper tentatively presents a rough concept for a piece of information architecture to facilitate participatory democracy worldwide.

Accepting that soft systems thinking is fundamental for human survival, this paper examines activity on the internet and proposes that one solid piece of open source code will revolutionise the internet like Google did, but to far greater effect.Appropiating the Internet for Social Change (pdf 647Kb)
Towards the strategic use of networked technologies by transnational civil society organizations

As civil society, we are confronted with an opportunity – to use the Internet and other emerging network technologies to support our quest for global peace and social justice. Consider that we live in a world where almost anyone located in an urban centre can share their message globally with a free blog and a few dollars spent at an Internet café. Access is not– or will not for much longer be – a major communications stumbling block for civil society organizations. The more pressing need is for civil society to learn how to appropriate the technologies that we now have access to, bending and molding them so that they can be used more strategically and politically. While we can point to examples of innovative civil society applications, most organizations have not moved much beyond e-mail and basic web sites – and they have certainly not moved on to what might be called the ‘strategic use’ of these technologies. Put simply, the tools are in our hands, but most if us have not yet decided what to build.

Augmented Social Networks (pdf 467Kb)
Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet

Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by being better at connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century? When networked personal computing was first developed, engineers concentrated on extending creativity among individuals and enhancing collaboration between a few. They did not much consider what social interaction among millions of Internet users would actually entail. It was thought that the Net’s technical architecture need not address the issues of “personal identity” and “trust,” since those matters tended to take care of themselves.

This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complimentary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives:

1. To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries.
2. To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society.
3. To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of “online citizenship” for the Information Age.