I've been wrestling with the difficulties of this wiki for a little while now. At first it was easy to just start collecting political information, with the assumption that this would be something that could be usable later. But now I've hit a wall in my own thinking, maybe some folks can help me out.
Our mission is to explore how to move politics from broadcast politics to participatory politics, at least, so says our Mission Statement. So I was wondering how something like that could happen. Fresh from WikiMania this past weekend, I am drenched in sunny optimism (spending a lot of time around these things does this to me somehow).
So I was thinking, what if we put together a document about what we might say about participatory politics to our politicians, if we had their ear. Together we write this document, or maybe it's a questionnaire. Then we get it to every campaign we can, from constituents in the appropriate areas.
Then we take the responses (if we get any) and incorporate them and send it around again. We'd probably just get ignored by most campaigns, but if we got a few to respond, and incorporated their changes and send the thing around again, I wonder if others might start to get into it. Something from WikiMania that stuck with me from this weekend was during a panel someone said that there was a problem with presenting people who were not used to wikis with a blank page. They needed some kind of starting point.
So I don't know, what do you think, too crazy? Could we, in fact, just redraft the mission statement? Should we actually ask all the campaigns to draft our mission for us, collaboratively? Anyways, just some late night thoughts.
Munchtipq 04:04, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
- I don't think the campaigns should adjust the mission, but I do hear what you are saying. Maybe the questions to the campaigns should be how we move from one type of politics to another, rather than asking the question if we should in the first place, which would be implied if we ask for a continuous redraft of the mission statement itself.
- Any good business plan begins with a goal. It can be a solid goal, like X amount of money, or Y amount of growth, or it can be an insubstantial goal, like the mission statement of Nordstrom, which is to continually "improve customer service". Whatever ideas people can come up with to achieve that goal are presented, explored, drafted, discussed and decided upon. We can and probably should do the same thing, and that's what we're starting to do.
- I saw several needs above all others when we first started. We needed to know what elections were coming on the calendar, and we need to create a foundation for the growth of the site. So I copied over the Electoral calendar, and began to build the Voter Guides. These two navigational tools would be standard regardless of what type of site engine we used, and the incredible advantage of the wiki systems is that anyone can help. And we're getting a lot of help.
- I think contacting candidates and politicians is critically important to the success of the site. We should probably start with the campaigns that are already listed, instead of just sending out requests to any and all. It's going to be hard to get candidates and campaign managers to find the time to do much within a few months of such a major election in the US, but if we contact people ahead of time, we might have better luck. I know that some of the larger campaigns are hiring people specifically to read the blog posts about their candidate, their opponents and the electoral environment, then provide reports back to the campaign manager and candidate so that adjustments can be made to media outreach plans, platform and speech language, etc. Joe Trippi ran the Howard Dean campaign on this concept, and he's probably someone we should contact for advice. Maybe Jimmy should make some phone calls and bring in some of the big guns.
- Chadlupkes 16:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
- I totally agree, and I hope you didn't take my comments as critical of anything that anyone has done here. I spent a lot of time on the Massachusetts page making a voter guide-like page. I didn't mean we should change the way the wiki is developing. I just was thinking that it's hard to explore the uses of participatory communications without having many people (i.e. politicians/campaigns) to communicate with.
- So I was just trying to think of some ways to try to get that started. Maybe what you said is better, maybe people with inside knowledge will be the best people to get direction from when we think about how to use participatory communications to help open up campaigning.
- Munchtipq 16:30, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
- Not at all. You presented an idea, I presented my opinion, and we're working together trying to figure this out. I like what you're doing in your sandbox. That's going to look great.
- We need Jimmy to have more of a hand in things. He is a big name, and can get some people involved that I couldn't. I haven't heard from him since he finally got done with Wikimania '06. Can you contact some of your local campaigns and invite them to take part in things? Chadlupkes 18:35, 15 August 2006 (UTC)