From Campaigns Wikia

Jennifer is a recently inspired political activist. She is excited about the swirling possibilities for tranforming politics in 2008. The "big idea" that she's enthusiastic about is using just starting netroots movements like...

• The Unity Movement.

• Campaigns Wikia itself.

...to mobilize and unify pre-existing communities like...

• Slashdot

• Digg

• Kuro5hin

Contents 1 Pitching the Unity Movement 1.1 The core of the Unity Movement 1.2 Jennifer gets inspired 1.3 Jennifer takes action 1.4 Jennifer's "Wiki Goals" for Unity 1.5 Comments From The Readers 2 Stuff Jennifer Has Been Working On Lately 2.1 The List of participating bloggers 2.2 Helping People think about POV 2.3 Promoting the Unity Movement

[edit] Pitching the Unity Movement

[edit] The core of the Unity Movement

Unity08 started with a splash of media and announced the following core goals (quoted from their site):

"We have set three specific goals, and are exploring how best to achieve them.

* Goal One is the election of a Unity Ticket for President and Vice-President of the United States in 2008 – headed by a woman and/or man from each major party or by an independent who presents a Unity Team from both parties.

* Goal Two is for the people themselves to pick that Unity Ticket in the first half of 2008 – via a virtual and secure online convention in which all American voters will be qualified to vote.

* Goal Three, our minimum goal, is to effect major change and reform in the 2008 national elections by influencing the major parties to adopt the core features of our national agenda. With a group of voters who comprise at least 20% of the national electorate, we feel confident that our voters will decide the 2008 election."

[edit] Jennifer gets inspired

Jennifer is mostly interested in ensuring that this online convention actually happens (IE she wants to support the achievement of the listed goals) AND she is putting her influence into making sure that the online convention works in a manner vaguely consistent with the following vision:

• There should be automated polls for "single outcome voting" with preference ballots counted by the RPV (Ranked Pair Voting) algorithm. Making sure that the actual Presidential ticket is selected in this way is Jennifer's fundamental goal.

• There should be automated polls for "multiple outcome voting" using some form of proportional representation.

• The convention should run in a highly transparent way (for example, on Open Source Code, with community elected administrators and moderators, with a web accessable monthly budget, and so on).

• The dynamic should be peer-to-peeer with Conventioners/Users/Voters organizing themselves into one or more (per person) issue-oriented factions, possibly using a system inspired by Liquid Democracy.

• Users should be able to engage in free-for-all public discussions that are basically as open as usenet.

• However, there should also be more "rarified" discussions whose participants are only leaders of factions (see above) of a certain size (or users otherwise "elected into prominence" by some show of user/member support).

[edit] Jennifer takes action

Jennifer put up UnitySupporters.Com as a central hub for anyone who wants to help the Unity Movement. She then ran around the web seeding it with communities using pre-existing sites. The idea was to let people "vote with their feet" and nurture whatever communities grew up behind the seeding effort.

As of mid-July 2006:

• The Unity Supporters Web Forum was the biggest success with over 60 users and over 800 posts.

• The Unity Supporters Yahoo Group has about 10 subscribers and around 15 posts. (A parrallel Google Group grew less swiftly and was closed down when it's users agreed to migrate to Yahoo when it became apparent that Yahoo had a more "joining friendly" interface and setup.)

• Also, the Unity Wiki grew less swiftly than either of these places but has a lot of potential in Jennifer's mind.

[edit] Jennifer's "Wiki Goals" for Unity

I want the Unity Movement to have some sort of large wiki presence and place for coordinating...

I put up the Unity Wiki but I don't really care if wiki-style Unity organizing happens there or here in the Campaigns Wikia. My only worry is that one or the other of these places might pull "wiki people" who are also "unity people" into two separate places and reduce the "Metcalf's Law boost" that comes from many people interacting in a giant pool.

What I'd really love would be to coordinate with "wiki people inspired by the Unity Movement" and as a group choose one or the other path. If you fall into this catagory, please leave your comments below so we can start a dialog about the best way to go forward:

[edit] Comments From The Readers

I'd love it if you wrote something here. I generally take the suggestions of "people who comment" and I'd like to know where to spend my time. (For those of you new to this kind of wiki you can sign things (assuming you have an account) with ~~~~. For example I'm going to put -~~~~ at the end of this to get a hyphen followed by attribution.) So, would the Unity Movement be better served with it's own wiki or trying to work within Campaigns Wikia? -JenniferForUnity 06:58, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stuff Jennifer Has Been Working On Lately

[edit] The List of participating bloggers

I've been trying to clean it up in terms of making it a useful place to get a sense of who is really involved in the wiki. Prominent people should get some credit and some attention, and I'd like to shine the light on them.

[edit] Helping People think about POV

I started the POV page. I've been adding pages for specific points of view like Slashdot, Objectivists, and the Unity Movement.

[edit] Promoting the Unity Movement

I finally got around to starting an article on the Unity Movement. After thinking about it for a while, I think the right thing to do is make or edit pages on our "crucial issues" with sections for "Unity POV" summarizing our thinking and linking to places where Unity People are having online disucssions about these issues.