I came across this gem while sifting through new SSRN Law Review releases :
“Debate: Collaborative Environmental Law: Pro and Con.” Eric W. Orts, University of Pennsylvania - Legal Studies Department and Cary Coglianese, University of Pennsylvania Law School. University of Pennsylvania Law Review PENNumbra, Vol. 156, p. 289, 2007
Granted, this isn’t exactly analogous to this or other related ‘open-source’ policymaking and large-scale argumentation projects. The authors are debating the merits of environmental mediation where the regulatory authority attempts to bring together “not only government officials (and their designated scientific and economic experts), but also the representatives of a range of interests in civil society who will be affected by legal rules and decisions concerning a specific environmental problem, including businesses, citizens’ groups, and nongovernmental organizations” in the hopes that better policy will result.
However, several points struck me as relevant, especially this (abridged) list of criticisms from Prof. Coglianese:
On the contrary, what we know from past attempts at collaborative environmental law is that making agreement the goal often introduces one or more of at least five types of policy problems.
- Tractability over Importance
When agreement is the goal, collaborative groups tend to give more attention to those issues that are most tractable—not necessarily those that are most important…
- Imprecision
People can often more easily reach agreement over imprecise terms. Each side can interpret vague words or broad principles in a light favorable to its own interests, each thinking it has won more (or lost less) than its counterparts think…
- Lowest Common Denominator
When securing agreement becomes the primary aim, each party effectively gains a veto over the outcome. If an agreement does result, it is likely to reflect little more than the lowest common denominator of the various parties…
- Increased Time and Resources
As Professor Orts notes, collaborative environmental law has been criticized for taking longer to generate decisions. If each party effectively holds a veto, then much time will be needed for all negotiating parties to present their concerns and hear how others respond…
- Additional Conflict
Although collaborative environmental law seeks to resolve conflict, it actually can add new and unproductive sources of controversy. For example, conflicts arise over who gets to participate in collaborative groups; in some cases, lawsuits have been threatened or even filed when organizations are not invited to sit at the negotiation table.
Little off topic, but these two essays / presentations on using Web 2.0 technologies for activism and organizing have really inspired me recently:
Here Comes Everybody: Clay Shirky
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/02/shirky
and Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, Ethan Zuckerman
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007877.html
Both presentations are optimistic about the potential of Web 2.0 technologies (or the internet in general) to enable activist groups to coordinate and build movements for social change. I’m partly interested in this for my day job but also to help figure out how a tool like this could be useful for more than research.
As a counterbalance, I tried sifting through last month’s First Monday which devoted an entire issue to “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0.” Most of the essays were more Kritikal (read: academic) than I expected, approaching Web 2.0 from Foucauldian or Marixst perspectives (ex. “wikis as a tool of our corporate overlords to get proletariats to work for free” etc.) that tweak my wonkish pragmatism.
As for the project itself, I’m almost finished with the base code for the next generation of the project but decided to take a detour to rework the interface (thus the theoretical research) but I am still planning on releasing it on opendebateengine.com this Spring as an open source project. I’ll move all of my theoretical / engine-related blog postings over there, leaving this space for news about space lasers and picking on China hawks.
Just discovered this new volume, published January this year, that brings together fifty-five scholars and researchers from the “emerging discipline of collective intelligence”. The book’s contributors, including digerati like Yochai Benkler, Howard Bloom, Jaron Lanier, and Howard Rheingold, explore models for “digital deliberative democracy, self-governance, legislative transparency, true-cost accounting, and the ethical use of open sources and methods”. Of special interest to this project, Mark Klein’s chapter on “Achieving Collective Intelligence via Large-Scale Argumentation” (on which I will be blogging more about shortly).
You can find the whole book online at the Open Source Intelligence Institute or available in dead-tree format at Amazon.com.
The latest edition of the online Journal “Re-Public: Re-imagining Democracy” is devoted to the wiki/open politics movement, or how the use of new collaborative tools (wikis, blogs, forums, mailing lists, podcasting, and videos) can transform the ways politics are practiced.
I’m going to be speaking at the Politics Online Conference here in Washington, D.C. this Friday, March 16th. I’m in a breakout panel called “The Policy Commons: Democracy when the Owners Take Control.”
Dave Witzel, my former boss at ForumOne Communications helped organize the panel to promote the idea of the policy commons, or the use of peer-production tools to guide and develop public policy. He wrote a kind review of this project when it first launched last August and he has just launched another Digg-like blog to track similar projects and developments at PolicyCommons.org that is worth checking out.
I’m looking forward to the discussion and will post slides, photos, and any suprise announcements I make here on this blog over the weekend.
Updated:
I’ve uploaded my presentation slides in powerpoint and PDF format.
Catching up to the last several years of web innovation, I’ve enabled ‘media’ clips as evidence in the citation and quote database. I’ve added two examples already to test this out (click on the ‘1 Reference’ link in either one):
Gore, Al. “Remarks at Wirefly X Prize Executive Summit.” Popular Science October 20, 2006. [ 1 reference ]
Tkacik, John J. and John Pike. “Situation Room: January 19, 2007.” CNN
January 19, 2007 - 19:00 ET. [ 1 reference ]
I like the idea of using a video clip to further one’s argument, it opens up the possibility of using other forms of media including images and podcasts. I’m still working on how this will integrate with the rest of the resources (not sure if this should be cluttering up the bibliography page) and will probably setup a special ‘media room’ for media enabled resources.
I also did not start working on this with the space weapons topic in mind, this was one of the ideas I’ve been working on to prepare the system for new and bigger topics (ex. my target topics, Global Warming and Iran). I was pleasantly surprised while searching for test material at the number of videos currently up on youtube related to space weapons and will work on integrating the best of these. Anyone that would like to help sift through these for key interviews or quotes, let me know.
Definitions have always been a tricky part of this system. The debate hinges on a few key terms (ex. “space weapons”, “outer space”) but the rest are technical terms or program descriptions and acronyms (ex. “geostationary orbit”, or “FALCON”). When entering these definitions, I kept referring to Wikipedia for a baseline definition. However, if Wikipedia suffices as a definition resource for the terms used in this debate, why attempt to compete? If the much greater hivemind of Wikipedia can agree on a definition, that will probably suit the purpouses of this debate as well.
So I’ve upgraded the definition tool to integrate some definitions with wikipedia. For definitions that have been ‘wikified’ the full text of the definition will come from the live wikipedia page’s summary (the first couple of paragraphs for the entry). The ‘Edit’ and ‘History’ tabs for integrated definitions will link to the corresponding pages on Wikipedia but the ‘Discuss’ tab will remain on this site to address any specific issues.
An example of a definition outsourced to Wikipedia
I still have some bugs to work out on this — especially parsing and outputting Wikipedia’s syntax correctly — but let me know what you think.
U.S. News and World Report has a short article on the U.S. intelligence community’s experimentation with wikis and blogs:
In an age when information sharing is the name of the game, intelligence agencies have also embraced the latest off-the-shelf technology to get their work out to others. “We are using wikis, we are using blogs, we are using chat, we are using instant messaging,” says Eric Haseltine, the chief scientist for the Director of National Intelligence. Given the sheer volume of information flooding into the community each day, he adds, “We have to be very creative in coming up with better stuff.”
Via Secrecy News
Updated: The Los Angeles Times also has a story on the intelligence community’s wiki:
The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have created a computer system that uses software from a popular Internet encyclopedia site to gather content on sensitive topics from analysts across the spy community, part of an effort to fix problems that plagued prewar estimates on Iraq.
There are many ways you can contribute to this project as either a contributor or reviewer. The following is a list of current priority tasks and will be updated periodically on the Frequently Asked Questions page. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.
- Virtually every argument in the database needs some editing attention. You can browse the argument tree or pick a random argument and do what you can to improve the argument.
- If the argument has a corresponding counterargument (for example, “China is not a space power threat“), you can help improve the system by evaluating the argument versus its counterargument and selecting the one you think is stronger. Arguments with a counterargument will have a ‘Compare’ link below the ‘Counterarguments’ on each argument page. You can also view a complete list of counterargument pairs here, or browse a random pair.
- We need more quotes, arguments, and definitions in the database that directly address missile defense systems, both space-based and otherwise. There is a direct connection between the two technologies and some existing missile defense technologies can serve as anti-satellite weapons. A fair evaluation of the space weapons debate has to include an examination of the pros and cons of missile defense.
- Users have flagged certain arguments with a ‘yellow flag’, indicating that they need to be improved. All recently flagged arguments are available on the updates page.
Mitch Kapor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave a talk on the possibility of using Wiki tools for collaborative advocacy and politics at Wikimania over the weekend. He calls for developing new tools to foster debate on the web:
“This talk will be a speculative exploration about using collaborative and community-building techniques inspired by the Wikipedia to social problems such as global warming, America’s role in the world, and growing gap between have’s and have-not’s, not only to discern what is the case, but to help the process of democratic deliberation of choosing a future. In other words, it’s not only about facts, but values as well.”
Good stuff. The audio is already online and more is soon to be posted. There’s also a good summary of the presentation online here.