Borrowing Words Helps Netroots Reach Consensus
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, July 28 2008
Some members of the netroots are experimenting with a new collaborative writing tool called MixedInk to craft a Democratic party platform. The idea grew out of a brainstorming session between MixedInk co-founder David Stern and MyDD's Jerome Armstrong and found support from the organizers of Netroots Nation, where the idea was presented at two sessions. The platform is accessible directly through the url netrootsplatform.org.
Stern, a former economic development consultant with a masters degree from the London School of Economics, described the project as "very much a synthesis between a wiki and Digg, or between a wiki and Soapblox," the popular community-building software platform. "It's exactly in the middle. It does things that neither allow on their own." Stern is based in Washington DC, and and works with New York City-based partners Vanessa Scanfeld and Dan Scanfeld.
In one of the platform's more intriguing features, when contributors start to edit a plank the software suggests similar prior contributions and suggests that you "Borrow This Sentence." That language is pulled and added to the new version, but the original author's name stays attached to that bit of contributed text, throughout the plank's remixes and permutations. The idea, says Stern, is to "give people credit for their words and ideas." The advantage over a wiki is that no one author's version is dominant -- at least until the project is closed, and only then by community agreement, not by virtue of who edited it last.
The goal? Consensus. And efficient consensus at that. Stern: "Our assumption is that no one person is going to have all the best words and ideas. The idea is to fuse them together, synthesizing ideas into a single, concise text." Each proposed plank is rated from one stars to ten, and the highest rated plank gets to the top. The site now has ten planks categories, from health care to media and communications to electoral reform, and about 75 contributed plank versions.
The results of the experiment will be submitted through the Obama's "Listening to America" process in which the campaign is encouraging supporters to get together and jointly craft platform planks. Says Stern, "we are going to submit it as if we organized it through an in-person meeting." Those face-to-face meetings face a challenge: shaping the wisdom of several minds into one coherent and useful piece of thinking. How do you effectively harness the wisdom of the crowds when the goal is political ideas, not pinning down the weight of an ox at a county fair?
Does MixedInk point to a way that governing that effectively harnesses the intelligence and energy of bigger groups than we're used to? It might offer some direction to a campaign like Obama's that claims to tap into the wisdom of, for example, more than 300 foreign policy advisors. Managing all that smarts can't be easy.
In a proof-of-concept, Mixedink was used by friends of the founders to collaboratively write a letter to the editor. The topic: disputing idea that Barack Obama would be well served by choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate. The letter was indeed published in Madison, Wisconsin's Capitol Times, among other papers -- signed by 18 different authors . Says Stern: "This is a way for a big group of people to get their ideas into a short piece of text, which is not the way the world normally works."
The planks of the netroots platform can be edited until August 6th and ranked until August 9th.