Dave Pollard's essays on politics & economics.



 

  Monday, May 11, 2009


BLOG The Future of the Media: One More Time
adding value to information

Nearly 15 years ago I was asked to give a speech at a conference of Canadian mainstream media types and 'content aggregators'. I quoted Marshall McLuhan ("Information is always trying to be free") and told them that, in 15 years, if they didn't change, they would be extinct. Specifically I told them that they had to do more than regurgitate stories from the newswires, and that if they wanted to be paid for their work they would have to do something valuable -- either provide information content that was actionable, or provide some service that added value. I described seven ways to add value to information (see chart above):
  1. Provide an actionable alert about something new and urgent.
  2. Provide an actionable briefing about something new and important.
  3. Provide the results of a survey of informed people that has never appeared anywhere else.
  4. Provide genuine research that explores an issue in depth and gives readers/viewers a thorough and useful understanding of the issue, and which asks important and provocative questions.
  5. Provide guidance on what the readers/viewers should do about this information (something more valuable than "be on heightened alert")
  6. Provide a gauge or measure by which people can self-assess what they know about an important subject vs. what they should know.
  7. Organize a real-time event where people can engage with each other and with people who know more than they do, about an important subject.
The media types laughed at me. They insisted "this is not what the mainstream media do". I insisted that if that was so, they had better start looking for a steadier job. As usual I was a bit ahead of my time, but not by much. The mainstream media are drowning in debt and losing readers every year, and their only answer is to try to find ways to force us to pay for the same old content, what I call "worthless news".

Bill Maher famously said "The job of the media is to make what's important interesting." And the above list provides seven ways to do so. So why don't they do their job?

Well, for a start, it costs more to do these seven things, and media companies are notoriously cheap (that's why, a century ago, media barons were so wealthy). It's risky. It's hard work. It requires real skills. And it requires the company to really know its readers/viewers. The mainstream media fail on all counts. The alternative/indymedia, by sheer force of numbers and the astonishing range of new technologies at their disposal, are proving more capable of all seven ways of adding value to information than the stodgy old media.

There are exceptions. Some local newsmedia do some excellent investigative reporting of local issues (corruption, neighbourhood pollution, local culture). The New Yorker provides great analysis on important issues like government torture, American cultural phenomena, and environmental issues. The NYT, in its weekend and special editions, does some admirable long pieces and multi-part investigative series. The Op-eds in both The New Yorker and the NYT are often insightful and informative, not just empty rhetoric. So are many of the environmental articles in Orion.

A lot of people are asking what will happen if most of the mainstream media fold -- where will the raw 'news' that most of the new media write about come from then? The reality is that most of the 'news' in most of the mainstream media are not information items at all -- they're entertainment items. In fact many of them are entertainment items about the entertainment industry -- pure pap. Much of the 'news' comes from wire services that, increasingly, use vast networks of freelance reporters, rather than having their own staffs, so in the worst case after the mainstream media's demise, freelancers (who already work for next to nothing) will have to become part-time reporters, and earn their living doing something else. In that case the raw news reports (most of which aren't actionable in any case -- more worthless entertainment) will end up being served up by millions of part-time freelance reporters, who will provide their copy and multimedia free (it won't cost them anything) just to see their name in the byline of all the narrowcasting blogs and e-newsletters that will thrive once the newspapers and the remains of real radio/TV journalism disappear.

A larger problem is that, even now, there is a dearth of skills at doing the seven things that add value to information. Doing great research is a rare ability, and insightful research is lost in oceans of superficial, thoughtless regurgitation and academic esoterica. Few people care to take the time needed either to do great investigative work, or to think creatively and profoundly about what all the mountains of facts really mean. And the short attention spans of most of their potential audience is not a great encouragement either.

But it's interesting to see how, no matter how the intermediaries and governments and corporatist packagers of drivel to dumbed-down consumers obfuscate, trivialize, neglect and deny any obligation for doing the real job of adding value to information (and making what's important interesting), somehow there is always someone out their to take up the slack. Government censorship has never been a match for citizens' passion to know important truths. The education system can never quite stamp out all the creativity and intellectual curiosity of its inmates. And there is always someone out there prepared to risk everything to speak truth to power, to the deceived, to the deniers, and to the ignorant.

For all the worthless news served up to us by the dinosaur media conglomerates, there is more useful, valuable information available to us today than ever before, and the magical thing about it is that the people providing it are doing it not for money or glory, but because they care about the truth. And the more they inform us, against all odds, the more we come to care too. And when a connected, organized group of people come to care about something actionable, watch out: there is no stopping them. It's the phenomenon that has brought down tyrants and empires, and brought us just about everything that is worthwhile in our struggling society.

As Margaret Mead said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Category: The Media

10:29:00 PM  trackback []  comment []

  Saturday, April 25, 2009


BLOG An Unschooling Manifesto
kelvin high school
a photo of my high school, c. 1969

In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%. Aptitude tests suggested I should be doing better, and this was a consistent message on my report cards. I hated school. As my blog bio explains, I was shy, socially inept, uncoordinated and self-conscious. My idea of fun was playing strategy games (Diplomacy and Acquire, for fellow geeks of that era -- this was long before computer games or the Internet) and hanging around the drive-in restaurant.

Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called "independent study", that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C -- 60% -- really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold. There was a core group of 'brainy' students who enrolled immediately. Half of them were the usual boring group (the 'keeners') who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents' behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning. The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.

To the astonishment of everyone, including myself, I did very well at this. By the end of the first month of school my average was almost 90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects. I'd become friends with some members of the 'clique' I had aspired to join, and discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all. We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others' work).

As the year progressed, the 'keeners', to my amazement, found they were struggling with this independence and opted back into the regular structured classroom program. Now our independent study group was a remarkable group of non-conformists, whose marks -- on tests we didn't attend classes for or study for -- were so high that some wondered aloud if we were somehow cheating. My grades had climbed into the low 90% range, and this included English where such marks were rare -- especially for someone whose grades had soared almost 30 points in a few months of 'independent' study. The fact is that my peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do -- inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in the school literary journal. On one occasion, a poem of mine I read aloud in class (one of the few occasions I actually attended a class that year) produced a spontaneous ovation from my classmates. 

The Grade 12 final examinations in those days were set and marked by a province-wide board, so universities could judge who the best students were without having to consider differences between schools. Our independent study group, a handful of students from just one high school, won most of the province-wide scholarships that year. I received the award for the highest combined score in English and Mathematics in the province -- an almost unheard-of 94%.

The experience spoiled me for university -- I graduated in two years, which was all I could bear, by taking extra courses and summer courses, just to get through it. And the independent study program, despite its extraordinary success, was not repeated in subsequent years. Part of the justification for the pilot program had been to free up teachers' time to spend with students who needed more individual attention; yet the dubious reason we were given for its cancellation was that "it was unfair to deprive the average students of the presence and example of the more outstanding students".

All this is by way of introduction to my thoughts on PS Pirro's excellent new book on Unschooling, which is in effect what my belated "independent study" experience was an example of. Here's an excerpt to give you a flavour of the book:

The world of the classroom is so unlike anything the real world has to offer – with the exception of other classrooms – that kids can excel at school only to find themselves utterly lost in the real world. Some people think this is the result of failed schooling, but a few of us suspect otherwise. We suspect that this sense of displacement and confusion is actually the result of schooling that succeeds in its most basic unwritten objective: to keep you dependent, timid, worried, nervous, compliant, and afraid of the World.  To keep you waiting. To keep you manageable. To keep you helpless. To keep you small.

Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system of command and control. Those in power don’t want you educated. They want you schooled.
 
It is not up to teachers or school administrators to figure out what you should be or do. It’s not up to the State, it’s not up to your guidance counselors. It’s not up to your parents. What you do with your life ought to be up to you. What you learn ought to be up to you.  How you navigate the world and create your place in it ought to be your decision. Your life belongs to you.  School does its best to disabuse you of this notion. Unschooling celebrates it. Unschooling puts the responsibility for creating a satisfying life squarely where it belongs: in the hands of the one living it.

PS presents 50 reasons why schooling is, in every imaginable way, bad for us and our society, and then 50 reasons why unschooling, which she defines as "learning without formal curriculum, timelines, grades or coercion; learning in freedom" is the natural way to learn. She argues that we are indoctrinated from the age of five to cede our time, our freedoms, and what we pay attention to, to the will of the State, so that we are 'prepared' for a work world of wage slavery and obedience to authority. We are deliberately not taught anything that would allow us to be self-sufficient in society. And in the factory environment of the school, where teachers need to 'manage' thirty students or more, ethics and the politics of power is left up, from our earliest and most vulnerable years, to the bullies and other young damaged psychopaths among our peers, to teach us in their grotesquely warped way. As PS explains, it is in every way a prison system.

Unschooling, by contrast, starts with the realization that you 'own' your time, and have the opportunity and responsibility to use it in ways that are meaningful and stimulating for you. When you have this opportunity, you just naturally learn a great deal, about things you care about, things that will inevitably be useful to you in making a life and a living. Your learning environment is the whole world, and you learn what and when you want, undirected by curricula, textbooks, alarm clocks and school bells. You develop deep peer relationships around areas of common interest, once you're allowed to explore and discover what those areas of interest are. And the Internet and online gaming allow you to make those relationships anywhere in the world, to draw on the brightest experts on the planet, and to communicate powerfully with like-minded, curious people of every age, culture and ideology.

Many people argue that unschooling will only work for the very brightest and most self-disciplined children. On the contrary, I think we are all perfectly suited to unschooling until the school system begins to beat the love of learning, the ability to self-manage, curiosity, imagination and critical thinking out of us. By the time we have reached the third grade it becomes much more difficult, and my success in unschooling in twelfth grade was, I will agree, due to my above-average intelligence and initiative -- most of my intellectually-crippled peers just couldn't manage by that time without the strictures they'd become accustomed to. They had long ago lost the desire to learn, and to think for themselves.

If every child was unschooled -- given the chance to explore and discover and learn in the real world what they love to do, what they're uniquely good at doing, and what the world needs that they care about -- then we would have a world of self-confident, creative, informed, empowered, networked entrepreneurs doing work that needs to be done, successfully. We would have armies of people collaborating to solve the problems and crises facing our world, instead of going home exhausted at the end of the day seeking escape, feeling helpless to do anything that is meaningful to thems or to the world. We would have a world of producers instead of consumers, a world of abundance instead of scarcity, a world of diversity instead of what Terry Glavin calls "a dark and gathering sameness". We would have a world of young people choosing their lives instead of taking what they can get, what they can afford, what is offered to them. We would have a world of people who are nobody-but-themselves, and who know who they are, and how to live and make a living for themselves.

In the final part of her book, PS encourages us to check out unschooling gatherings in our own area, and find out more, find out what we can do to grow this important movement. She describes some of the groups that are organizing travel adventures to enrich unschoolers' experiences even further, and provides a host of resources for further reading and exploration of the unschooling movement.

I'm growing increasingly convinced that if we have any hope of coping with the crises that we face in this century, it lies in the generations now in the "school system".

More precisely, it lies in getting them out of that system, and making this the last generation of "schooled children".

Given the damage we've done to the world -- due in no small part to the "education system" that has molded us -- damage that future generations must reverse, it's the least we can do for them, and, at last, for ourselves.


10:01:51 AM  trackback []  comment []

  Sunday, March 29, 2009


BLOG Links of the Week: March 28, 2009
Atlantic Fin Sector Charts

The US Behaves Like An Emerging-Market Corporate-Crony Nation: From a former IMF Chief Economist, in the Atlantic, a familiar story, except that, unlike Russia and Argentina and other emerging nations, the US is 'too big to be allowed to fail' (charts above are from this article). This is essential reading, and the 'hopeful' scenario on its final page is bone-chilling (thanks to Glenn Greenwald for the link):

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time...

"Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders."

[Other stories this week on the economic crisis and bailouts in particular:
An Economy Where Almost Everything is Free: ABC interviews Wired's Chris Anderson on how in the next economy, you'll give everything except premium 'wraparound' services away for free, and 'make money from zero', and Jeff Jarvis on the transition to Peer Production, "giving up control of your customers" (actually, giving up control of your enterprise to your customers). Click on the 'Show Transcript' button to view the full text. Thanks to Cheryl for the link.

Do Just Three Things Per Day: If you're having trouble Getting Things Done, Colleen says try limiting yourself to working on just three projects/activities per day.

The Genetically Modified Poem: Another perceptive and conceptive work from Dave B: "You hardly need to read anything else."

What Happens When Your Local Paper and TV Stations Disappear?: Rob says that, like in any ecosystem that is suddenly devastated, there's a slow, innovative road to recovery.

The Wisdom of Crowds for Decision-Making: Caterina Fake is incubating Hunch, a new software that aggregates collective knowledge into decision trees that will help you make the decision by asking yourself, and answering, a series of questions. Thanks to Kathy Sierra (via Twitter) for the link.

Why Sharepoint (and Other Overengineered 'Groupware') Almost Never Works: Nancy summarizes the finding of just about every user I know that deployed groupware solutions are always suboptimal. Message to companies: Stop deploying these tools, and use simple, ubiquitous, user-friendly tools for social networking instead.

The Dysfunctional State of Info-Sharing in Business: A new survey says that people in organizations mostly share what they already know and agree on, and rely too much on consensus and not enough on critical discussion, and that the amount of discussion and info-sharing doesn't correlate with the quality of resultant decisions. Thanks to Tony Karrer (via Twitter) for the link.

The Difference Between Libraries and Schools: A young video-blogger makes a clever case for unschooling. Thanks to Michelle P for the link.

Why We Shouldn't Trust Experts: Experts are overrated, but because there's no accountability, no tracking, we don't realize that in the long run they're no better at decision-making and forecasting than random. Want proof? Look at this hilarious prediction from 2006 by Wharton prof Jeremy Siegel, who is still telling us everything's a deal today.

Shhh! Mexico is Not a Failing State: Yeah, let's not get Mexico mad at us by suggesting that it is, or they might let loose their corrupt cops, gangster governments, drug mafia, starving and angry farmers, and tens of millions of economic refugees on us.

Obama Plans to Make Canada-US Border Crossing Even More Bureaucratic: For both our sakes, we should cancel NAFTA now. It never worked, except for the corporatists. And it's looking more and more, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as if Obama is just as clued out about the futility of imperial wars and massively complicated "security" processes and bureaucracies as Bush was.

An Acronym for Sustainability: LEARN: Localize, Educate, Adapt, Ration, Negative Population Growth. Thanks to Lucas for the links.

Just for Fun: Now you can use Twitter to get each of your plants to tweet you when they're thirsty and thank you when they're not. Thanks to Theresa in Vancouver for the link.

Thoughts for the Week:
  • From Jeremy: "Foresight reads weak signals, not major reports - Arie de Geus said 'act with foresight: act on signals rather than on pain'."
  • From Michael Wiik: "We know our body is more aware of reality than we are. It sees more than we see. It hears more than we hear."
  • From children's story writer Philip Pullman: "We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."

11:49:03 PM  trackback []  comment []

  Thursday, March 19, 2009


BLOG Power Laws and Power Dynamics
power curve
Christopher Allen has his article on social networks and power laws up today, and it's worth a read. He makes the point that the size of a group or network is only one part of the social dynamic, because not all members of a group are 'equal', and, particularly in larger groups, a small proportion of members tends to dominate. This is all according to the Power Law theory (Clay Shirky is most famously associated with this), which is illustrated above: Most members of such groups fall in the "long tail" to the right side of the curve; each of them has relatively little influence on the group as a whole, but collectively, because of their large number, this "tail" can be long enough to "wag the dog" (if they're sufficiently organized and enabled and inclined to do so).

What interests me, more than the non-egalitarian nature of such groups (especially hierarchies), are the power dynamics of groups that are purportedly equal. We have been conditioned by the multiple hierarchies in most of the groups we participate in (including families, workplaces, and recreational teams), to wait for 'leaders' to present themselves (or be assigned) in the groups we are part of. We tend to find self-organization opportunities (or necessities) bewildering -- there's kind of a tacit "who's in charge" question floated, a 'holding back' waiting for someone to direct the group.

It doesn't take long, however, with a bit of practice in Open Space or in unorganized collaborative activities ("pick-up" sports, karaoke, dances, and some collective work-bees), we quickly re-learn the art of self-organization. Once you get used to self-organization, it's hard to put up with 'organized' groups again, with their bullies, louder voices, self-designated leaders/followers and wallflowers. So you get a complex power dynamic working:
  • The people who are used to holding sway (people normally in a position of wealth or power) will naturally talk first, and start to display dominance behaviours (talking loudly, interrupting, aggressive body language, pulling rank, assigning tasks, making decisions 'for' the group)
  • The people who think they have something to say but who are unable or unwilling to exercise dominance behaviours to 'compete' with the first group will disengage, and their behaviours will show it (looking away, multitasking, crossed arms, moving towards exits, daydreaming)
  • The people who want to curry favour with the first group will start exhibiting submissive behaviours towards them (leaning forward body language, nods)
  • The people who are overwhelmed and reluctant to contribute out of fear or shyness will start exhibiting non-directed submissive behaviours (legs drawn up, self-touching, intertwined fingers) and trying to decide who to defer to; anything they are coaxed to say will be immediately discounted or ignored
Some of these signals and dynamics are quite subtle, and many of them are not even noticed by others. If you have come to prefer self-organized egalitarian groups but work for an organization where this is rarely or never authentically practiced (most hierarchies pretend to have/tolerate egalitarian groups, but this is only for effect, and such groups actually have little or no real authority), this can be so exasperating as to make you culturally incompatible with the organization -- you'll find hierarchical group activities so toxic you'll quit, or your rancor or disengagement will get you fired.

My sense is that this cultural tension is creating a constant power disequilibrium in many organizations:
  • People who are at the top of hierarchies are finding it harder to attract and retain sufficient obedient submissives and patient sycophant climbers
  • Hierarchies with too many ambitious dominants are being crippled by more and more violent dominance competitions (leading to high burnout rates)
  • Some former egalitarians are being seduced by increasing power and wealth to behave like, and finally become, top-of-hierarchy dominants
  • Mostly-egalitarian groups are being exhausted by the need to constantly reprove/expel incorrigible dominants and 'bring out' incorrigible submissives
Picture a society made up of equal numbers of chimps (hierarchy, top-down organized culture) and bonobos (egalitarian, self-organized culture). Yes I know these are somewhat exaggerated sterotypes. The chimps had worked fine together when they were a monoculture, because everyone quickly learned their place in the hierarchy and decisions were made and followed accordingly. The bonobos had worked fine together when they were a monoculture, because they worked out everything by consensus without power dynamics.

But now they're mixed together, and worse, the older members of the diverse culture are mostly chimps and the younger members are mostly bonobos. The dominant chimps are unhappy because the bonobos won't defer and obey. The submissive chimps are unhappy because it looks like chaos -- no one is clearly in control, telling them what to do. And the bonobos are unhappy because the dominant chimps are bullying and not listening, and the submissive chimps are not participating and speaking up.

In the real world, the power dynamics are at once much subtler and much more complex. There is no truly egalitarian culture, and many of us have blind spots as to our use of and acquiescence to power. Nor is there any truly hierarchical culture -- we don't always defer to people higher in the hierarchy (especially if there is no direct line of responsibility or authority), nor do we always want or expect people lower in the hierarchy to defer to us. Besides, position in the hierarchy is usually subjective and context-determined. So in fact the power dynamics and cultural tensions described in the bullets above are ever-present in almost every group or organization to which we belong.

So 7 and 50 may be ideal sizes for Work Groups and Enterprise Groups, but their success will be strongly determined by the cultural mix and power dynamics of the group members. That's even true, the idealist in me acknowledges with a sigh, when the Group is substantially self-selected. We cannot know the personality and power culture of people until we've worked with them in a variety of situations. And of course, we don't even know ourselves perfectly, nor how we can delude ourselves, or be seduced, to act in ways very different from those we claim to espouse. Some of the constant power struggle will be going on inside each of us.


11:59:52 PM  trackback []  comment []

  Wednesday, March 11, 2009


BLOG Bottom-Up Democracy: Selecting Our Representatives Face to Face
congressional districts cartogram
There has been a lot written lately about the need to reinvent our economy from the bottom up -- community-based natural enterprises owned and operated by people right in the community, providing local products to local customers, responsibly, sustainably, and powerfully connected, with each community only exporting goods that are excess to the needs of the community and importing what cannot reasonably be produced in the community.

A major problem with this ideal is that our political and economic systems are to some extent inseparable: As long as we have a top-down political system whose officials are disconnected from local economies and citizens and beholden to very wealthy and powerful multinational lobbyists, that political system is going to be at loggerheads with a bottom-up community-based economic system. This political system will do everything in its considerable power to disrupt and destroy an entrepreneurial economic system that would take away all its financial funders' power, wealth and influence. In fact, our political system has already and always done so -- trade regulations, legal indemnifications, tax breaks, corporate 'rights' and massive subsidies are all skewed in favour of multinationals and against the interests of local enterprises, labour, the environment and local communities.

Many anarchists (that is, people who believe the less government the better) espouse simply eliminating government power and infrastructure, but that actually plays right into the hands of the corporatists, since it essentially leaves corporations to govern themselves. You only need consider Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, GMO, well-financed climate change deniers, all the Bush war profiteers, and all the corrupt and incompetent bankers that gave us the current economic collapse, to see what deregulation and self-regulation produces.

A few political thinkers have suggested that we could replace the current hierarchical political system with its precise opposite -- a bottom-up democracy where each community would pick its own representatives from among people they knew well, those representatives would in turn pick their representatives at the next-higher level, face to face, and so on. This approach has some obvious problems, but let's see how it might work.

Suppose we designed a computer to create two hundred Regions of one-two-hundredth of the total number of eligible voters in a country each, in such as way as to make them as contiguous as possible (i.e. no opportunity for gerrymandering). So, for example, suppose the US has 200 million voters. Each Region would have one million voters. Each Area in each Region would have ten thousand voters, and the Areas would be computer-generated in the same way. There would be 100 Areas in each Region, or 20,000 Areas in the country as a whole.

Now suppose that within your Area, comprising the ten thousand voters in your contiguous area, you could self-select to belong, with anywhere from 75 to 150 others, to a designated Community. You would have to choose one, and if you didn't want to do so, you would be automatically assigned, by the same computer program, a Community of the 100 people in your immediate contiguous proximity. Every four years you would have the opportunity to self-select a different community, or stay with the one you were in (provided you were still living in the same Area).

Next, every four years, your Community members (75 to 150 people) would get together and select a Community Representative (CR) from among their own members. The one hundred (or so) CRs in an Area would get together and select an Area Representative (AR) from among their members. These CRs would also constitute the government of their Area. The one hundred (or so) ARs in a Region would get together and select a Regional Representative (RR) from among their members. These ARs would also constitute the government of their Region. And the RRs would constitute the federal government, and select a President or Prime Minister and a Cabinet. Powers would be allotted to the President/PM/Cabinet, to the Federal Government (the 200 RRs), to the 100 Regional Governments (each with 100 ARs), to the 10,000 Area Governments (each with 100 CRs), and to the one million Community Governments (each with 75-150 voters/members). Hopefully with no overlap!

Could this work? Imagine if you could choose 75-150 people from among the ten thousand voters living closest to you to constitute your political Community. Can you imagine self-organizing this way? Can you guess who you would choose as your CR? Is s/he currently an elected official? Now draw an Area around where you live consisting of about ten thousand voters. Who might the 100 CRs in this area select as their AR? Is s/he currently an elected official? Could this whole system be corrupted by party organizations preying on citizen indifference to corral people into faux communities they could control?

Now consider that your Community (unlike your Area or Region) is made up of people who are not necessarily living contiguously -- they are people from all over your Area. What powers and authority, currently residing with some anonymous group that just happens to live in the same town or neighbourhood, would they have, and what kind of power shift would this represent?

I have a pretty good idea who I would end up with in my Community. I also know who would aspire to be our CR, and I think I know that the person we selected to be our CR would not be one of those politically ambitious members. It would, instead, be someone we trusted, someone we would choose precisely because they lacked political ambition.

Imagine if it worked like this all the way up -- CRs, ARs, RRs, all selected because they were modest, trustworthy individuals. Would we have a real democratic political system, immune to lobbyist influence, party bullying, manipulation and power politics?


11:55:34 PM  trackback []  comment []


Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website. © Copyright 2009 Dave Pollard.
Last update: 5/11/09; 10:29:29 PM.

May 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31            
Apr   Jun

SEARCH BLOG How to Save the World

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner


ftssMy book is available to US buyers from the Publisher or Amazon.com

to Canadian buyers from Indigo or Amazon.ca

to UK buyers from Amazon.co.uk

or from your local bookseller.

leafMADE IN CANADA leaf trust your instincts


bc MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY
People who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months. For my full blogroll/online reference library, see here. [* indicates people I connect with in real time, f2f, via IM, Skype or SL chat.]

Artists:
Andrew (UK)*
Jen  (US)
Justin  (US)
Kevin (JP)
Melisa  (US)*
Michael (CA)*
Nick
(CA)*
Pete (NZ)*
Sharon (US)
Susan H  (US)*

Business, Health, Tech:
Colleen (US)
Dave S (US)
J-S (CA)*
Jeremy (CA)*
Jon (CA)*
Karen H (CA)*
Lugon (ES)*
Paul/Grace (CA)*
Shawn (AU)*

Communication, Learning:
Barbara (BR)*
Chris C (CA)*
Chris L (US)*
Geoff (AU)*
Mariella (PE)*
Nancy (US)*
Rob (CA)*
Siona (US)*
Tree (US)*
Viv (AU)*

Community Makers:  
Amy L (US)*
Cheryl (AU)*
Daisy/Emily (US)
Don (US)
Melindigo
(US)*
Miranda (CA)*
Sarah B (US)
Sarah (CA)*

Environment:
Chelsea Green (US)*
Cyndy (US)
Dale (US)*
Dave P (CA)*
ETBNC (US)*
Steve (SE)*
Zane (CA)
Sam (US)

Philosophy/Spirituality:
Amanda K (US)
Amanda T (US)*
Beth P (US)
Craig (US)
Evelyn (US)
Karen C (US)
Melinda (US)*
Michelle (AU)*
Victor (CA)
William (US)

Second Lifers:
Aletheia (UK)*

Samsara (US)*
SingingHeart (US)*
Skyler (US)*
Sojourner (US)*
Theresa (CA)*

Storytellers:
Barb K (US)
Beth T (US)
Cassandra (CA)
Joe (BZ)*
Natalie S (IS)
Patri (US)
Patti (US)*
PS (US)
Rayne (US)
Terrapraeta (US)




.
.
.
.
.

Subscribe to "Politics & Economics" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.


I'm listening to:

Visit the David Suzuki Foundation




WHAT THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS MORE OF

Blog readers want to see more:
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.