Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Science fiction authors imagine the future Bruce Sterling, Norman Spinrad, Cory Doctorow, Ken Wharton, John Shirley, Pay Murphy and Kim Stanley Robinson discuss the future of society. And Slashdot follows up. (Thanks to Thomas Armagost for the link). 10:49:07 PM    comment []

Designing for participation Politicians and the political classes often make the mistake of assuming that politics is the most important activity anyone can engage in. For most people, there are a great number of other activities that are rightly placed before participation in politics - family, friends, earning a living, and so on. We are all time-poor these days, and the Athenian Society will be an activity like any other, in competition for people's attention with football, television, clubs, bowls, and crochet. At the same time, the Society's active membership needs to be as representative of society as possible, or it will be seen as just another sectoral or class-based pressure group. So it is important that the Society's operations are structured in such a way that they can fit in with the rest of its members' lives. A member should be able to get benefit from the Society if she gives it three hours a day, or one hour a month. In web design terms, the Society's work should degrade gracefully. There are a few practical ideas that come out of this: Voting by members at large should take place on a set day, every month or two weeks, and the voting pack should contain a summary of the information necessary to make a decision, as well as pointers to further discussion Voting should have a "no vote" option, for people who want to record that they do not want to express an opinion on an issue Activity in different forums should be summarised weekly, again with pointers to where full discussion can be found There should be 'event days' on current live issues, such as a Q&A session with a Minister, or a debate between the proposers and opponents of a particular idea. 8:53:54 AM    comment []

Minnesota E-democracy user survey Steven Clift's Minnesota e-democracy project, one of the earliest e-democracy efforts on the web, and still one of the most effective, has published a fascinating analysis of the profile and opinion of its users. Unsurprisingly, the majority of users are politically interested and better-educated than average. More interesting are the positive effects both for themselves and for the political process that the forum participants identify. 6:52:38 AM    comment []