Technologies for Democracy, Part 3

In this last blog about Froomkin's article, I'd like to raise an important issue for our discussion.

Scalability. The new tools we see on the net are pretty, but how scalable are they? 10 comments may be not enough, but 100 makes for a long reading. What about 10,000?

We have been hearing some interesting concepts on this from our recent guest, Peter Muhlberger, but unfortunately with our resident liveblogger stricken by flu it appears we don't have any notes online to go over the links he mentioned (a shame - can anybody fix this?).

And ideas are all well and good, but does anybody know of any projects being implemented and actually using such large scale digital governance projects?

One thing that struck me about all those projects we have been hearing about is that they are all about designing better software. Software is good, but aren't we forgetting the human factor?

There is one comforting thing I can tell you from personal experience with Wiki. With hundreds of thousands registerted editors and many anonymous, we are still far from being overloaded with comments. Even controversial, 'hot' subjects are under control, as with increased numbers of comments and edits we gain increased numbers of editors working together, keeping track of current discussion, updating the article with the evolving consensus, guarding against vandalism and if the subject is important and broad enough, even creating dedicated projects.

You see, people who edit Wiki do it for *fun* - I know of no Wikipedian who is bored editing. This means basically that we have managed to gather specialists (or hobbists) from area as diverse as Aa, Estonia to Złotów County (in other terms, we have now over 750,000 articles). And this is just a tip of the iceberg.

There are many tasks involved in our project beyond simple article writing. We have software developers. We have a police force. We have a detective agency. We have a cleanup crew. We have such strange organisations as the Arbitration Committee, Association of Members' Advocates, Welcoming Committee and even people taking care of BJAODN (don't ask). And as strange as this sounds, we even have people who even find administrative and bureaucratic tasks fun and carry them on efficiently and with passion. Come to think of it, we probably have people taking care of the proverbial kitchen sink as well. But unlike the classical bureaucracy, we don't allow ourselves to became overburdened with rules for the sake of rules - our encyclopedic conentent is growing almost expotentially, which I think is a good indicator that we are doing a fair job.

The point is that with the growth of a project, it doesn't have to collapse under its own weight - if it is flexible enough to utilize the full potential of its users. This leads me to a hypothesis that if we can delegate parts of governance related jobs to volunteers/hobbists, we can end up with the best sorting/analytical system this side of a strong AI.

Sometimes I have this vision of a government run by volunteers and hobbists. I am not sure if this is would be a utopia or dystopia, though :) Can they do a worse job then our current politicians? Often, I wonder. Seriously: sure they can. But - can they do better? If Wikipedia is any indicator, this is at least a subject meriting more study and discussion.

Well, that's all for today, folks. Awaiting your comments!

Oh. Sorry I didn't manage to cover the promised meaning of life topic. But don't worry, the answer is out there - go read the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is actually one of our Featured Articles on Wiki :)

And don't forget to check some previous commens - I think you will be suprised who found us already! (Stu, you may yet become quite (in)famous :D).