About four or five years ago I talked to one of my old colleagues from Texas. He had been one of the top dogs in our corner of the industry, and was, as far as I'm concerned, way too smart and ethical not to be one of those overdogs today. But as with most of us people who spend way too much time thinking, he had been bitten by a great idea. It took him away from that vein of gold we had been mining since Bob Earle got his patent and came up with that magical thing called Essbase. So we blabbed a bit and I told him all four of my ideas. The one he liked most is the one I've been nursing for about 10 years now (probably more). XRepublic.
Today as the old Tracy Chapman song said, there's 'prison doors open, shackles broken and chaos in the streets'. Everybody may be singing that they are free, but they have only just begun to build the institutions of democracy. What if they had more than just Facebook and Twitter to help them along? What if they had XRepublic? I think there's no doubt in my mind that the world would be a better place. What is XRepublic?
The XRepublic is the description and implementation of a computer mediated deliberation process. It is conceived as a system which can fundamentally change the way that people share ideas for the purposes of collaborative decision making. This includes but is not restricted to democratic voting & policy making, logical problem solving in expert domains, brainstorming and intelligence gathering.
The XRepublic can be thought of as a virtual parliament and it is from that perspective, using the terminology and technology of web-based online conferencing, that it was originally conceived. It is designed from the ground up to take advantage of Internet technology in order to make the kinds of deliberative processes currently found in governments, universities, intelligence organizations and other deliberative bodies available to a distributed group of people connected by networked computers.
XR provides a series of computer mediated spaces as well as a variety of tools which allow its participants to craft findings of fact, arguments pro & con, opinion polls, votes, and other artifacts associated with the construction of multi-authored, negotiated, subjective statements.
It is primarily designed as a communications medium and deliberative forum which captures statements from human participants in realtime. It then encourages participants to judge that information at their leisure and allows motivated individuals or interest groups to structure the information judged most useful. XRepublic facilitates through a variety of polling, categorization and voting methods, collective judgements to be passed on said structured information in the form of resolutions. These resolutions are then, with their supporting arguments and artifacts, kept on record for future reference, and for related and derivative works.
It's just what many millions of people around the globe need today. But they will need it again tomorrow and again, because the ability of people to collaborate and craft law for themselves is fundamental to self-rule. Please read that sentence agains slowly. I don't think that 'duly elected representative' is quite good enough. And if I were to make a bold suggestion, it would be that we live in a pre-Reformation era of representative government. And I think we need a tool to help us disintermediate the hierarchs who are proving themselves daily insufficient to the task of adequately scaling up their accountability and transparency as they continue to scale up their influence and tenure.
Sooner or later, as I improve the ends of reducing my needs, my time will free up to help craft such a system as XR. I am no longer afraid of Open Source. It will help deliver us into a new era.
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