Thank you for all your comments - they are very helpful. Here are my
responses
On 3 Mar 2011, at 18:05, Francis Davey wrote:
I do quite a lot of "activist group" looking at bills and drafting
amendments to them. In all cases what we do is confidential. For all
kinds of reasons we simply don't want a process that the whole world
can participate in. A private version might be usable, a public
version - not.
The question of privacy came up quite a few times. Technically
speaking, this is not difficult to do at all. Because I have based
it on Drupal, I hardly have to do any coding to achieve this.
I am in two minds about it, however. My initial position was to
simply allow independent organisations to install the software on
their own servers. I also thought that integrating privacy options
may be outside the scope of what I am trying to achieve, and such
options will make the identity of YourConsensus just a little less
clear (I am looking to achieve Wikipedia-like clarity).
Having listened to your comments, however, I may be persuaded
otherwise. It sounds like including privacy options would widen the
appeal, which would be a good thing.
On 3 Mar 2011, at 18:05, Francis Davey wrote:
You don't really want
activist groups to be using it, because its a tool that works on
building consensus, and any activist group is inherently not aimed at
consensus. You don't form a group to campaign against a new Bill or a
change in the law if everyone agrees about it.
I think it is important to distinguish "consensus" from "the status
quo", which is what I think you mean. Consensus is a position with
near universal consent, while the status quo is something that is
enforced with, or without consent. I certainly do want activist
groups to engage with others on this platform, because consensus
building requires conflicts to be recognised.
The presence and nature of conflict gives us clues as to how a
proposal can gather more support, or whether a proposal has merit at
all on the whole.
It is my hope that activists find that engaging with different
perspectives on YourConsenus will be to their advantage. I haven't
met an activist who thinks reason is against them, and YourConsensus
could give them an opportunity to win the argument. I say "could"
it's something that needs to be measured.
I should mention that YourConsensus is an adaptation of the "Formal
Consensus" process outlined in this online handbook, which I found
invaluable:
http://www.consensus.net/ocaccontents.html
On 3 Mar 2011, at 18:05, Francis Davey wrote:
As to having bills published through it - there is one point. There
are, as far as I know, no software tools that are well designed for
editing bills, legislation or indeed contracts. In bills, line numbers
have an enormous importance which is alien to the way in which most
wordprocessors and markup languages think about the world. Bills,
legislation and contracts use numbering systems that it is often hard
to persuade software to understand or respect.
I suspect that without decent editing capability you can have a good
discussion of a bill, but maybe not as much useful drafting as you'd
like. Certainly someone needs to fix the editing side if its to be
seriously used by governments and legislators. Again, I suspect that's
a bit off your brief and is a hard problem (given that no-one does it
right).
I'll be interested to see it working.
Mark Wrangham in particular has been working to build a service that
translates government Bills into a useable XML format for public
access. I'm intending to use the XML here to build the YourConsensus
page, which will have a few differences from the current page. Mark
and I have already been pondering the numbering and referencing
challenge. I haven't started publishing Bills yet, so there are
still opportunities to influence how legislation could be drafted in
a slightly updated format. I would greatly appreciate your input
since you have some expertise in the area. Numbered lists are only a
small part of the problem.
With this in mind, I have created a YourConsensus page to deal with
this precise issue, and I ask for your help in drafting a
specification for such a system:
http://www.yourconsensus.org/consensus/specifications-system-drafting-
legislation
On 3 Mar 2011, at 19:15, Anthony Cartmell wrote:
Let me know if you would like any help or Drupal tips: one thing I
noticed was the timezone settings - if you install the Date module
you get time zones like Europe/London that know about daylight
savings time :)
Good point! I will put it on the To Do list. I will be posting this
software as a contributed module under GPL on Drupal.org as soon as I
have cleaned the code up a little. Maybe I will get some help with
development from there. Thanks for having a go at using the site
with your group.
Thank you for all your comments - they are very helpful and encouraging.
Tom
Tom Kaneko
mobile: 07762656493
skype: tommykaneko
www.tomkaneko.com
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