bentrem

Ben Tremblay · @bentrem

15th Jun 2010 from Twitlonger

Context:
from http://twitter.com/bentrem/status/16167264493
* "Rhode Island's David Segal's Call for a Constitutional Convention" > http://bit.ly/a6Hgfv (@lessig at HuffPost)
* http://www.callaconvention.org

Extracted to http://soup.groundplane.org/post/60781303/Im-not-sure-its-in-the-best
“I'm not sure it's in the best interest of this country to be spending hours, days, weeks, and months discussing some of the most controversial issues in this country as to whether they should be part of our constitution. Regardless of whether it is a red state or a blue state ... this is not how legislatures in the 50 states should be debating very controversial issues.”
— Steve Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU; quoted in Lawrence Lessig: Rhode Island's David Segal's Call for a Constitutional Convention

So, for me, this is the beginning of what could be a movement. And immediately the focus is on the tech side of process: how to handle the discussion ... which is Web2.0/Gov2.0 in a nutshell.

Now for most things most times and most people, my "discourse-based decision support system" is over-kill. Most folk most times are perfectly happy to, as I tweet it, "contribute comment #4385 for a total of 6712" ... which is kinda sad, I think.

But a project like this comprises a real opportunity to roll out some best practices ... the stuff I've been flogging for over 5yrs ... the stuff that folk are "too busy" to be interested in. (Notice how folk have time to write tens of thousands of tweets about Web2.0/Gov2.0 and almost as many blog posts, but nobody has time to implement effective alternatives? That's why I studied social psych ... to get a handle of the dynamics that control innovation. And it ain't pretty!)

--ben

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