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By JasonMoreland on
Ok I'll come out and say it I need help and I have no money to pay for it and only 4-6 weeks to get it done but please read on.
There is a General Election in 2011 in New Zealand and I’m looking to run a drastic experiment into collaborative government. The idea is to use drupal and provide a portal where individuals can join and effectively develop policy together. There is no left or right ideology but simply community. The purpose being is to get a selection of the members elected and start making substantial changes to the way decisions are made. In the future I would like to see the government reduced to an administration role with more decisions being made by communities.
There are a lot of issues around making this accepted and a large part would be a kick ass website where people can communicate, share and become involved. There are some great examples of community management being used in some communities and companies now, surely its time for a government to step up and New Zealanders are very accepting of new ideas.
So what I want to know is where I should post to beg for both designer and people to collaborate on the workflow issues. Time is short as I would like to be pushing the site and change the way to govern from January 2010.
Should I start a group, we could make the result an installation profile.
Cheers for taking the time to read this.
Comments
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Unfortunately, this is a bad economy to ask for people, who are typically contractors and only get paid when they spend time on clients, to donate time for such a project. There seems to be a lot of nz drupal users-- maybe there's a user group or gdo group you could ask?
Yes I understand worldfallz
Yes I understand worldfallz but its also the best time to push for real change. To get people involved. New Zealand is the perfect place for this experiment. I will reach out to the NZ community.
Thanks to benevolent001 for contacting me. :-)
why is the project has a such
why is the project has a such short time frame? 4 - 6 weeks?
are you looking to build a forum?
Christmas
I was just thinking that to have the most chance of success it needs as long as possible running before the next election. There is a lot of time needed to have the community normalise so there is confidence in a system of community government. I was also thinking than a lot of people here wouldn't have time over the December period and It would be preferable to have a small scale test then maybe before a larger launch.
I guess it could have a longer time frame.
The idea is to have many small groups feeding upwards into governmental policy formation. In the long run when we can get enough people into parliament the total conversion of the party political system to one driven through collaboration from the net without parties or politicians. Reducing government to what it should be, the administrators of the community they represent. If you want a look at current businesses etc running this kind of management you can google a doco called USNOW its about 500 MB and free to download. Or go to usnowfilm.com
Most people don't really care much about the big picture in politics. For instance healthcare, everybody wants it but are unsure how to understand the policy but if you ask them about their local hospital then they have plenty to say about services etc. In this way I would see a HEALTH group with smaller sub-communities started groups for the areas of health that are important to them. They in tern would build a health type wiki of policy together.
My first thought was a Forum but It also needs to be very community focused. Forums are great but they sometimes don't give you the feeling of ownership of the topic. I think to make this work users have to feel like they started the group are involved and developed their group, in part to make local changes themselves and to be involved in the process of developing their own society. Which is why I was looking at drupal it seems better suited I think and more flexible than say phpbb3 or maybe an integration of the two.
groups
wiki
group / forum/ blogs /pages
voting
If possible a way for user's to select there own moderators and for 2011 their own representatives for parliament.
Once its up and running I would like the community to feel like its their site. While I have strong views on politics its not about driving my ideas but letting go and allowing the community a place to function under this new system and organically develop.
I'm open to ideas.
I could probably throw
I could probably throw something together but it needs to be sound and my skills are still very basic and slow.