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Tech Committee Version 1.4
Update 7 April 2005 And the winner is: Minnesota- based E-Democracy.Org is investing in enhancements to the open source GroupServer tool out of New Zealand for our UK funded pilot initiative. Talk about global. Check out the message
view in our LiftOff forum.
Ready to volunteer? |
E-Democracy.Org uses e-mail lists to build effective online public spaces. E-mail, a technology most people actually use combined with our forum management and facilitation approach have served us extremely well for over a decade. However, now it is time to integrate of our e-mail discussion lists with the web. Jump right to our extensive
list of related links or read our rationale below. If you are
really interested in this topic, you should wade through our raw
materials as well.
Use a web forum? You might say, "Use a web board." That is not the answer. Even with e-mail notification options built-in, web-centric forum systems tend to work best on high traffic sites or extreme niche sites. Web forums are good for broadband users or for use with time-limited high interest online special events. Put bluntly, if citizens can't publish to a group via e-mail 100% of the time, the technology won't work for busy citizens and community leaders. Despite advances in web forums, blogs and the spam crisis, e-mail is not dead. E-mail is still the killer ap. We seek a compromise. We call it "eWeb" - an equitable forum system that allows citizens to participate via their preferred medium - e-mail or web. Equality is job one. Think of an open source YahooGroups that you can host from your own domain with web friendly features and no advertising. With our model, we put our "public issues forum" in the center of real politics. We deliver discussions right to the "eyeballs" of elected officials, journalists, and citizens. No audience, few participants, no power, no forum. The simple fact that visiting a web forum requires a conscious choice each time a citizen is online eliminates web-centric system from our consideration. E-mail is all about ... location, location, location. We are missing half our audience ... However, we fully understand that many people prefer to read and participate in online discussions via the web. When our current very basic web archives are unreachable, we hear about it immediately. Therefore we seek a solution that will first make our forum content highly accessible and usable on the web. Second, we seek a fully integrated, recipricol e-mail list/web forum system. Web-only options would be limited to auxiliary functions like a member directory and personalized tracking for keywords on multiple forums. (What politician wouldn't set a tracker on their name to see if they are mentioned?) We also envision the
full integration
of RSS headlines from our forums where people can follow a forum from
their
news reader, other sites, or receive special headline digests via
e-mail.
We envision a three
part system:
Key projects we might
involve ourselves
with or encourage to collaborate on open source tools - together they
might
change the e-world:
Mailman 3 is under development - join their e-mail list to put in your ideas Key text that needs to
be integrated
into project requirement documents:
In the long run, we envision a fully integrated e-mail and web discussion system. Many of the features we seek, like a member directory, personalized message tracking, or enhanced forums directories (based on OpenGroups like ideas), need to be part of a complete and comprehensive system. We will strip this raw project
requirements document of the big ideas that go beyond what a stand
alone databased-driven e-mail archive can do and place those ideas here.
Ready to volunteer? |
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