I hope you'll allow me a moment of shameless self-promotion, but the article I'm quoting, from
SEED Magazine also has nice things to say about DailyKos and kossacks.
The article is not online yet (it should be in a couple of weeks) - the magazine's not even for sale yet (it will be on October 3), but it has been sent to a happy few already (hat tip to josephk for his diary which first pointed me to the article).
Jérôme Guillet - Citizen Kos.
How can the US achieve energy security by 2020, and energy freedom by 2040? By listening to Jérôme Guillet, who, together with hundreds of other global citizens, has devised a plan that will literally energize America.
kossacks = global citizens. Sounds better than angry extremists, right?
A banker who has never lived in the US, Jérôme Guillet is an unlikely leader of an American citizens' revolution aimed at completely restructuring how the US, and by extension the world, obtains and uses energy.
Yet there he was at the first-annual YearlyKos convention, chairing a panel alongside Bill Richardson, former secretary of energy under President Clinton and current governor of New Mexico. Guillet presented slide after slide of damning evidence, reminiscent of An Inconvenient Truth, all pointing to a single conclusion: The earth is warming, the world is running out of oil, and for more reasons than anyone cares to count, we have got to do something about it.
Guillet's solution, called Energize America, is, he says, "as much about the process as the product."
It was unveiled, appropriately, at YearlyKos, where a thousand of the million-plus bloggers from the progressive Web site DailyKos gathered last June. Anyone with a screen name on DailyKos could contribute to the plan--and hundreds of scientists, engineers, policy wonks, and ordinary citizens did. Guillet's idea was to bring the thinking of this diverse, virtual community to bear on solving the US's energy dependence, while heeding economic, social, and environmental interests. He and three other editors assembled the comprehensive, exhaustively debated, and triply fact-checked plan in a matter of months by exploiting the site's power to collaboratively filter content via user ratings.
I am glad that the article is focusing on the process that made it possible to build Energize America, as it is indeed the most revolutionary aspect of the plan. The presentation at YearlyKos focused on that aspect, as you can read in the second diary below:
YK - Energize America presentation (part 1 - the energy situation)
YK - Energize America presentation (part 2 - how Kossacks built EA)
YK - Energize America presentation (part 3 - main goals)
YK - Energize America presentation (part 4 - principles and exemplary Acts)
YK - Energize America presentation (part 5 - how you can help)
(See also: DailyKos in Action: the example of 'Energize America')
Kossacks do include "hundreds of scientists, engineers, policy wonks, and ordinary citizens", and many other competences, which were brought together in the preparation of the successive drafts of Energize America. What got this started was that I the slightly crazy idea to draft a policy plan, but what made this possible is the way the site works, and allows for information and content to be provided, analysed and filtered. And that comes from our numbers and our diverse backgrounds, not because some of us are particularly bright.
Technology aside, Guillet is the center around which Energize America nucleated. His posts on peak oil and the inevitability of the $100 barrel regularly draw hundreds of comments. A recent piece in which he complained of exhaustion garnered dozens of sympathetic responses from fellow "Kossacks" who seem just as enamored with Guillet himself as with the ideas he expounds.
The next phase for Energize America, Guillet says, is to sell it to politicians. He also hopes to have more experts "find errors or silly things" in the proposal. In other words, the plan is far from complete-- not because, after five drafts, tens of thousands of comments, and its recent presentation to the Democratic Leadership Council, it isn't ready for prime time--but because the process by which it was created is inherently open-ended. "This is what science is about. The bad things need to be disproved, and that's how you make progress," Guillet says. Whether or not the next election begets an administration willing to use some of the ideas in Energize America, Guillet's legacy will be that he established a near-scientific process for policymaking, in which debate and peer review take precedence.
This is our common legacy. This is the legacy of DailyKos. It's an incredibly powerful tool, as we're all discovering every day. We have to trust ourselves, and trust the community, and we'll be able to jump far beyond that we would have dreamt on our own. I often say that we get from dKos what we put in it. In fact, we get a lot more. I must say I am especially grateful also for the confirmation from a source like Seed Magazine that the methods we use on dKos can be taken seriously - and can add "near-science credibility" to what we write. DarkSyde has done a tremendous job with his science stories, but there's more than the knowledge: it's something new, which comes from a combination of our numbers, our willingness to confront our ideas and to somehow thrive on confrontation and argument, by pushing out the weakest ideas.
And the best part is - we don't even know where this is going: it's a giant social, political and, yes, scientific, experiment. Enjoy the ride!
Note: I'll do a longer article on the whole section a little bit later, when the articles are all accessible. In the meantime - go give SEED Magazine some support, and buy the issue when it comes out!