In line with its stated mission, DailyKos does an amazing job on electoral news, polling, and politics. Ditto the hot button issues of the week. Despite the valiant efforts of the Rescue Rangers, wonkish diaries promoting discussion of more theoretical, policy-oriented topics tend to languish and roll off the diary list into oblivion.
I think that discussion of these more arcane (perish that I should call them boring) long-term issues is important to the promotion of informed action. Unfortunately, the way the system works these discussions ordinarily never attract more than minority interest, thus insuring that they are effectively unavailable to the larger community in the long run. What to do?
Can't we have some sort of place to which the best of these diaries can be permanently posted and available to interested Kossacks as a continuing resource?
I firmly believe that the long-term quality of the political dialog on Dailykos would be enhanced by extended background discussions of the nuts and bolts of effective governance and policy.
To some extent this is me thinking out loud. It may be that my tendency to overthink things and make them too complicated is playing me false, but see what you think.
First, bear with me as I say a number of things everyone already knows in order to get to the point. Feel free to skip down to the next section if you are already familiar with Dailykos.
Things Dailykos does very very well
- The primary mission here is electing more and better Democrats. In line with this, the front page does a masterful job of keeping us up on electoral and polling news, and opportunities for political action. Witness today:
Today in Congress
Polling and Political Wrapup
- The recommended diaries of the day tend to be reactive to the hot button issues of the moment. This is both understandable and necessary since these issues constitute the tactical ground of politics: the grist of the primary misson. Example:
Iran: The end game approaches?
- We can all appreciate the variety of regular features that have arisen over time, some organically and some by administrative action to fill perceived needs for continued attention:
Health Care Tuesday
Green Diary Rescue
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup
Overnight News Digest
Top Comments
High Impact Diaries
Diary Rescue
- We have an array of fine editorialists such as Teacherken, whose wisdom is always worth attending.
- And finally, recurring diaries whose only purpose is to feed our souls and provide relief from the somewhat grim world of politics that we inhabit:
Pooties
Photos
Gardening
Birding
Beyond all of this we have. . .
The Case of the Rapidly Sinking Policy Discussion
The Dailykos community has attracted a wide diversity of individuals with expertise on practically every topic. These folks create diaries, or contribute to diaries which are sometimes sweeping, sometimes quite arcane.
In some cases persistance and talent have propelled the most prominent onto the rec list:
Jill Richardson on agricultural policy and alternative agriculture
Energize America
But in most cases these wonkish diaries are necessarily of minority interest, glean a few comments and recs and then sink into oblivion. I'm talking about diaries such as today's The Genius of Interagency Metropolitan Policy. This is a diary alerting us to something rather arcane that the Obama administration appears to be doing right in an unprecedented way. Its importance as a topic and dearth of recs and comments were what motivated me to start writing this diary.
Even when diaries on some of these issues break into the rec list it is only a momentary sighting, like the fin of a whale breaking the surface.
More examples (and due to the nature of the problem, I had to dig). Although some diaries on these topics have been well-attended, none of my examples broke 100 comments. Titles paraphrased.
Transportation:
Building Train Networks
Transportation and Economic Recovery
Transportation and Energy Independence
Energy:
The stimulus and clean energy
Clean Energy Research
Energy and Economics
Urbanism:
Failed Republican Urban Agenda
Urban Policy Through Urban Fiction
Urban Gardening and Food Policy
Obama Urban Policy
New Urbanism
Education:
Online Resources for the YearlyKos Education Panel
Attempting to Change Education - Some Personal Thoughts (and BTW, both of these are from Teacherken, a one-man powerhouse on education, showing that not even folks who regularly find themselves on the Rec list will necessarily see their valuable thoughts gain wide attention)
Educational Politics and the Dialogic Classroom
An Improbable Rwo-Headed Snake: The Fallacy of Expedient Purpose
Teacher's Lounge: Critical Thinking
Systems Thinking:
Applying Systems Thinking to Politics
Systems Science
Systems Principles
...and many others: welfare/social safety nets, community organizing, biodiversity issues, media, political philosophy, bioethics. . . surely many more that I, myself, haven't noticed for the same reasons I am writing this diary.
Continuity
The great strength of the internet and the thing about it that has fundamentally changed the average person's access to information of all kinds, and had a profound effect on politics, is interconnectivity. The hyperlink is one of the most powerful concepts ever devised by the human mind. It allows the decentralized growth of networks of information and cooperation. Dailykos has made full use of this strength.
The weakness of the internet is its diffuse nature. One must work to gather the information you need. The searchable keyword system is a response. Running series of diaries are a response. But note my examples above. Even when some topics are crucially important in the long run, even when they occasionally break into the rec list, they suffer from discontinuity. Linked only by keywords, they do not as a rule constitute a connected dialog but rather a series of orphaned diaries.
Asynchronous Dialog
One thing I do with my high school science students is to try to get them to see the process of science as an asynchonous dialog (not that I use those words). If you follow the development of a major pathway of scientific inquiry by reading the landmark papers it is possible to see it as an extended dialog taking place sometimes over decades as new scientists respond to the hypotheses and experimental conclusions of older scientists by extending them to new tests and hypotheses. Development of germ theory is an example. Establishing that disease comes from pathogens and does not arise from the patients' own bodies is a conclusion that developed over the better part of a century, experiment by experiment and paper answering paper.
Possible Solutions?
By direct analogy, if diaries could easily refer to and respond to one another within the boundaries of a given topic, perhaps a similar asynchronous dialog could be promoted? What I think is needed is some kind of dedicated system of nodes and connections. A place or series of places where the boring, wonky, details-oriented diaries can cluster, live on, and begin to develop an inter-diary dialog.
What form this should take I have no idea. A Dailykos Wonkipedia? A running diary series called Wonkish Links? A dedicated Issues page linked from the front page, grouping diary links under issues banners, similar to the Truthout Issues page? Something obvious in the current Dailykos system that I am not seeing correctly?
Thoughts and reflections?
Baz
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UPDATE:
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Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this discussion. Here is a summary of ideas that have emerged in the course of commentary. Key: [**] = must be implemented by dKos staff. [ ] = could be developed independently by interested members.
Wonkipedia – Issue-specific pages in dKosopedia containing links to related diaries, links to related sites, and back-linked to dKosopedia reference pages on the specific issues. (Thanks apsmith, Blicero)
Weekly Wonk Digest – A periodic diary gathering and summarizing issues-oriented posts. (Thanks In her own Voice, apsmith)
Monographic diaries diaries that review the diary history of a given topic, with annotations
Links to other wonkish sites like European Tribune (thanks Jerome).
** Issues Working Groups – dKos subgroups organized according to however dKos4 is structured. (Thanks several who mentioned the coming site transition).
** Front page tabbing by scope and topic – an issues sidebar or tab menu. Scope = international, national, regional, etc., Topic by issues. Similar: ** Tag-specific rec lists organized by issue (Thanks, RLMiller and apsmith)
** Related Links sidebar on all diary pages, autofilled by an algorithm, listing diaries according to defined tags and/or wordclouds (Thanks, Tonyfv)
** Central tags list to aid diarists in tag consistency. (Thanks, RLMiller)
** A stand-alone issues page, organized similarly to the front page, and linked from the main front page.
**Rating diaries by link statistics One more idea occurs to me as I compile this list. It might be helpful to adopt the approach of a publication called Science Citations which lists articles according to how many times they have been cited by other articles, and by whom.
Let me know if I overlooked a suggestion. Regards and thanks for your warm response.
Baz
Updated by bmcphail at Tue Feb 22, 2011, 02:03:36 AM
I will note that, probably coincidentally, or perhaps by convergent evolution, DK4 incorporates the functional equivalent of many of the suggestions generated by this diary.
Fantastic! We shall see what comes of it.
Baz