Hey all. I'm kind of excited about this one. In a little over two hours, the Netroots Platform Committee has a call with Michael Yaki, the head of the Obama Campaign's Platform Committee(!!!) - and we want your ideas!
If you haven't followed or contributed to the Netroots Platform, see the story over at Wired
that was published yesterday and a press release about the project. The Wired story does a nice job of capturing the spirit of the project which I'll describe in more detail below.
The basic idea is we've developed a political platform in an open, transparent, and democratic fashion, using the power of the online community to craft it, produce it and drive it.
More details below the fold...
Background: The process began at Netroots Nation in Austin. It lasted three weeks in total, and culminated in a 29-page document that includes collaboratively produced planks on everything from foreign policy to science & technology to the economy. We invited people to participate with an email from Netroots Nation, with a couple of front page posts at MyDD, in a bunch of diaries and diary-pimping here at DailyKos, on progressive listservs, at the MyBO site, through our own group email lists, through twisting a few arms at Netroots Nation (how many of you got a card from me and a plea to come play?) and whatever other methods we could think of in the short weeks after Netroots Nation.
Now, while ANYONE was able to contribute to the platform, the final product is the result of a collaboration between 164 individuals who actually participated in its development. Chris Bowersand others have accurately pointed out that the final platform doesn't perfectly capture our collective views (and indeed there may be no such thing as "a collective view" for this pluralistic group). But as Meteor Blades, Jerome Armstrong, and Natasha Chart responded, that misses the point; this was an experiment in participatory democracy that went pretty darn well for an initial grassroots time-limited effort. It's likely more significant for the democratic (small "d") future it foreshadows as for the actual policies it includes.
Now about today's call...Initially, our goal was to see if we could influence the official Democratic Platform. And we did manage to get a short quote included in one of the appendices. But given that the platform probably needs more work to reflect our shared views, and given that the official Democratic platform is pretty much already set in stone, on the call with Yaki, we plan to focus more on the process we used than on the actual policies in the final platform. We'll encourage the Obama Campaign to use similar, more participatory ways to get its supporters' input in a meaningful way in the future.
Of course, we'll address some of the key policy differences between what we created and what's in the official Dem platform on FISA, fulfilling Al Gore's 100% renewables pledge, etc. And we'd love your help on identifying those, since we're not the policy experts who actually drafted most of the planks. But our primary message will be " why not do more of this?"
I'd love to hear your thoughts - and advice on handling a meeting like this (this is my first time talking to the head of a platform committee, natch) and I've been tapped as moderator. I'm excited that there is interest in this kind of activity (sounds like the Obama campaign is pretty savvy and ready to roll with it).
What do you think of the message? Have any other ideas?!?!?