Comments on: Future Melbourne: The Dawning of the Age of P2PGovernance

By: FutureMelbourne

FutureMelbourne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:07:09 +0000

Hello and apologies I couldn't get involved in this discussion sooner, some interesting ideas floating around here. From an internal perspective, what we have found most telling with the Future Melbourne wiki has been the reconfiguration of traditional structures of influence. Specifically, large organisations are typically more familiar with drafting a traditional written submission in response to projects such as the Future Melbourne city plan. However, our wiki was constructed to preference contributions of the individual. This led to concerns aired by organisations worried that their ideas/edits wouldn't be afforded the same level of importance as had previously been the case. Consequently, most organisations have since selected to draft hardcopy written submissions. Ironically, we've found that individuals who directly edited the plan, then discussed their changes on the discussion pages, now find their ideas remain within the final content essentially unchanged. This contrasts starkly with the process required by a 3rd party to interpret the content of written submissions and then somehow incorporate these ideas into the plan in the best perceived possible way. I agree that this new form of online consultation/participation will take time before the majority of people feel comfortable taking part. However, once the possibilities of direct participation become apparent then organisations will be one such group who will need to re-evaluate the way they engage with planning processes if they wish to maintain an element of influence over the final outcome. Dale Future Melbourne Team

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By: mark_elliott

mark_elliott — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:25:13 +0000

I think this sums up the ideal role that a wiki type platform might play Michel – providing a publicly accessible means of developing the ideas which opens them up to scrutiny and discussion, while enabling the further development of the ideas in a transparent and open-access way. It feels like the Future Melbourne project has achieved this, however I think I’ll invite one of the City officers over to join in and give his inside perspective…

By: Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:29:50 +0000

Mark,

Would’nt you say that the key is to separate the idea forming, from the representational and interest-based decision-making. What is happening until today is that ‘interests’ distort not only representation, but also crucially the input phases of solution-seeking, so that solutions are filtered a priori with interests already in mind, thereby prohibiting good ideas to filter through. But if we have a mechanism to allow good ideas to filter through, then it becomes a lot more difficult, with that transparency build in, for illegitimate interests to come through to the back door, and they can only acquire legitimacy by engaging with the good ideas, not filterning them out a priori.

By: mark_elliott

mark_elliott — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:40:27 +0000

Well, that is an interesting issue - true, there does need to be a final, single decision. I also anticipated the need for conflict resolution and developed a basic plan (informed by the Wikipedia experience) which you can see here. But (as you've intimated) we haven't needed to draw upon this yet. I think it is an issue of maturity in a more general sense - WikiGovernance / p2p governance is still extremely young (with our project being one of the first) so i think there are few who really grasp the potential for influence through this channel/medium. However I'm quite sure that it won't be long until special interest groups and lobbyists develop a better understanding of the potentials. This will likely spawn more conflict (along with healthy debate) surrounding the struggle for the representation of a decision. However i see this in no way as a drawback, rather it would simply be an indication of maturity of the medium through the mirroring of life's normal activities within it. At which point, our dispute resolution policies would no doubt develop accordingly and given enough time, perhaps the need to be able to represent more perspectives/interests in policy would exert pressure upon government to rethink how 'valid' policy is formed, created & updated. Great comment! does that answer your question?

By: Zbigniew Lukasiak

Zbigniew Lukasiak — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:17:51 +0000

It is natural to expect that the first editors will be those interested in the general theme of collaboration – so it is not surprising that so far everyone is so nice and cultural there. But after the general public learns what is at stakes I would expect more, maybe not vandalism per se, but power-plays, editig wars. At Wikipedia you can always present two conflicting opinions – when city planning you have to choose one course of action – so the question is how do you plan to reconcile conflicts?