Though we may be content in our personal lives, the problems facing our larger world should give us pause for concern. Beyond our spiritual and genetic connection to the rest of humanity, the issues facing us are interconnected, and what happens overseas certainly affects us at home.
Hard as it is to feel individually responsible for issues like climate change, the economic crisis or peak oil in our daily grind, we are all liable for them through our collective action and inaction.
While one person can make a difference, the only way to overcome the challenges of our new century, is through coordinated action in our communities. Media and governments can help with awareness and funding respectively, but at the end of the day it's up to us to work together as families, towns, cities, regions and nations to make the world a better place.
The purpose of this diary is to solicit feedback and support for a unique non-commercial discussion forum, the goal of which would be to increase the quality in the manner and measure of the national dialogue.
Follow below for an important poll, and ways you can get involved in a 50 state strategy...
Daily Kos is certainly one of the best, if not the most active political forums on the web, but organizationally it functions far more effectively as a group blog, than a traditional discussion forum.
I know many of you have probably written or read some really fantastic diaries only for them to be bumped off the recent list, never to be heard from or seen again. Although it is possible to find articles by searching for topics, the dialogue that occurs in the comment trees are often buried under the site within days if not hours or minutes.
Part of the beauty of DK of course is that the community gets to decide via rec's which top stories make the index, but at the end of the day the attention span of this forum looks a lot like ADD.
Is there room for a complimentary, non-competitive forum alongside Daily Kos and others?
I think so.
The infrastructure for it is essentially in place already at demosphere.net as follows;
Global discussion boards, nested within each other and organized via the United Nations geoscheme:
Global | Regions | Americas | Subregions | Northern America | Countries | United States | States | Louisiana | Local | New Orleans
The italicized boards are essentially place-holder parent forums, used only for housing the lower level communities.
In this way, 'diaries' can be started in their relevant community level. For example, a topic specifically about the Katrina recovery effort in New Orleans would go into the 'lowest' level forum. A thread regarding the Governor of Louisiana's botched handling of the hurricane would go at the state level forum, and discussion about FEMA's response, or neighboring state action and relief efforts would go into the national level forum. It follows that a story about Canadians sending assistance would go at the 'Northern America' forum level, and if you started a thread about Mexico or other Central American nations helping the US that would go at the 'Americas' level.
The beauty of this model is that we can provide dedicated public, private or semi-private sub-forums for organizations and associations for free, and leverage their existing memberships to contribute to the overall quantity and quality of discourse on the parent community level forum. Groups could use the forums for specific projects, voting on measures and business, or brainstorming.
We are also developing a sister MediaWiki project where each affiliate organization can have their own Custom Namespace for gathering, managing and collectively editing information.
While the wiki service is probably a month or so away from being ready, the forums are online now and all that's missing now is the people power to activate the potential of this framework.
To be absolutely clear, this diary is not an advertisement for the site. With only a little over 100 members, and relatively little activity on the existing forums, there isn't a lot TO advertise at this point in time.
Rather, I'm hoping that this vision resonates with Kossacks like yourself who are passionate about the issues facing your local communities and states, and are interested in getting involved to help get our USA forum active.
There are a couple key questions I'd like to solicit your feedback on, namely:
1. 50 State Ambassador Strategy:
Much like Howard Dean's, the goal here is to find 50 affiliate bloggers/websites to act as Ambassadors to their state level forum. Effectively acting as moderators, and already engaged in the issues on their own blogs, these Ambassadors would be chiefly responsible for promoting their forum and developing relationships with groups and communities online within their state.
Can you think of any particular individual bloggers or sites/groups that may be interested in participating in building this network? Aside from creating diaries like this one, what would be the best way to get in touch with individuals who might be interested here or on other existing sites?
This will be a great opportunity to raise the profile of your blog or group site, and be involved in something that has the potential to grow into something quite profound.
Which leads me to the second key question...
2. Timing
Would it be better to time to co-ordinate the Ambassador network to launch on, before or after election day on November 4th?
If you think it would be best to capture the energy and interest that the election is oozing, then I think we should have enough time to launch before election day. Or perhaps with everyone so focused on getting their progressives elected it would be best to wait until after the election?
What do you think?
Ultimately, the US Demosphere should itself be non-partisan and open to all perspectives and viewpoints as long as they are construed and shared in a respectful and responsible manner. Soon, I hope to be producing a few training videos to train members new and old to the world of online forums alike, with skills on etiquette, how to disagree, and developing tools and resources for forum best-practices (i.e. sourcing quotes, bb coding etc).
Register for free and connect now. Browse the forum, participate in polls, share your thoughts in a thread, or even start your own discussion!
Please send an email if you're interested in promoting your blog and moderating your community forum as an 'Ambassador':
"jschroder (at) ddsi.info"
Finally, if you think this is a worthwhile endeavor, please recommend this diary so that others may have a chance to take part and share their thoughts on the project as well...
Thanks for making it this far, and I really look forward to reading and replying to all of your comments below.
Cheers,
Jordan Schroder