wrythings

We’re making progress towards e-Democracy in Chicago. We’ve got a great steering committee in formation, and we’re eager to recruit participants to the Chicago Region Civic Forum. We’re relying on Twin Cities based e-democracy.org for hosting and for their local issues forum platform (based on groupserver). Our forum won’t go live until we reach a critical mass of subscribers.

We’re using their platform for several reasons … we’re committed to a civic discourse on an open source, neutral platform, so that no group or person in Chicago would feel “ownership” (or exclusion) except in the sense of a common, collective ownership and responsibility.

We also like the model, generally. The e-democracy project has been going strong for more than a decade, and continues to expand. It’s built on web technologies familiar to everyone: email and browser, yet also allows room for web 2.0 growth with RSS/XML feeds. The e-democracy forums pay a good deal of attention to the social dimensions of online communities, and have established sensible policies and practices for a healthy community. A clear and explicit policy is important.

The list/forum is open to the public, for the purposes of local civic discourse. Participants are expected to register under their real name, to conduct themselves with civility and generosity of spirit and to focus on issues of pertinence to the Chicago region. We’re all restricted to two posts per day so that no one person can dominate the discourse and so that participants don’t feel overwhelmed by excessive traffic. We’re all busy people, and we respect each other’s time and commitment to improving life in our city.

Feel free to register now… and let me know if you have any problems! We’re still testing some things.

This should take you to a registration page for the Chicago Region Civic Forum on the e-democracy site. Remember, we won’t be live right away, but you will be the first to know when we are!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under Chicago, civic garden, commons, community, elections, politics, public, social justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.