[pp.int.general] A consensus experiment as a partial answer to the Pirate Communication Problem.

Zbigniew Łukasiak zzbbyy at gmail.com
Wed May 14 13:07:46 CEST 2014


Copied from the workpad at:
http://pad.polskapartiapiratow.pl/p/ConsensusExperiment


# Problem (http://pad.polskapartiapiratow.pl/p/PirateCommunicationProblem)

There is a severe deficiency of communication between the pirate parties:

* at the General Assemblies of PPI we don't have enough time to talk
about everything

* the general mailing list does not work - because lack of rules makes the
discussion chaotic

* the leaders mailing list and Liquid Feedback setup by Nuno look desert

* the local forums are often locked down now

## Proposal 1: consensus deliberative group experiment (zby)

A consensus based deliberative group (committee?) that would gather opinions
from all pirate parties and work on what is the common core among them.

It will be immediately useful for:

* organizing coordinated actions (mostly protests, but also actions
like welcoming Snowden etc.)

* working on common program core (the European common core program is
very useful for small parties and it should be copied worldwide)

* making common declarations

* maybe working on PPI statutes

After we get it running we can also work on more difficult stuff like
 establishing what it really means to be a pirate party.

### Known issues

To get there we need to meet two conflicting requirements.

* The group cannot be too big - so that we can work with the classical
consensus protocol (based on ideas like:
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/trainer-resources/consensus.html),
and it needs to have a well defined boundary (rule #1 in 8 rules for
governance of the commons by Ostrom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom ). I think the Dunbar
Number that is 120 would make a hard limit.

* and it needs to include at least participants from all (legitimate)
pirate parties

### Plan

All more concrete rules would be established by the group
itself. I believe that if we make good rules we can avoid the problems
that afflict the other communication channels. We can start using emails
and pads - and then choose our own communication infrastructure.

All this will require some work from all participants - we need
volunteers that can regularly dedicate some of their time to
communicate with the group and with local parties and work on the issues.

Anyone interested?


-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/


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