I’ve recently been exploring a space that I will call, “Political Software.”
Most SocialSoftware, generally described as “software that helps groups to form,” and prototyped here to include blogs, wiki, and so on, focuses on the lower end of the EcosystemOfNetworks.
For example, blogs are, in our conventional day to day use as “little people in a big world,” centered towards the CreativeNetwork? aka “Clique,” wiki are similarly situated.
The same for wiki, though I suppose a few sites have big communities of, say, 30-100 people working on them. (The “Social Networks” in the map.)
“Proto-Political Software” is software that exists before what I want to call, “Political Software.”
Examples are:
While out here, in the cliques & social networks, we say, “VotingIsEvil,” …
…in political software, voting is a near universal feature.
(IN PROGRESS.)
See also ForFewAndMany.
This is a WorkInProgress, but if you have any comments or questions already, please do so!
Some notes:
According to Rene Girard conflict in human groups is inevitable. The traditional way of dealing with it is using the scapegoat mechanism. This is really not satisfactory for us. The other, modern way is using the judicial system - i.e. appealing to some higher justice. PoliticalSoftware should somehow incorporate that wisdom.
The biggest need for politics is when there is something at stake. In the online world - one important thing is Open Source. It is fully coordinated online and there are high stakes in choosing the future development path (it is diminished by the right to fork - but still you need to gather quite a bit of followers to make such a fork feasible). If there is a need for PoliticalSoftware it is in the Open Source communities.
A couple of the talks at Online Deliberation 2005 were about political software. I didn’t attend and haven’t yet read the programme of Online Deliberation 2008, but I assume that there was probably some there too.
Also, I’m hoping that a CommunityProgrammableWiki could serve as a testbed for scalable “direct democracy”-style legislative procedures.
It seems I’d left this page pretty wide open; I had meant to define more. Still, your comments are on the mark with what I had intended.
The phrase I’ve developed is: “Political Software is software made for use by societies.”
The image is of 1,000s of people interacting, not just small-medium sized groups.
But interacting in a way that adds up.
I am somewhat convinced that we (most people, including myself) don’t know how to think about interactions of groups of people larger than, say, 150. We don’t know the ethics, we don’t know the organizing principles, we don’t know the values systems, we don’t know all of these things; We have very little intuitive feeling about it, not working in units like that. The extent of our imagination is hierarchy, voting, and primitive signalling notions. Is it possible for two groups of 500 each to have a conversation that reaches a conclusion and affects a transformation in the two groups, for example? Can this be done intentionally, and on who’s intention? There’s very little that we know here, there is very little that we (us) have tried here. But I diverge-
The question is political software. Software that is made for political societies (societies of say 1,000 people) to use. Soft processes (SoftTechnology) are as important, if not more important, than the hard processes.
Critique of proto-political software:
I predict (and hope) that in the long term, the Citizendium will overtake the Wikipedia. But I don’t really know.
I think we can safely say that political software can only really evolve with a society- that we can’t create the software, and then invite the society in.
My imagination has expanded beyond PICA. PICA, in many ways, seems obvious to me: “Of course this is what we should do. Of course.”
I am now interested in the development of a new society. This is what we need to do.
I’m not saying that that’s what we’re going to do on CommunityWiki.
But all I work on now, is, “How to grow a society?”, and TestingTheoryThroughAction.
Finding people interested in doing it is somewhat easy; I have found many people who are interested, and a few who are somewhat committed.
The hardest thing right now, for the few who are committed, is changing habits.
Count me as interested. Which habits are you trying to change?
All our habits..!
But it’d be a good start if we had regular attendance to Saturday meetings by the end of the year. 
More seriously, by next year, we should be making extended stays at one another’s houses in order to get to know one another better, to work on projects together, and so on.