Idea 1: Using Wikis for Political Causes
What if we built public interest congressional lobbying pushes through a wiki.
Granularize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granularity) tasks:
-Page for research
-Page for coming up with a slogan
-Pages for crafting personalized letters to each congressman
-Pages for crafting specific letters to the editor
-etc.
It’s hard for the average guy who cares about, say, fishery protection to quit his job and join a lobbying effort. But, it’s not hard for him to write up a paragraph on a specific policy point. It’s not hard for another guy to write up a specific argument point to a specific congressman. It’s not hard for another guy to come up with posters and another guy to organize a rally and another guy to pipe up about the current climate in the Ohio-23rd. etc. etc. If there’s another task, the administrator could pipe up on the main page and ask someone out there in cyberspace to take up the task.
Problems:
-How do you regulate it so that the people working on it all have the same goal (i.e. no spies for the other side).
-How much administration? Would fact-checking the user-generated contributions be just as burdensome as writing it oneself?
-How do you granularize efficiently? Are the tasks required for a Congressional lobbying push even granularizable?
