Projects:ConsensusPollingAwareness
DistributedPlanningGame / Consensus Polling Awareness (Obed Suhail, TedErnst, Brandon CS Sanders, Julia, MartinPfahler, Umair)
Contents
phase one is a One and Done Project
Why we're doing this?
We want all AboutUs staff worldwide, to be familiar with consensus polling, when it's a good idea to create a new consensus poll, how to create a consensus poll, what the roles are, and how to talk about the whole process and share it with others.
It will be done when:
All aspects of consensuspolling are clearly defined on the site and all staff have the knowledge that they need to become ConsensusPollEnthusiasts whenever they desire
Project Tasks
- ConsensusPollingAwareness:Staff
- ConsensusPolling Affordances (this is a dev task, for them to build out app!)
notes
consensus polling as a concept and consensus polling as a technology
- tour is for the concept
- couple places that are broken on our site
- communication and notifications
another idea is to initiate more consensus polls
- and help people to initiate their own consensus polls
new person joining a poll
- when a person fills out the current form and saves, what happens?
- dev could have them added to the page itself
- we need better instructions
a page for coaching facilitators
- some good examples of facilitation
we want dev to write us an app
- brainstorming moved to ConsensusPolling Affordances
phase two is an Ongoing Project
Why we're doing this?
In order for consensus polling to reach it's full potential as a disruptive technology, we need to go far beyond staff, to all ActiveUsers, and even the public at large.
It will be done when:
Project Tasks
Once we're ready, AboutUs will devote some mainpage and/or sidebar space to consensus polling
relevant links
A recipe to gain more public awareness and participation
Step 1. Get some philanthropic deep pockets to throw money into a pot, perhaps in the range of $1M to $5M
These deep pockets will not commit their money to “anything”, so first work out with them what type of projects they are willing to fund. Perhaps an initial phase of creating an alternative energy mini car (less than $5K purchase price), etc. The point is the project should be something that a lot of the general populace would want, if “whatever” came into existence.
Step 2. Create a special consensus polling site for this test.
Step 3. Create an interesting story around this censuses polling project, one that will capture the interest of the public.
Step 3. With collaboration from media manipulation experts get lots of free editorial content into non Internet media – newspapers, magazines, etc. that have high readership from the general populace (also radio and TV). Also generate Internet buzz. You know if this effort is successful if entities like a major news network does a story on their evening news, or similar mass audience media.
Step 4. Continue to generate buzz as people come to participate in this consensus poll. The wager is that lots of people will participate because they are being given a chance to decide directly how to spend a large chuck of somebody else’s money.
If this first consensus poll is successful, there are now likely millions participating in the polling. Then create a new poll, again with a large chuck of cash as the carrot. This time modify the process so the money is not put into play, until after participants contribute some of their own cash – thus is introduced a money pooling dynamic. This second poll demonstrates that one gets more done when the average Joe and Jane also pitch in some of their cash.
Note that this consensus polling executes some type of project. This is actually easier to do than taking on political issues directly. For example one can have half the USA population decide about a political issue, and still it goes nowhere. That is because at the end of the day one must still convert this consensus polling activity into action relative to existing political machinery – and thus in effect it becomes just another special interest (Moveon.org, etc.). In contrast by executing a project, one can do this in the commercial sector outside of “government”.
Also the project should ideally avoid political partisanship – pitting liberal against conservative mindsets – thus potential to gain a larger group of participants. Find something that the average Joe and Jane would like or need. Cheap non polluting transport to and from work (timing is good for this, lots of folks currently hurting from high gas prices), or? MartinPfahler
Discussion
Some of the content on this page is confusing to me. I agree it is important for Aboutus Staff to become very familiar with the consensus polling process if it is to make headway – but then comes the question of how to educate the larger populace, the community about the process? Without the latter happening how can it make a big impact? To me, this seems to be a “how does one generate publicity about this new process?” problem. In such regard at the current Aboutus web site it it too hard for new people to discover this topic.
I could make an argument as to this function being important enough to command key home page real estate, similar to the “edit” function and button. Without similar visibility I suspect gaining awareness will be a tough go.
I can see management saying, “adding a new function button like this on the home page is a major step” – and not one they would take lightly. So why not creation of a “Sandbox” for people to test out, that is a mirror image of the homepage, but with proposed new buttons or features, so folks can actually test drive and give input before shifted to the actual homepage? MartinPfahler
- Martin, I love your idea here, to extend this project far beyond it's current scope. Totally awesome! I'm going to make the change now. Please feel free to take this page and run with it. There's no reason phase 2 has to wait for phase 1. TedErnst
Ted, you say "I'm going to make the change now" Where can I watch where you are doing this change - or perhaps this involves work you must do that is not on a wiki page? MartinPfahler
