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Thu 9 Sep, 2004 10:40 pm
Edit [Moderator]: Moved from General to Forum Help.
Craven, I am asking that you create a separate forum on able2know specifically where people post threads with political reforms that they think would improve this country. If this forum grows large enough and it proves to be successful, I am asking that the forum be made into a separate non profit non ad based site, with an address like ideas.org or politicalpolicies.org with the function of giving well informed citizens a venue through which they can propose political reforms. If not, the forum should at the very least have a stickied post at the top stating it's purpose as described below and what rules if any it's participants should abide by.
A significant portion of what drives our private sector economy are fresh new ideas and I believe that if more people are given a venue through which to have their fresh new ideas for political policies heard, our government can be that much closer to achieving the same increases in productivity and efficiency that our private sector continuously experiences. People can only post on the forum, a thread with a specific idea for a political reform that they have. They should state the intended purpose of the reform they propose, as much supporting evidence as they can and should also indicate their specific experiences with the issue at hand. Each and every thread posted on the forum will automatically have the poll: "Does this idea have the potential, given sufficient research and amendment, to achieve the stated purpose and is this purpose a worthwhile one to pursue? Please read the entire opening post before voting." Yes or No. The ratio of Yes to No votes will be one of the criteria by which the threads on the forum can be ranked and viewed. Once a thread is posted, people can reply to it with information, research and personal insight into why the idea may or may not work, suggestions on what reforms the idea needs in order to be more specific, more inexpensive to implement, to receive more bipartisan support, to be more plausible or realistic to get passed, and to deal with possible negative side effects that the idea may have.
When you register an account to post on the site, you can indicate which quadrant of the political spectrum you fall under (you can take a quick quiz to determine this): Left Liberal (progressive), Right Liberal (libertarian), Left Conservative (populist), Right Conservative (republican). This will be used to give posters the ability to rank the threads based on the ratio of Yes to No votes of the posters who share the same political affiliation that they do. Thus, right liberal posters (aka. libertarians) can look up the policy reforms that proved favorable among fellow libertarians. They can in turn use them to formulate a more realistic political platform even if various "No" votes from posters with different political leanings pushed the policy idea to near the bottom.
By default, when you enter the site, the threads on the top half of the site will be listed based on how recently the original threads were posted. On the bottom half of the site, the threads will be listed based on their ratio of yes votes to no votes on the poll. By clicking a link, you can change the criteria upon which the threads will be listed either in ascending or descending order whether based on how many total votes they have received thus far, how many yes votes they have received thus far, the ratio of yes votes to no votes they have received thus far overall or specifically from either left liberals, right liberals, left conservatives or right conservatives, how recently the original thread was posted, or in the order of the threads that a reply was most recently posted in. In addition, posters can search the forum for threads based on a term or phrase in the title, the body of the original post, the body of the entire thread, the author of the thread, or the threads that a certain poster has posted, or the threads that a certain poster has posted in.
The forum will require essentially no moderation since the bad ideas and the threads in bad taste will be screened to the bottom by a series of No votes.
It is my hope that the forum will generate a great many fresh, realistic, specific, bipartisan, inexpensive political reforms and in turn, the forum will receive more publicity and more exposure. Some day, I hope that the forum will become a national phenomenon that policy makers frequent in order to come up with popular realistic, specific, bipartisan, inexpensive ways to improve the efficiency and productivity of the federal, state and local governments. Thus it would be wise to also give the thread creator the ability to amend their original post at any time and it would be wise to also allow the visitor to rate the reform based on how specific it is, how realistic it is, how bipartisan it is, and how inexpensive it will likely be.
Craven, I know that I am asking for a lot. But I honestly believe that the American people working together as one giant think tank can generate a tremendous number of very good policy reforms that if adopted will improve the productivity of our government. Working together, I am certain that responsible American citizens can come up with cheap effective ways to improve national security, reduce poverty, or cut costs and make this country stronger.
Currently, any new political policy idea generated has to originate from a small group of legislators in congress who not only have to come up with these policy ideas but have to work out all the details, think through all the potential problems, crunch all the numbers, write up the policies, publicize these policies and get them passed while simultaneously winning over their constituencies, running this entire country and dealing with any unforeseen problems the nation faces. These are simply too many tasks for too few people. It is little wonder that few fresh new policy ideas originate from congress or get adopted by our government while the private sector continuously comes up with new ideas that allow it be more productive and achieve more for less.
Imagine how many great political policies that the American public can generate by pooling its collective experiences and working together. If the idea I am proposing takes off as I am hoping it will, it will make this country far better. I will gladly offer up anything I can whether it is time or what little money I have in order to further this goal. So please don't just ignore this request. In order to illustrate the kinds of ideas that I hope this thread will generate, I will start posting threads with policy reform ideas in the format I described above in the politics forum.
So, how will you pay for it without ads, and how will you prevent spam and personal attacks without moderation?
Mods can't preemptively stop spam either. All they can do is lock the thread and have it slowly fall to the bottom.
With this, the users will simply give a series of No votes to any spam posts and that will quickly unbalance the ratio and push the site to the bottom.
If the problem worsens and moderation does prove neccesary, it can always be implemented.
As for the ads, I was hoping that the site would be cheap enough to run without ads. But I guess if that's not a realistic possibility, small unobstructive ads like those on this site aren't neccesarily a bad thing.
I think many of you are missing the point of this forum. It's main idea isn't to be ad free. The idea behind the forum is to have a forum specifically where educated citizens can share their ideas on political reforms and political policies that would improve the efficency of the federal government and/or point out key areas of waste with in existing political policies.
The merit of these political policies will be gauged by other visitors who vote Yes or No on the poll. As a result, good, bipartisan, realistically, cheaply implementable ideas for political policies are constantly filtered to the top. And policy makers can turn to this forum any time they need ideas on how to deal with a specific issue or cope with a specific problem.
For example, suppose the current advertizements the government runs to curb the use of drugs are just not very effective ideas. It's very hard for the government to come to realize this on it's own. Many of the earlier antidrug ads which were even more ineffective and downright stupid stayed on the air for several months until the government recieved enough complaints and suggestions from everyday Americans and decided to change them. A forum such as this speed up this process and might even provide various ideas or approaches for advertizements that are more effective (such as drug ads that specifically show the specific mechanism through which those drugs do harm to your body rather than having the government simply state repeatedly that "drugs are bad, mmmkay" without much of an explanation at all). Whether you are talking about an ineffective advertizement, or an ineffective political policy, such a forum would provide a means to quickly figure them out.
In addition, such a forum would also give the oppurtunity for people to come up with alternative ideas based on their own experiences. Each of us is creative in our own way, have a different insider perspective on how the world works, and if we pool together our collective experience, we can find better ways to do things than the government currently does. The federal government is often a great deal more inefficent than it's private counterparts. But it doesn't have to be. If those ideas suggested are well thought out and have a great deal of potential, they would be screened to the top by the other viewers themselves so that policy makers could quickly find and skim through them to find any that might work better than how congress is currently going about it.
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