[Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Announcing Matchism

[Scott Raney <scott AT metacard.com>]

The matchism.org site is (finally) finished and polished enough that
I'm now encouraging people to read it. The sections you all would be
most interested in are "The MatchSys" (the voting system), and the
Goals section (the lead-in to the proxy-matching and manager-advisory
systems). But I recommend starting at the beginning and read at least
the pages leading up to the voting system to get the necessary
background. There's a navigation bar at the bottom if you want to jump
around from that point.

Why read it, especially when you've probably all got other projects
that will have to be put aside for a bit to do so? For one thing, it's
a lot different from most other political philosophy or economics
books in that there are a lot of very specific proposals: If you're up
for shooting fish in a barrel, here's a whole long string of them to
fire away at. It also addresses a much neglected issue in all the
other "alternative government" projects: The claim of Matchism is that
it is not sufficient, and may even be misguided, to focus on the
disenfranchised minorities in our society. The real need, and danger,
comes from that minority who currently hold the power. If this is
correct, then the new system merely needs to be designed to give the
*middle* majority the power to set the goals and control over how to
achieve them. It doesn't have to specifically be designed to support
"consent" or "consensus" or even "collaborative" decisionmaking, all
of which have proven to be extremely difficult to actually implement.

A more cynical reason to read it is derived from my recent review of
all of the projects linked out from the Metagovernment.org site (and
most of those on the ParticipateDB.com site), none of which have not
amounted to much and most of which have been abandoned for all
practical purposes. Unfortunately, it seems to me that every one of
these dead-end projects is another nail in the coffin of the idea that
a new government system is even possible, let alone that it might be
developed by any independent person or group. It's one thing to take
on projects like these as an experiment or hobby, but I see that
hundreds of thousands of person-hours and millions of dollars have
been spent on these things. This sort of review is bound to make
anyone very discouraged,and instill a great reluctance to add to the
pile.

The only reason for optimism I could find is that all of them I looked
at are missing what I believe to be one key ingredient: a
comprehensive and well-specified philosophy. No revolution has been
successful without a "story" that can be used to sell the new
political "technology" it will be based on. Which is why I believe
that it's worth your time to invest in a philosophy/narrative *before*
expending any more resources building tools and technology. Even if it
turns out that Matchism isn't a good fit for you, the way it is
organized and specifically refers to competing alternatives (e.g., see
the "isms" section) should help you find or develop one that will be.
  Regards,
    Scott