Loomio

Policy Sharing

DS Danyl Strype Public Seen by 15

Creating detailed, well thought out policy summaries, and more detailed discussion documents, is a lot of work for small groups of volunteers. Perhaps the most obvious way parties could work together is in shared policy development. This could be as simple as adopting policies from each other holus bolus, or could involved creating cross-party working groups to look at particular areas of policy. Working groups could coordinate campaigning as well as policy development, and we are already experiment with the working groups approach, with another AGE subgroup on Basic Income.

One of my goals for this year is to set up a GIT-based policy hub website, which allows us to use the same open source approach programmers use for writing code. Each party could have its own policy repository, and could import policies from other parties, modify them, and where appropriate, 'push' their changes back to the original authors for their consideration. Also, where members of one party disagree on a tricky policy area, they can 'fork' the current or proposed official policy document, work on their own version, and continue discussion (eg on Loomio or a mailing list). This approach allows every member to do policy development on their own 'branch', without fear their work will just be deleted by another member or official who disagrees with them.

JB

Jo Booth Wed 19 Aug 2015 5:38AM

A git based 'open' repository for ideas And policy sounds great. Internet Party used google docs for policy collaboration, but better versioning and forking would be much awesome.

DS

Danyl Strype Wed 19 Aug 2015 6:04AM

I'm building up a list of collaborative authoring platforms, which I'll try out, to see what the PolicyHub project might be able to borrow from other open source projects, and what we can learn from proprietary ones.

DS

Danyl Strype Tue 21 Apr 2020 9:46AM

I'm wondering if the Smallest Federated Wiki, a more recent project by the original inventor of the wiki Ward Cunningham, could be used as a tool for collaborative policy development? There has been some discussion about how the 'FedWiki' works in the Open App Ecosystem group:

https://www.loomio.org/d/r7T9o6b2/fedwiki