Post in Anyone going to Barcamps?

Jan 27 21:41 UTC

Saturday, Feb 2nd, there will be an e-governance barcamp in Boston.  Then, the
first weekend of March, there will be an e-governance barcamp in Washington DC.
Anyone going to either of them?  (I'm thinking of going to Boston).

I just wrote a blog post dealing with this and thoughts are appreciated.

Aldon

Politics and Governance
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2757

Recently on the Group Psychotherapy mailing list I am part of, the question
came up about whether members could copy portions of emails for articles they
were working on. This brought up some very good discussions about copyright,
privacy, and ethics. Underlying all of this was the question of how rules get
made. One person observed how the group was reluctant to establish rules.
Another asked why rules the list needed rules, at which point the first person
rested his case.

With Second Life, there seems to be similar resistance to effective rule
making. As I noted in my SLNN Reporters Notebook, people claim that Daniel
Linden said LL keeps its policies deliberately vague because, "as soon as they
draw a solid line, someone will walk up to the line, lean over it and spit over
it."

Are these, and other examples of difficulties establishing online rules a
function of the online environment? In an online environment, the question of
authority arises. Who has authority on a mailing list or in an online
community? Is it the moderators, the company that runs the community, some
combination? If it is some sort of combination, how is that worked out? To what
extent should rules be established by direct democracy or by a representative
democracy where rule makers are elected? What role does the absence of cues
that we receive in face-to-face interactions play in people’s resistance to
rule making online?

Is there something bigger going on here? Do people generally resist rule
making, not wanting to be the disliked rule giver? Does this happen independent
of the means of communication?

Next week, there will be an E-governance barcamp in Boston. Steven Clift has
been working on e-democracy since 1994. Yet these efforts all seem to get
drowned out with all the e-politics. It seems like everyone wants to argue the
political points, but somehow e-governance initiatives don’t get the same
amount of focus.

Does it make sense to have an experiential mailing list focused on
e-governance? Can virtual environments like Second Life or Central Grid
establish effective e-governance? How useful will the e-governance barcamp be?
It will be fun to find out.