Openpolitics.ca

From dKosopedia

Category: Internet

The openpolitics.ca political wiki is in some ways the closest Canadian equivalent to dkosopedia itself. Though it does not favour any particular political party, it does express particularly progressive views and favours rational debate on policy over irrational emotion and fear driven ways of making decisions. It also uses the issue/position/argument format and keeps an exhaustive list of issues that it organizes roughly according to the styles of capital (economics).

The effort grew from the Living Platform created by the Efficient Civics Guild and Green Party of Canada Living Platform and Living Agenda the Green Party of Canada created as part of its 2004 electoral breakthrough to 4.3% of the nationwide vote (in the 2000 election, that vote had been only 0.8%). When the effort to open policy up ran into political interference, creators of the system went non-partisan and exploited the CC-by-nc-sa open content licensing to fork and rapidly improve the database for all users.

The [1] list gives an idea of what is being debated. Interestingly, most edits are anonymous, and all pages can be edited by anyone. This appears to be part of the basic ideal of openpolitics.ca, that there is no concern about "who wrote what", only "who approves of what". On a page entitled Hayley Easto runs for GPO President, for instance, a candidate for a Green Party of Ontario post indicates that if her name appears as the most recent edit, she has approved the page. Else, one should not quote from it or believe in it yet as female impersonators or anonymous trolls may have altered it. This puts the emphasis clearly on "who approves" and conciously mimics the phrase I approved of this ad that has become a legal requirement of US political advertising.

Openpolitics.ca is a project of the Open Politics Foundation (Canada). It has adopted some standards for content from the Efficient Civics Guild to make it simpler for many parties and political players to cooperate usefully. It has also adopted the wiki best practice list from dowire.org, a global best practice exchange on e-government and many terms and definitions from the Civic Efficiency Group, Imagine Halifax, and the Greens, who tend to lead policy debate in Canada, where all parties except the Conservatives tend to compete to be "greener" at election time. There have been rumours that the project will soon be copied by the New Democratic Party or that the latter will work with the OPF to "catch up" to the Green policy method.