The Knowlective Project
This site aims to explore new tools and approaches to aid collective decision making, whether in the context of an organization or society. We are assuming that a common course of action should be decided and acted upon in a certain amount of time. We are especially targeting the case where the issues are too complex to be well understood by a small group of people; the opinions are so diverse that the set of options, or even the very definition of the problems are not agreed on, at least initially; and the population involved is too large to be able to discuss the issue through meeting as a group.
We believe that many issues that face collectivities now fall in this category: for example, many features of national policy will turn out to have unforeseen indirect impacts in the social fabric and the natural environment; also, decision processes used in many collectivities (including representative democracy) do not ensure, by themselves, that the people most directly affected by a decision will be able to provide input.
To answer these issues adequately, decision-making processes should make it practical to include input from as many stake-holders as possible; to ensure that all are heard; and to ensure that arguments will not be ignored just because they are complex or require specialized knowledge. This, we propose, can be achieved through collective authoring of collective projects.
Collective authoring has recently entered the mainstream, through Wikipedia; but Wikipedia is not designed to achieve a binding decision for its users, and even allows for ways to register dissent explicitly. We argue that most existing groupware is not yet ready to take on the challenge of large-scale, multi-issue decision making; and we would go as far as to say that no strictly technological solution is appropriate for that task. However, technical tools that support collective deliberation have been developed, and we intend to examine where and how these tools can help; to point out some of their limitations and, in some cases, how they could be improved; and to propose some elements towards the design of a better collaborative deliberation tool.
[More details about the approach, with use cases (TODO)]
Comparison with existing tools and projects
Building plans and technical aspects
Why this site?
The knowlective project is, at this early point, a description of what one person believes to be a good design for a tool to help the deliberative process. As such, it will keep evolving, as I learn about new ideas on these topics. However, there is something inherently paradoxical about designing a collective tool alone: this is precisely why this site exists. Many other people and teams are either thinking about or building such tools; my intent for this site is to participate in the design discussion, and hopefully to offer ideas and components that can be used in these other projects. Also, to be frank, I would love to work with other people on this; this project is too large for one person, and I would be happy to either form or join a team, if you believe there is enough agreement on design issues. Until then, I am doing what I can.