March 28, 2005: Important updates

1. If you have problems with the submission procedure described below (such e-mails can reportedly get labeled as spam by some internet providers), just send us an ordinary e-mail with your short CV.

2. Online Constituting Convention: After receiving your applications, you will be tentatively subscribed to the WDDM mailing list right away. Thus after the April 10 deadline, when everybody gets the information on all the other applicants, the process of mutual review of applications, as described below, could be done using the WDDM mailing list, without the intervention of the webmaster.

March 25, 2005: Call for initial membership applications. Deadline is April 10, 2005.

To apply, send an empty e-mail by clicking here, and then follow the instructions that will be sent to you in the confirmation request: include in the body of the reply to the confirmation request a short CV containing information about yourself that could be of interest to the DD community (that is not yet in the "DD public domain") - do not forgot your name! After the April 10 deadline, all the applications obtained will be sent to all the other applicants, who all would be asked to review/accept/reject them. You will then sent your comments back to the webmaster who would tabulate the results. If you would be happy with all the other applicants, you do not have to do anything at that point, although a confirmation that you reviewed the other applications and have no objections, would be useful. Otherwise, e-mail back also your suggestions for the consensus level needed to accept or reject somebody's application. Actually, anybody is invited to do this, even separately from the application process, at any time. What do you think about this initial proposal: an application will be accepted if not more than 20% of others send any objection to it (an 80% approval consensus level)? In any case, if any objections to somebody's application would be raised, they would be all again collected and resent to all the other applicants for further comments, perhaps even several times, until a comfortable consensus on this application is achieved. In a similar way, one would proceed with later membership applications, using the rules/procedures established in this initial phase, and possibly modified based on all the experience accumulated.

It is envisaged, that in this consensus building style all additional rules needed for the functioning of WDDM and this site will be eventually established, when need appears to have them. One could probably imagine the need of one more rule for the rare case, that in spite of all the collective checks in accepting new members, somebody with malicious intent could still get in. So it might be a good idea to think in advance of what to do if most of the members would not be happy with one of them, e.g., with the contents of this member's area on this WDDM site (see below). In such a case, what level of consensus would be required to expel this member, after all other attempts for reconciliation failed? Would it be 80% or 90% of the other members, or even more?
However, no unchangeable initial rules are imposed by the WDDM initiators upon perspective future members. Nevertheless, in the discussions leading up to this announcement, also more detailed initial proposals appeared, and these are available for your inspection/comments below.

The idea to start WDDM was born at the 1st International Congress on Direct Democracy held in Príbram, the Czech Republic in 1998. It was first time officially registered in Greece in 2000 (see the Archive). This first attempt more or less failed because the original founding members were not able to achieve a comfortable working consensus.

Thus we are trying to restart WDDM in a way that would build consensus from the very beginning: all the initial applicants for the WDDM membership will mutually review/approve/endorse/reject their application so that the initial group of the WDDM members would be comfortable with each other, comfortable to share this site and build the WDDM community/society/movement. In this way no one's particular views are imposed on those initially interested in the WDDM membership. Hopefully, a large number of people will apply soon, and it would be interesting to see what they could create together.