Re: Educational Organziation Proposal, new Wiki pages, etc.

[Bruce Eggum <bruce.eggum(at)gmail.com>]

Dear Mirek and members of WDDM,

I thank you Mirek for all the pulling together you have done for this group. The Wiki is very useful for those who take advantage of it.

I would like to ask the members, isn't it time to discuss WDDM?

When WDDM was founded, there was much concern that nobody "run" the organization. Indeed "titles" such as chair person, president were denounced thus we have spokes person etc. This was to try to establish an organization which ran on the members input instead of a "ruler". George has declined from being a ruler in his actions and participation. I also expect he is very busy, there were many times we did not see a posting for months. Not to be critical, but perhaps practical. Sometimes we expect and wait for "someone" to take the initiative. Lacking that, people "find" bosses and than complain they are being bossed.

I would like to suggest we can operate more like a coop, a group of people equal and capable of establishing something useful together and aimed at better governance.

Will the others here take up this challenge?  We have no real guidelines as to how someone can become a member of WDDM, no expectation that the person is a democrat or even wants to participate actively in WDDM affairs. Do we need such guidelines?

There are projects, and this website has expenses. Is WDDM responsible in these matters? Do we need to seek sponsors to grow?

It has been determined WDDM is a "hub" of people advocating Direct Democracy. Is there more we can do to advocate democracy?

What of Lee's recent suggestion for a educational organization? Should we organize to help this movement start?

We have a number of members dong "things", is there a way we can compliment each other and work together as a common bond, a common strength?

Should we have a bulletin board where we could address individual goals, topics?

Just wondering a bit.
Bruce Eggum

On 12/2/05, WDDM webmaster wrote:

Lee Gottlieb presented at the recent 3rd CICDD and WDDM conference (Prague) a
preliminary proposal to establish a non-profit (educational) organization to
promote DD. Since then he put some more thought into this proposal and it is
now posted for general discussion at http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/eo/

Everybody here apparently agrees on the importance of good education,
acceptance of a "New Manner of Thinking" as prerequisite for the good
functioning of DD. Could we finally made some practical progress in this
direction, e.g., along the lines of Lee's thought? It would be good to address
mainly the young people. Erik, if you are still with us, do you have any ideas
how to address your peer?

Personally, I am slowly trying to proceed toward the goal of making this site
an exchange of DD resources as is stated in our current Mission. For your
convenience, I copy here where we ended up the the development of our Mission
Statement:
>>WDDMnet is a worldwide hub for the advocates of Direct Democracy (DD) to
exchange information, experience and ideas from different parts of the world.
Individuals are encouraged to join, or form, sub-groups in their own countries.
Our goal is to develop a multilingual Globe-covering network of DD web sites
linked to this site.<<
(I hope that George Kokkas will soon be able to take over the role of the
moderator and to try to revive the effort on putting up some minimal WDDM
structure which he started at the Prague conference.)

So I have tried to tidy up the Wiki a little bit, renamed "Projects" to
"Topics, Activities, Projects", and grouped them together somewhat to create a
tree-like structure of Wiki pages. Have a look.
For example, all work/links of DD (citizens) constitutions is linked to one
item (DD constitutions) in the main "Topics, Activities, Projects".
I also started a topic "Voting systems, methods, theory".
All this is still far from complete, so please do contribute the missing links.

On the main Wiki page (WikiRoot) there is a link to D2 Discussion Zone
(http://d2dz.stevemagruder.com/ ) which Steve Magruder rather recently put back
online. He encourages us to use it: "Yes, please do use the D2/DZ for any
discussion related to direct democracy or enhancing democracy in general. In
fact, I've been considering making the board global in perspective (removing
the U.S.-centric language). Everyone is welcome." It is possible to have polls
there. And it could be used for DD discussions only marginally related to our
Mission.

All the best,
Mirek

--
Direct Democracy League, DDL is a nonpartisan coalition, advocating constitutional renewal at state and national levels to give us TRG -- true republican governance. Not mob-rule, it is a balanced governance of I&R's citizen lawmaking combined with representative govt. TRG relies on the People to make decisions using  State-level OCI's (online citizen institutions). OCI's will be transparent organizing institutions, not control 
devices.TRG  has been legally recognized as a republican form of government intrinsic to the Constitution.
http://trg-polity.org

Bruce Eggum, Gresham Wisconsin, USA
http://doinggovernment.com/
Check out my Blog too
http://doinggovernment.blogspot.com/