Re: [WDDM] A proposal put for vote to all the WDDM members

["M. Kolar" <wddm(at)mkolar.org>]

Dear WDDM members!
   This is about my YES vote. But I start with a few comments on the already
received replies.
   I would be glad to receive the accusations of being incompetent and guilty
of bad formulations, but I strongly reject any suspicions of being
antidemocratic, oligarchical, dictatorial, etc. Where are e.g. any elements of
representative democracy in the proposal? Can you show them to me?
   I suspect that all these suspicions/accusations were the result of not
reading at least the whole discussion in the "WDDM Membership Guidelines"
forum. (But I agree, especially after I saw the most recent additions in this
Forum added during the past week since the proposal was put to vote, that
reading the whole discussion requires a lot of concentration and effort to get
the whole picture, and it shows that we have to start from scratch, and the
first thing to do it to devise procedures for orderly deliberation that is easy
to follow, that would not wast a lot of time trying to understand what's going on.)
   But it was actually sufficient to read and try to understand the
introduction to the Proposal ("Our past experience shows that there are roughly
two groups who want to be associated with WDDM ...".

   Let me remind you that there is actually no real WDDM existing yet. That the
notion of "WDDM member" has little meaning. We have not been able to arrive at
any collective position yet. Mission, etc. posted on the WDDM site is just a
place-holder, waiting to be replaced by something we can all agree on.
   It started with an interesting idea in 2000 in Greece (at the birthplace of
"democracy", so this can have a powerful symbolic meaning, which it would pity
to abandon lightly, and so we still continue the attempts to keep this idea
alive under the original name WDDM). But that effort has never been brought to
anything meaningful yet.
   Then something more than a year ago, this still continuing attempt to revive
WDDM started with the call to "Online Constituting Convention":
http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/archive/proposals0/wddm_index_march28.html
Of this still nothing has come up yet. (It looks like we want to provide a
strong argument to those who are claiming that DD will never work: if our group
of people who consider themselves international DD advocates cannot arrive at a
single collective position in the whole six year and even at a reasonable
procedure of how to conduct the collective deliberation, isn't that a pretty
strong argument for them?)

   We have never heard from some of the original 2000 founding members (for the
recently registered members: their list and a lot of other WDDM history is in
the WDDM site archive). And we have many new members who signed up since March
2005, from whom we have never heard a single word after they signed up.
   So we have two "problems" to solve before we can start to create anything
meaningful:
   First is a "legal" one. Can we use the name WDDM (World Wide Direct
Democracy Movement) with the above mentioned certain symbolic power, or are
only the original 2000 founding "members" still owning this title? The
   Second: when we would want to arrive at a collective position on something,
how are we supposed to count the quorum if we have never heard from a
significant percentage of our current "members"?

   We do not want to throw out anybody, so the essence of the proposal was to
try to accommodate everybody with various degrees of the willingness to be
actively involved. For the start we defined two groups (G. Kokkas suggested
even five groups with different degree of involvement, with which they have a
good experience in their DD movement in Greece). One group would be all the
sympathizers (or WDDM fan club if you want), and the other those who want to be
more active and participate in creating a meaningful WDDM - for this second
group there were many suggestions in the course of our discussion how to call
their members and I dutifully listed all these suggestions in the final
proposal with the proviso that the name actually used is subject to final
discussion. This second group would constitute the actual (proper, only) WDDM
organization. There was nothing in the proposal about any internal structure of
this group, any suggestion of a hierarchy, oligarchy, dictatorship. All the
members (the only actual members of WDDM) of this group would be absolutely
equal, and would use yet to be devised procedures to make collective decisions.

   Best thing would be to simply call the members of this second group just
"members" and those in the first group simply sympathizers (fans).
   The reason why we ended up with the resulting complicating terminology was
"problem 1" mentioned above, to appease the 2000 founding members, most of them
are not active at all at present, and so they would be called just "WDDM fans".
So instead of mere "fans" we devised the terms "associate members", and then we
had to use for the actual real members some other name, and none of those we
came up seems very suitable.
   And that was probably the only mistake we made.

   Then there were some concerns about spammers, and "sleeping cells", who
would be able to take over WDDM if any "sympathizers" would be able to become a
real member without any further screening, so we put in the 3 or 6 month
waiting period, and the process of accepting new (real) members by all the
current members (again absolutely democratically). But this would be possible
to change any time the majority of members would want to - as all the current
"members" would be able to become real members immediately, and participate in
creating the final rules, and these are still to be created.

   So I still have to vote "YES" for the essence of this proposal.

   Remember, there is no WDDM established yet, currently registered WDDM
"members" (users of the WDDM site) are merely people who showed some interest
in the idea of WDDM, and it is only up to them (that is up to you) to create
something that can have real impact. You were all invited repeatedly to become
more active and become involved in the discussions. This proposal was the last
attempt to broaden the number of the people involved.

  Mirek (now in the role of an ordinary WDDM member/user)