January 11, 2007 Chief Editor Announcement

Michael Pilling, Chief Editor of Open Politics is announcing that there will be some changes made in openpolitics.ca. Over the next couple of months, we will be implementing some planned upgrades and improvements to the service, and preparing for a public release this spring.

As the founder and principal steward of this project since its inception in may of '05, i guess i've been pretty cagy about publicizing it, preferring a cautious approach of "lets play with this a little and see what we learn". We have learned a lot, about the technical requirements, the sociology of open politics, and the administrative requirements. Since no one else seems to me to be providing this kind of 21st century approach to participatory and deliberative democracy, it is time to steam ahead and share what we've learned.

New and improved theme

We will be implementing a new visual theme for openpolitics.ca something with a little more gusto, and generally reducing the clutter on pages and in templates.

Additional support for groups?

We want to encourage the growth of political communities online, not just to babble at each other but to develop coherent plans and policies for the future of Canada. We want to encourage real Canadian?s to become a virtual MP? or virtual MLA/virtual MPP?. Additionally we will be providing support for groups to have wiki meetings on private pages within open politics. This lets them link to our substantial base of issue and background knowledge.

New focus on the issues

We want to narrow the scope of open politics to reduce the administrative overhead and increase collaboration on a smaller number of pages. To encourage this we will shorten the active list of issues? to about 40 or 50 active issues? and designate the rest as "cool" background issues. The coolest or least maintained issues will be designated as "unmaintained"

Lots of votes

Some people want to write in open politics and some people just want to vote. We will be adding voting functionality so people can vote on positions that have been developed. Groups can record their supporters' position.

Changes to the governance system

For the time being Michael will continue as Chief Editor, but will be establishing an Openpolitics.ca Advisory Council? of dedicated participants to guide the development of the project. The long term intention is to make the governance of OpenPolitics.ca as democratic as it can be within the methods advocated by Open Politics in Practice, and used to deliberate on issues in the site.

This will lead to the eventual election of a new Chief Editor for open politics, while Michael will step back into a Founder role.

New Permissions Scheme

A new permissions scheme, which restricts editing to registered users will be implemented March 2, 2007. See: Open Politics in Practice