[ossig] Announcing OpenPolity.Org: Aggregating ideas from everyday Malaysians

[Satya Arjunan]

 Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce the availability of OpenPolity.Org (
http://openpolity.org). I had this project in development since 2005 and
only recently I was able to finally sit down and complete it. One of my
motivations is to make good ideas from Malaysians easily accessible,
centralized and persistent on the Web after noticing such ideas in the
letters section of Malaysiakini and in online forums. This site may be of
interest to those who think we should have our very own Slashdot! Although
it is mostly a political site, you can post articles to the Technology
category.

One-line summary of OpenPolity.Org:
Concepts from (Open Source
Governance<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance>+
Slashdot <http://slashdot.org/> + Digg <http://digg.com/> +
Wikipedia<http://en.wikipedia.org/>)
+ Content from (Malaysian News + Blogs + Commentaries + Videos) =>
OpenPolity.Org

OpenPolity.Org has two main objectives:
   1. To serve as a centralized knowledge base and help create awareness
about alternative news and ideas among Malaysians, at least among those who
are online.
   2. To help us use our collective power as citizens to influence our
representatives in the parliament and state assembly.
Methods to achieve these two objectives are described in detail in the about
section (http://openpolity.org/about).

The novelty of OpenPolity.Org is that it uses a wiki (called Wikiop,
http://wiki.openpolity.org) to store the most promising ideas or arguments
brought forth during discussions. The wiki is continuously expanded and
updated as new ideas and points are raised in the discussions. In order to
stimulate discussions, the site gathers daily news, blog posts, opinion
letters and video links through direct user submissions (like Digg,
http://digg.com).  These articles are then rated by other users to filter
out spam and uninteresting articles. After getting a critical score, the
best articles will be published on the front page. Articles also have tags
that automatically link to wiki pages, which promote users to regularly
refer, update or add new content to the wiki.

Discussions can take place for each article through user comments. A comment
moderation system, similar to Slashdot's (http://slashdot.org), has been
implemented to filter the good comments from the bad ones. A special
moderation descriptor called "Wikiop this!" lets users indicate which
comments have arguments or ideas that should be entered in the wiki. After a
comment gets the maximum score, any registered user can enter the arguments
in the wiki.

A poll can be created when the collective opinion about an issue needs to be
known.  Polls are linked to a wiki page which contains current arguments
about the poll topic. Likewise, a link is also provided from the wiki to the
poll. For example, recently there was a discussion about fuel subsidies in
one the Malaysian students mailing list. I have recorded the arguments
raised on a wiki page  (http://wiki.openpolity.org/Fuel_subsidies) and
created a poll to find out what everyone thinks about removing the subsidies
(http://openpolity.org/How.soon.should.we.remove.the.fuel.subsidies). Users
can add new arguments by writing comments to the poll. The best arguments
can then be added to the wiki using the comment moderation system described
above.

OpenPolity.Org hopes to borrow the successes of Digg, Slashdot and Wikipedia
by using their well established methods to generate, filter and store
quality ideas from users. We can use these ideas to make ourselves well
informed and as a collective voice, influence our representatives to improve
the governance of Malaysia.

I invite you to experiment with this site. You can start by rating the
articles which you think is interesting in the upcoming page (
http://openpolity.org/upcoming/newest) and if you like, write a comment
about the articles. You can read more about OpenPolity.Org in the About (
http://openpolity.org/about) and FAQ (http://openpolity.org/faq) sections.

If you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to write to me. I
appreciate any feedback very much (it is difficult to get feedback when you
are the only developer). I also recommend posting your comments in the about
page for the reference of others.

Satya Arjunan
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