Next steps in organizing this platform - an observation, a concern, and some suggestions.

[stevecoffman]

I love what I see developing here. Thanks to every one of you for contributing to this effort!

I have an observation, a concern, and some suggestions:

My observation is that this “Policies for the People” platform has attracted an incredible amount of interest and contribution - in a very short period of time. This suggests to me that Americans are very much interested in participating in their democracy…in a very direct way. This is heartwarming. I’ve read so many astute and well-thought-out policy suggestions.

My concern is that as you/we gather so many thousands of policy suggestions, people will begin to feel overwhelmed and lose interest if there is no clear process to consolidate our efforts into cogent and persuasive proposals that generate tangible and measurable legislative outcomes.

Already there is a huge amount of data that needs to be organized and prioritized if we’re ever going to have any significant and positive impact within the legislative process of our democracy.

My first suggestion is to prioritize our efforts. If we could each select our “Top 10 Policy Priorities", and then have them collated with all other participants in a ranked-stack format, we would then have the beginning of an organized structure on which to concentrate our collective effort. We need a rudder of some sort to direct this endeavor into a realistic and effective operation. We could then develop several working groups to sensibly merge, consolidate, and focus our collaborative effort towards developing intelligent, comprehensive, and concise policy proposals that could then be forwarded to our Congressional representatives.

My second suggestion is to organize our discourse, such that we can discuss, develop, vote on, and lobby for those policies that are most likely to have the greatest impact on the priorities listed…which would presumably, as utilization of the platform grows, become more and more representative of the American population at large.

This is an amazing beginning. I think it’s awesome what y’all have done so far. Let’s take it to the next step.

As together we choose, together it will be!

[EthanHowardMfrr (Ethan Howard)]

Allow Merges to be Accepted - Policy Collaboration

Merges seem to go ignored. An option to accept a merge, which would then allow all proposed authors to edit and write policy proposals together, would create a better evolving system on the forum. Merges should be able to be rejected, if even one of the authors rejects the merge, that merge proposal should fail, and another should have to be made. Merges should require that all accepting authors finish the editing process together, the merged policy proposal should not be posted until each aut…

Voting System - Establishing a Forum General Assembly

Policies for the People needs better moderation or voting systems. I don’t mean types of censorship, but instead organization. Like a form of forum ‘General Assembly’ for us to not just add meaningless ‘likes’ (votes) to posts. For Example: and Are supporting the similar policies, but with different wording-which can make all the difference. Merges seem to go unnoticed, and unchanged. Not allowing for any advancment of the forum’s attention/support Yes, individuals need to be able to …

[Nicole_C_Scott (Sovereign Sapien)]

To flag every one of the incorrect tags manually is not efficient. I did so on three examples to illustrate my point in feedback. It would be rather time-consuming to manually override incorrect posts one by one, or for volunteers to post something like this in the comments…

Note: this is an #Observation  and not a detailed contribution

I think a more efficient way to address it is to apply that tag sort delineation on the back end, considering character count, or markup conditional rules. Just a thought. Is that something the site programmers could implement? Leaving the user base to self-report their tag is impeding the database sorting, IMHO.

Thoughts @JayMudholkar ?

[Cindyl541]

Hi Steve. I commented earlier that I learned how to remove one of our limited amount of votes we have, and add it to more popular items. I think doing this will ultimately bring the cream up to the top of the bucket.

[Jack0 (Jack)]

Adding “simple contribution” to the list of tags would improve self-reporting. “observation” and “detailed contribution” are a false dichotomy, because a simple statement of problem and suggested solution isn’t just an observation.

Character count is a reasonable crude filter, but it has the downside of prioritizing AI-assisted slop over concise, quality posts.

[Cmooskey (Carla Muzquiz)]

That’s a great idea.

[EthanHowardMfrr (Ethan Howard)]

@Jack0 @Nicole_C_Scott i think @JayMudholker jumped ship from the dying P4P for $$$PAC moneies

[Nicole_C_Scott (Sovereign Sapien)]

Apologies for the delay, just seeing your message now @EthanHowardMfrr

We just have to work with what is provided, then. If anything, it does help solution-oriented thinking to be applied and helps in it’s own special way. And who knows, perhaps it might inspire more tech-savvy folks paying attention to dream up a new platform or project to develop that is an improved way to empower the visionaries and changemakers of our time.