Hi Dave, thanks for bringing me in. Let's get to it!

A few government employees said it was a morale boost, so that was fantastic. At the end of the article, I asked people who were interested in two aspects of the article to write to me and voice their interest. I've gotten a good response to that request.

Finally, some people, both in comments and via email, disagreed with my arguments and/or the ideas. What's great, though, is that all such criticisms were constructive. There was zero bickering or ad hominem attacks, which, having blogged in the past about government and politics, was a huge surprise for me.

Overwhelmingly positive, especially from those outside the government. I've gotten great feedback from everyone from government reformers to everyday programmers to founding fathers of the open source movement.

My friends in the government, who are primarily in the Intelligence Community, have stopped short of a full-out endorsement of it. But they are definitely open to using more open source software...as long as it comes from a trusted source. That's one of the reasons why I want to create an organization with a formal government relationship.

Hi Mark. State and local governments could absolutely participate. There are a few reasons why most of my words about it have focused on the federal level:

-That's where I have experience
-That's where all of the high-profile government software screw-ups have happened. In other words, their projects waste more money than state ones, and using such examples is a better way to convince people of the need for this project.
-Their work affects people nationwide--worldwide, even. So it's easier to attract possible programmers if they know their work will have a larger impact.

On the other hand, it might be easier to attract local programmers for local projects. Local governments will probably have less red tape than the Feds as well. So yes, I am definitely open to working with non-federal agencies.

Two things:

-First, I'm looking for funding to help me develop the project and promote the idea.

-Second, I'm researching what sort of legal entity the organization should be, how it should be funded, etc. This seems trivial, but when dealing with the government procurement process, your corporate structure could be the difference maker. Government procurement is a very murky world. I'm sure that even if a government office would love to work with us, their ability to do so could hinge on the most arcane of legal matters ("Oh, sorry...you didn't check Box 47f. Deal's off."). Therefore, I'm reaching out to people with government contracting and procurement experience to find out how to do get this project off on the right foot.

Josh,

you've struck at the heart of the matter. The two challenges you mention are precisely my motivations. I want to open the government's eyes to a new and better way of doing things, and I want to decrease the influence of the military-industrial complex and keep them from pilfering taxpayer dollars.

I have an answer for the first one. A necessary part of marketing the project will be talking to government managers and teaching them the facts about open source. I expect to encounter lots of skeptics who believe open source is low quality, is unsafe, etc. They need someone to explain the concept to them, so this project would be a good way to do that. Even if a certain person isn't willing to do a project with us, at least we have an opportunity to teach them the facts about open source.

Another way to fight it is in how we develop. Lots of open source projects allow for anonymous contributions, and government friends have told me this makes them skittish. So a low identity-based barrier to entry might be necessary if you want to contribute code to government projects.

As for the second challenge, I don't expect our financial resources to compete with the likes of SAIC, Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin, etc. But we can provide some things they can't--or, at least, aren't very good at: Our programmers will come from a bigger and better talent pool. The Release Early, Release Often philosophy will let us respond to user feedback as we develop each project. Change requests can be made and deployed within hours instead of months. And then there's the whole "free" thing.

I realize, however, this "muscle" you speak of might be used subversively. If that happens, I have no idea how I'll react to it. But I do know that if it does happen, it means this project has arrived.

Dan,

you mentioned a stellar prospect for a pilot project. Voting reform would definitely attract hacktivists. There are a few movements afoot to create an open source voting mechanism, but I don't know how far along they are, whether they're simply pushing for it versus actually building it, etc. If it were adopted, it would do wonders to fight the open source stigma that Josh mentioned: if the government trusts it to run our elections, they can probably trust it for other things as well.

That said, any project that addresses a visible public concern would be a good pilot. Two possibilities:

-anything that helps an agency improve its FOIA process
-a better way to manage Homeland Security's No Fly List (which topped 1 million people last week)

I used to be a government employee, and, like many organizations, EVERYTHING revolved around our systems. Searching for information, finding people, emailing them, finding out who knows what, distributing knowledge...all of that relied on a good network and good software.

We, however, barely got by using a bad network and bad software. As I wrote in the Man essay, almost every government employee does their job with a computer. And if the computers they're using aren't fit for their jobs, they can't be expected to do those jobs well. That's why improving systems will improve government.

In the long run, I also hope that this project will teach government managers that good results need not be expensive. This lesson would do wonders for public confidence and pocketbooks.

Yeah, I haven't really come up with a good name yet. I'm not the branding type. So if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

(govzilla.org appears to have been parked by spammers posing as government employee benefits providers.)

ReadableLaws was my Masters thesis from ITP. It's a Wikipedia-like site that lets people read laws in plain English, along with an explanation of their practical implications.

It was born from an idea proposed by Jay Rosen: wouldn't it be great if we actually read the laws passed by Congress? This idea intrigued me, because it's so simple, so essential, and yet so infuriating that it's not already happening: bills are way too long and complex for regular people to understand, and the senators and representatives who vote on them often don't read them either.

There are a few other Congressional information sites out there, some of which have much more visibility than ReadableLaws. So lately I've been talking with those people about integrating the RL concept into their sites.

Speechology is about two things: building a video archive of campaign ads and debates, and subjecting those videos to public scrutiny. Campaign ads are full of quotes and headlines taken out of context. Debates are supposed to be about informing voters about candidates' records and viewpoints. But instead, candidates usually simply ignore the question and reframe it in order to attack their opponents.

These videos deserve scrutiny. At Speechology, you can not only see every TV-based presidential campaign ad and debate, but you can find out truthful they are as well. We do this by letting users post their own research and analyses.

Dan Phiffer and I launched the project about a month ago, and it's going pretty well so far. We got a small grant from the Sunlight Foundation to help us out. We also want to expand beyond the presidential race and archive Congressional campaign videos as well.

Aside from the ones I mentioned in response to Dan's earlier question, I've thought about making some simple things to help government employees communicate and manage projects. Think of it as a 37Signals for the government. You'd think that they would have good tools for simple things like chat, but they don't.

I'll add it to the list. Before proposing this idea, I knew of a few embarrassing failures, but ever since mentioning the idea, I've learned of several others. In the coming weeks, I need to hide in the library and read up on them. Let's talk about the census mishap offline sometime soon.

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses is an analytical technique developed by Richards Heuer, a CIA veteran. The technique helps you consider many different hypotheses and track them against many pieces of evidence, which is helpful not just for intelligence analysts, but for anyone whose job it is to solve problems.

Heuer found me and asked me to build a Web-based platform for this technique, so that multiple people could share information, collaboratively solve a problem, and hammer out their differences.

We've been developing it for the past year as a pilot program for the Intelligence Community's much talked-about A-Space project. It will be ready for public (and corporate) use in a matter of weeks.

Thanks, Dave. I appreciate the opportunity to get the word out.

Thanks! Happy to do so.

The Open House Project started because many different people were all trying to address the same sorts of issues: redefining accessibility and openness in light of the increasingly relevant Internet. I wouldn't want to claim to have founded something so community driven. It grew out of individual efforts that discovered a shared interest in developing recommendations for the 110th Congress. I was working with a community of citizen activists on Daily Kos, a project we called the Congressional Committees Project, and initially connected with Pelosi's staff, The Sunlight Foundation, Matt Stoller, David All, and Rob Bluey, and the project rapidly expanded to include many other citizens and staffers with an interest in congressional technology.

I've grown used to dealing with Congress's idiosyncratic attention span, since their agenda is defined by a shifting agenda and justified partisan maneuvering; that's what to expect from the way Congress is structured.

Given that structure, the way something exists as a "true priority" in Congress is much different than what that looks like in other contexts.

Working with others necessarily involves understanding that their priorities need to be fungible, and that an unanswered email to a staffer should never be taken as a sign of neglect.

That said, one of the great surprises for me after relocating to DC was that congressional staff are some of our staunchest allies, and that public access and staff (and Member) IT resources are integrally linked. For example, if a more robust congressional video processing system existed, then members and staff could do a better job of what's happening on the floor and in the various committee hearings they're scheduled to attend, often in conflict with one another.

My practical advice, though, is to recognize the different kinds of interests insiders have in what your work is, and to treat them as assets and allies. Volunteering to help, or sharing information, is always a good idea.

Some partisan fights are inevitable, and to be expected. The electoral imperative is the built in incentive structure for representative government.

"Paving the Cowpaths", or what I sometimes call "practical attainable or incremental reform" has served the Open House Project well as a central theme, since consensus is easier to organize around than brainstorming.

Both parties are free to politicize government reform issues as much as they want, and they'll have to answer to an electorate inasmuch as any bad-faith participation is understood by their constituencies. Our focus, however, is on the underlying issues behind the struggles, which often overlap far more than the arguments make it seem.

Republicans and Democrats can embrace technology kicking and screaming, or they can do it holding hands, or one party can drag the other onward despite heel-dragging. Facilitating reform is the project's primary goal.

No. I think there are some fundamental changes happening, and a big part of that involves having Representatives and staffers who understand and use technology.

As a general principle though, finding the first levers to push on from a public perspective was something largely missing from the dialog about government.

Ongoing government reform will involve visionary ideas, administrative minutae, and political struggles, and an appeal to any one of those catalysts will always involve the others, at least obliquely.

The new communities that we're seeing developing through technology (to borrow from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody) are able to form and dissolve with much more agility than traditionally possible. This means that an organizations identity is more malleable, and more able to engage in whatever the situation calls for more easily, rather than being stuck in an academic, or advocacy, or legalistic framework. We can pick and choose the best features.

The Open House Project is a project of the Sunlight Foundation, so the relationship couldn't be closer.

The reaction overall has been really positive. Staffers often think about these issues tangentially to the rest of their work, wondering why the Congressional Record isn't text-searchable, or why there's no centralized list of all upcoming committee hearings, or lists of all organizations that have endorsed specific bills.

Many of them appreciate an external context in which to bring up these concerns, even anonymously.

Several of their platform positions are outside the purview of the transparency reform issue, but I'm delighted that they've chosen to add a transparency plank. I'm also happy whenever people involved in other areas like Intellectual Property, or those from the tech community, can come to understand why government reform is important, and gain a better view of how Congress functions, and how our laws are written.

Lessig is also on Sunlight's Advisory Board.

To see the Open House Project priorities, you can check out the report here: http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/the-open-house-project-report/

The reforms are broken down into chapters with specific categories. The Open House Project community has also weighed in on a number of issues in the same area, like the potentially reinstated Office of Technology Assessment, or on digital records management procedures, or digitization best practices.

The Open House Google Group has continued to grow and develop, and is really a concentrated group of experts and citizens, successfully grappling with complex institutional issues.

I didn't expect that dialog, or that community to have as much continuing success and relevance as it has, and it's still growing.

http://groups.google.com/group/openhouseproject

What's the steak without the sizzle? :)

There's this phenomenon about social networking and blogging that I find fascinating: we love to talk about the things we use to talk. I wonder what percent of all tweets are about twitter?

There's a real divide between those who feel comfortable interacting online and those who don't. Anyone who enjoys twitter, or has started a blog (especially before 2005) will probably understand this. There's something comfortable, and something really empowering about interacting with people you don't know, and having your ideas stand on their merits. Personality drops out of the equation, and you can be really selective about what you listen to, and what you say (like this interview).

That experience of engaging in what Mark Pesce calls hyperempowerment is really satisfying, and has big implications for the way we socially assign value to ideas.

When considering the complex questions around member web use restrictions, we realized that there's no better community to encourage Congress to use things like twitter than the community of people that have found it useful in their lives.

That's what I see when I look at the stream of people signing the petition -- http://letourcongresstweet.org/ -- people saying "I find immense value in connecting online, and I want Congress to benefit the same way."

Political struggles aside, that's what I'm interested in, in terms of Franking reform: seeing Congress not miss out on the opportunities to really connect online.

It's not unlike deciding at what age a child or adolescent should be given uncensored Internet access: there's a balance.

Sunlight is the sole official supporter of OHP, although many other organizations and individuals have volunteered time and support. We had a panel at the Heritage Foundation shortly after the report's release, I've been in close consultation with both Speaker Pelosi's and Minority Leader Boehner's staff, and we enjoy a great relationship with a community of bloggers, open government advocates, librarians (especially through freegovinfo.org), and staff and Members throughout Congress and the relevant committees. Citizen technologists, like Josh Tauberer (and his GovTrack.us) have also played a huge part in the project's success.

I think a realistic view of Member's responsibilities would help their perception overall, although there are some really frustrating aspects, like the amount of time they spend doing things like fundraising, which wouldn't help the approval ratings much.

I suspect that the busy-ness of congressional staff would be surprising to many. Staff and members' schedules are pretty ridiculous, and these incredibly important decisions are being made by young staffers...

I think a realistic understanding of what goes on in Congress would help us to value the work of people making decisions a little more, at least as compared to those trying to /influence/ the decisions. Why should a lobbyist make four times as much as the staffers they influence? Something seems wrong about that. I'd love to see MRAs (congressional office budgets) increase, or at least to see some reasoned discussion about whether or not this is a good idea.

Incidentally, I think the GAO should expand siginficantly, since their work results in a net savings.

It's been a pleasure!

Thank You!

I'm home in Noe Valley, close to downtown SF.

Hi Jim,

Wikipedia's internally evolved governance system is one. Another is the series of Asambleas Populares that arose in Argentina during the 2001 crisis to take back power.

At a larger scale, the compliance certification movement that NGOs are spearheading is a form of self-governance, too. See Branded! for more details.

For an inspiring scan of this space, view the Everyday Democracy video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR45-VFcVyg

Hi Brian,

The work we used to think had to be done by big news organizations at newspapers or TV networks is what I think is migrating off to investigative reporters and editors. They need a very stable base of revenue that can't be threatened, like endowments.

I'd love to have an infrastructure where those larger groups plus independent citizen journalists could be rewarded for their efforts. A business idea I had five years ago I call "Grassroots MacArthurs," with the working premise: if the MacArthur people can give genius grants, why can't you and I?

Citizen journalists are extremely important.

Hi Jim,

Yes, I think we're in one of those phase changes like the shift from feifs to Church, then Church to States, then States to Corporations. All these roles are being remixed now (including the Fourth Estate, per my answer about citizen journalism).

I can't really predict how it all turns out, especially because there are always these unexpected big detours in any "obvious" trend, but I'd love to see people wake up and begin to take power back themselves.

Back in 19th Century England, the central Government began to usurp local power for the new highways they were building. Once they'd started that, they worked their way through other domains, including education.

Now we have a chance to rebalance the whole, discovering new ways of (dis)solving problems without huge centralized (corruption-attracting) Government projects. It's a future that liberals, libertarians and conservatives might actually all like -- if they thought through their goals and principles.

Hi Dave,

Like the neural connections that carry signals inside individual brains, we're now weaving simple, "dendritic" connections between people around the world.

Every seemingly low-value act of "friending," blogging, linking and even email forwarding builds these connections. At first, they're just weak links, but over time, these become the trusted channels for recommendations (what to buy, how to vote, whom else to trust) and new relationships.

The result looks a bit like Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a Noosphere, or other folks' beliefs about conscious evolution. It's a pretty neat future, and I think we're heading toward it.

Hi Ellen,

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200: read Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody. That's a great start.

After that, you can go in a zillion directions. Two other recommendations:

Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, an international relations prof at Georgetown who mentored Bill Clinton. Way interesting view of history.

The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain (Tiffany's Dad!), an even more out there view of history -- with very useful insights about the role of written language versus images.

Hi Allison :)

Online and on-land can intersect and enrich one another. By following what we each write and link, we can know better what to talk about when we meet. By linking up across social networks and making our locations visible, we can cross other people's real-world paths more often and get to know them.

Place is super important. F2F likewise. So much gets communicated in person that doesn't make it through the Intertubes. Yet the skinnyness of the Intertubes is often a virtue. It helps mask aspects of self that might sometimes cause people to avoid one another. Thus the Israeli and Palestinian kids become friends playing online games (first-person shooters? yikes!), then realize they come from different "sides."

Familiarity dispels fear.

Josh, what's amazing is that much of the interesting stuff I've seen started with populations under a lot of stress, like Argentines in 2001, or Brazil trying to figure out what to do to keep their country from imploding, or Estonia trying to figure out how to build a Government after their liberation from the Soviet sphere. And also at very small, local, neighborhood levels.

The most obvious need I can see is just to get word of these capabilities to underserved communities, then to get them access. "Word" doesn't mean curriculum, just stories. The access does the magic.

Governments could take many many steps to enable self-governance to thrive, but in most cases this would mean cutting back their power, their jurisdiction and their budgets. Who's going to do that?

It would also mean learning a lot about what dynamics cause collective action to thrive, and what dynamics cause it to crash. And having the confidence to let communities go sort things out themselves.

Finally, many in Government are convinced that they've discovered the theoretic basis for building the right institutions, from education to transportation to taxes and more. I see all those as deeply, deeply flawed. So how do we hit "undo" on all that?

For that last reason especially, I think the best self-governance efforts will stay below the radar.

Dave, super difficult to put a number on this. I'd love to say 90 percent.

My old Wharton prof Russ Ackoff used to talk about "lowerarchies" rather than "hierarchies." In a lowerarchy, issues would only fall to "lower" levels if the participants at a current level couldn't successfully resolve issues on their own. They'd all self-manage and seek help from others "lower" only after trying hard themselves.

I don't know yet whether I hew more to Libertarian values (Govt only for police, courts, rights) or to another model. I'm still working that out.

I just know that we've stifled a tremendous amount of innovation and problem-solving by taking away people's responsibility for solving their own issues, as well as their ability to act to solve them.

Lotsa questions, Micah! :)

In the original one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion), a huge variety of new organisms appeared, mostly complex animals. Existing organisms also diversified and adapted.

By analogy, I see many many new tools for and forms of collective action appearing. Rather than there being a few, cookie-cutter "right" ways of doing things, groups are evolving their own practices, innovating like crazy.

And the Net's persistence now lets us all read up on what others are learning (or watch it, or listen to it...), share new ways to learn or analyze stuff, etc. The power of all this collective learning and recombining is immense.

Next: there's always the possibility that we're going through a nervous breakdown. In fact, many periods will feel that chaotic and dangerous. But I think that our collective desire for order and connectedness can outweigh the forces of chaos.

On Mark's talk: I thought he harshed too much on Wikipedia, which has set its own norms for what I think are very good reasons. I agree that the superempowered individual is now on the loose, but I don't think we're wired to stay in perpetual war with one another. I think we're wired the other way entirely. (I'd also like to take another listen to Mark's talk.)

I just finished a bunch of conference travel and don't have that many good ones coming up. One I very much recommend is www.ncdd.org in Austin this October. Forget politics: this is where governance is being learned.

You know, the Government hurts more than it helps here.

The FCC was created to protect the nascent radio industry. Dividing up rights to the electromagnetic spectrum by frequency bands, as if it were all scarce beach real estate, is insane. Yet that's what they did.

All the WiFi stuff is happening in the incredibly thin slivers of unregulated bandwidth.

All the regulations that were supposed to break up AT&T and give us competition have just led to a duopoly that people now rightly suspect may try to change fundamentally the nature of the Net, killing off its openness. It happened before to other media.

So I'd rather see the regulations taken away so that we can actually have the naturally inexpensive infrastructure we could all enjoy, rather than the mess we now live with. It would still be a great entrepreneurial opportunity, just not the present unfair oligopoly.

Thanks, Dave

Great questions. Thank you so much for a chance to discuss these things in public.

Sure, happy to do it.

We find that people using unstructured digital information, especially Web 2.0 data like wikis, blogs, and Google documents for projects are often saving information that they then promptly lose. We think that people are having challenges finding the "good stuff" in all that unstructured data, and are often unable to easily share their "insights" - the main takeaways from the data they find, save and use.

Now we're shifting gears a bit, so I'll back up from the software arena, and talk in general about the arena of "money for good." There is currently no set definition of the social capital market, so it's a little hard to say there's a specific number. Is it only money that generates a return or a profit? Does it include donation money, which typically looks for no return? Is it "blended capital" that includes both? What *kind* of return does it look for - financial return (just money), social return (people are helped), or environmental return (planet is helped)? Depending on how you slice it, the arena encompasses billions of dollars, but how many billions depends on how you define it.

Xigi Software's godfather was xigi.net, a non-profit site that was created to help people in the social capital space to find each other. It's both a social network and an information network. On Xigi.net, we help people discover others who also want to accelerate the flow of capital to good. As for Xigi Software... we're still somewhat in stealth mode, but I can say that we see the opportunity to connect people and information in new ways.

Depends on what we mean by "contributors." If it's people contributing their information to the non-profit xigi.net site, then yes, we've had thousands of people come. They add a brief profile, and define their "power relationships" in the social capital space - who they invest in, what boards they're on, etc. - and they can see a dynamic "map" showing their connections.

It took a few months to get going, like any social network, but once it reached a critical mass of a few hundred, people saw a lot of value in the connections being displayed graphically, because there were enough people to connect to.

For the non-profit xigi.net site, we want it to grow as the arena grows. As more and more investors are looking for ways to have an impact with their money, we want the site to reflect that rapidly-expanding group.

For the for-profit Xigi Software, we see it as solving a variety of "wicked problems," complex information coordination challenges where teams are collaborating to gain insights or reach a goal. We'll measure our success by building a great company that helps people manage their need to coordinate these kinds of insights.

I actually had a number of stints at Ziff Davis... Launching Interactive Week as a joint venture with them; managing the launch of what became Yahoo! Internet Life, and Smart Reseller; re-launching their online group; and helping to launch their custom events group. After ZD, I was in a partnership for three years on Microcast Communications with Al Perlman and Mike Perkowski, where we grew the MuniWireless.com business, as well as other projects. But on the side, I'd been working on projects related to the social capital arena for the past 7 years, so when I left Microcast, I decided to focus more on social capital and helping organizations solve complex challenges.

The non-profit xigi.net has gotten great feedback; people routinely tell us how valuable it is for finding contacts, and information about what those contacts are involved in. Xigi Software has installed in its first customer, and will have several more installations coming online in the next few months.

Again, I'll apologize for being a little vague, and focus mostly on the problem. We hear from many people - in small organizations and large, in for-profits and non-profits - that they are continually losing their information in Web 2.0 tools. What they really want to do is to save and share the insights - the most important takeaways from that data.

Say you're an expert on social capital. What's your view of that arena? What are the most important ideas, people, articles, sources, etc.? And how are they connected? That's where we focus.

One of the challenges of the social capital arena is the "social" social capital part - what other people are doing, how they are investing or donating, and what the results of their efforts are. We have several efforts underway, for example, related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), helping people share what projects they're supporting. And if you could find out what others are doing, and why they're doing it, you'd have better information to make your own decisions. So if you plug into one of these social networks, then yes, it's likely you'd get some ideas about where to focus your efforts, whether it's your money or your time.

Yes, thanks for asking. (By the way, it's pronounced "ZIG-ee," for those struggling with our non-standard name. It comes from "Zeitgeist," as in "spirit of the times.")

Xigi Media is our third "leg of the stool." Xigi.net is our non-profit, much like, say, a google.org: It's the philanthropic "face" of our for-profit work. Xigi Software is the application company. And Xigi Media is an events and research company that is producing the first "social capital markets" conference, in San Francisco, at Fort Mason in October. More information at www.socialcapitalmarkets.net.

Thanks, this has been great. For anyone looking for more information, please check out xigi.net and socialcapitalmarkets.net. You might also find the newsletter from one of our partner organizations, GoodCap.net, a great education in the social capital space. Finally, watch for more from Xigi Software; we'll have more to talk about early this fall.

Thanks Dave, it’s a pleasure to be here, and I am really looking forward to the multi-way interaction.

A creative commons, social venture that combines argument mapping and wiki-editing to let people around the world collaboratively map contentious public issues; so that the best arguments on all sides of any debate can be freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.

Most of the maps are in an early stage of development themselves—like Wikipedia in early 2001 rather than 2008—and open to further collaborative refinement. But, for example, as well as the map on Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, there are maps on how the international community should respond to Iranian nuclear policy, climate change, drugs policy, abortion. In an educational rather than public policy context there’s also a map of 50 years of philosophical debate on artificial intelligence (building on Bob Horn’s pioneering work in this field). Once logged-in, anyone can create a map—and edit, extend, rate and comment on all the existing maps.

It’s a perfect example of the flow of emergent and generous conversation across the web. Seb Schmoller found, and was intrigued, by Debategraph, and asked us for a guest blog post. David saw the blog post and responded with a characteristically encouraging and insightful commentary—followed by a call for open debate on Obama’s running mate, which inspired us to seed and post the initial debate map.

[Ed: the Obama's Vice President debate]

My colleague, Peter Baldwin, is a former cabinet minister in the Keating administration in Australia, and I have worked as a public policy advisor in the UK. Having seen the policy system from the inside, we both felt that the way that we address and resolve complex and contentious issues in public life is broken—and it is broken at a time when it has never been more important for this system to function effectively. Independently we arrived at the conclusion that argument mapping offered a way bringing greater transparency and efficiency to this process, and that the read/write technology emerging on the web offered a way to open up this process to the collective intelligence and scrutiny of the creative commons.

Appropriately enough, we discovered each other via the web. Peter had begun to develop an initial version of the software, and I found his work while researching developments in the field. We struck up a tremendous collaborative relationship over the net immediately—Peter lives in the Blue Mountains in Australia and I live in Somerset in the UK—and have been working full time together at opposite ends of the world across the last two years.

For all the development work already embodied in Debategraph, we see ourselves as being at the start of long adventure. We are already working on simplifying and extending the user interface and developing the next generation of map visualisations. Over time, the ways that people interact with the Debategraph (the graph of all the interrelated debate maps), and the devices via which they do so, will change significantly. We are also beginning to engage with the semantic web and linked data community, which will enable the collective knowledge and understanding embodied in Debategraph to be made available contextually wherever people are on the web. Serving sense not Ad-Sense.

A significant enhancement released today is the ability for people to embed fully-functional live debate maps on their own websites (as well as the existing asynchronously updating snapshots). This makes it possible for people participating across multiple sites to build a single, cumulative, structured map of a debate without leaving their home site; so that contributions from the participants on any of the sites will appear immediately across all of the sites.

This points to a potentially profound change in the way that the web enables us to deliberate on complex issues in society—and we hope to catalyze our contribution to this process by working with clusters of NGOs and other policy stakeholders on a range of public policy issues in the weeks to come.

Peter and I see Debategraph as belonging to a new category of web-based tools and part of a wider, emerging movement towards a different quality of dialogue, deliberation and understanding in society. A web-based augmentation of individual and collective human intelligence that is potentially comparable to, and a countervailing balance to, the predicted singularity of artificial intelligence.

There are many other examples of excellent work in this emerging domain, including, for example, Mark Klein’s and Luca Iandoli’s work on the Climate Collaboratorium at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the Cohere and Compendium projects from the Open University’s KMi team, led by Simon Buckingham Shum.

As the logic underpinning these tools, and the wider momentum of the web, is towards connection, we are starting to gather informally as a group—under the Global Sensemaking banner—to explore how we can develop the next generation of these interconnected systems together.

In doing so, we are all motivated by the perception that humanity faces an emerging mess of global challenges—e.g. climate change, poverty, peak oil, population pressure, water shortages, declining biodiversity, and failing food supply—that are the product of thoughts and actions that no longer make sense—and that we need new tools of thought if we are to adapt to the scale and complexity of these challenges.

Currently, we are in the early stages of defining our objectives and methods of working together as a group, and will launch formally later this year. However, anyone who is interested in joining us in this process is welcome to contact me now at david [at] debategraph [dot] org.

Anyone is free to log-in and start participating in the maps on Debategraph straightaway—and bloggers and website owners are welcome to embed the relevant debates on their sites to open up a new kind of communication with their readers and to contribute to the development of the debate maps as a public resource.

We are also about to launch a series of live blogging interviews around several of the maps, featuring experts from all sides of the relevant debates.

You can comment on the individual elements of a debate map in much the same way as you would comment on a blog; so the learning curve for initial participation is quite low.

Adding new arguments to a map, and creating your own maps, involves understanding the basic building blocks of the map (e.g. Issues, Positions, and Supportive and Opposing Arguments) and how they fit together. Rather like a Lego set, large-scale, complex maps develop through simple combinations and recombinations of a relatively small set of blocks.

Beyond that the roles that develop around a debate map are broadly the same as you would expect to find in other wiki-based communities, with many of the same organisational principles and issues at play.

My sense is that the fundamental insight from the movement underway with the web is less about how changes of this kind will impact within the existing framework, but how they will change the framework itself. So for me the question is not so much about how we get our representatives to pay attention within the existing framework, but rather who will be the first representative(s) to seize on the huge opportunities opening as this framework changes, and when…

I have really enjoyed the process, Dave—and many thanks to you and everyone else who has participated.

Well, Dave, it's my pleasure. I'm fascinated by the process you've set up here, and I hope to get to as many questions as I can.

Grin. Ah, Jeremy, what an interesting question! :)

I am skeptical about the cognitive capacities of individuals to deal with the complexities of governing the planet.

This is not a new skepticism. Lévy raises it in his seminal 1994 text, "Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace."

So, while I'm not sure it's possible for an individual to take over the world in any kind of effective sense, perhaps it might be possible to nudge the world in the direction of taking over itself. As a civilization, we're clearly not in control of where the car is going.

We, as human beings, have yet to take over the world in any important sense, in any sense where we can be said to exert meaningful control over our own actions, or over the biosphere. Our actions are causing a lot of changes, to be sure, but they aren't directed. We have no capacity (ala Stamos), to choose a direction we like, to find consensus, or even exert minimal checks and balances over our activities.

There are no institutional levers on the controlled development of dangerous technologies, or over various kinds of resource depletion, pollution, or externalization of various costs. We have the veneer of a society that is effectively governing itself, but in reality that society has large informational blind spots, and societal biases, which prevent any kind of meaningful, coordinated action.

So, as a cognitive scientist, I would focus in on those blind spots and biases. These are amenable to large-scale cognitive engineering. That's a huge point of leverage.

Although the phenomenon predates the internet by a couple of thousand years (you could regard the development of The Illiad and The Odyssey, over centuries, as an example of collective intelligence), we're seeing a lot of interesting examples of collective intelligence emerging on the internet at the moment, which is one of the reasons that people are starting to sense the power of this idea.

The Wikipedia project is probably the best known example. You could regard the scientific enterprise as a whole, especially peer-review, as a remarkably successful, and institutionalized, example of collective intelligence. Or the creation, in the 19th and 20th centuries, of the Oxford English Dictionary, based on reader-submitted illustrative quotations.

The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence likes to define it this way: "collective intelligence is groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent." This hearkens back, I think, to the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, and Marvin Minsky's definition of AI: "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by people."

Most of the authors in this book emphasize a particular strength of numbers. They say that given the right conditions (and this is crucial!), many minds, coordinated in some fashion, can produce better results, or faster results, or more effective results, than many individuals working in isolation.

It came together in a remarkably short period of time. I've been working on it since November 2007, pretty much 24/7, and it was just published last month. It occupied my life completely for a time. A great deal of work, but also a wonderful space to be in!

The publisher at EIN Press, Robert Steele, was planning a conference, which instead turned into a book, and, now a series of books.

Tom Atlee (who wrote the definitive text on deliberative democratic methods, The Tao of Democracy), and George Pór (who, among other things, writes the blog of collective intelligence) helped enormously by inviting some terrific people to participate. I was invited to edit the volume. I asked a bunch of other people to contribute, and the ball kept rolling.

I tried to order it in such a way that it reads well from beginning to end. The ideas on small groups laid out in the beginning should help to inform the mass collaborative research at the end.

In keeping with the spirit of the volume, all of the papers were made freely available online during the editing process, so that the authors (and the public) could watch the book as it unfolded.

The book is also has a non-commercial-attribution license under Creative Commons 3.0, which means that translations, audiobooks, and other creative applications are now possible. I'm now working with George Pór on an interactive version of the book, partly modeled on the target article system from Brain and Behavioral Science.

The first step, as I see it, is to find a way to bring together the masses of information on addressing global problems that are currently scattered throughout the globe. Some of this information is in encyclopedias, some in government databases, some on various places on the internet. Finding a way of bringing that information together in a meaningful way is to my mind, the first step. I've got some ideas about how that might be done. This is one of my current research pre-occupations.

The second step is to figure out how to make that information available to policy-makers in an unbiased, credible, and effective way, such that it can help to inform policy decisions.

Ooo - I really don't want to play favorites. I'll resist your question and instead say that one of my favorite things about the book is that there are so many chapters, and that they are all so short and relatively accessible. As a result, it really is a book that can be read by anyone—as well as mined by academics, internet activists, and policy-makers.

Maybe I'll say this—the book has a terrific index, really first rate. This was the publisher's idea—he insisted on this, and was instrumental in making it so thorough and well-organized. The index was produced collaboratively, with the participation of many authors (of course), and some timely help from Hassan Masum and Marc Stamos. It really does enhance its value as a reference work.

Worldchanging Canada is a group blog. A group blog is where a number of writers contribute to a blog, but where the blog focussed on a single topic. In this case, we write about solutions: tools, technology, and models which are already changing the world. If we want to get to that bright green future we all want, we need to know how to get there: what already works, and that can be replicated today. We aim to provide context, and we aim to provide depth.

Worldchanging.ca been around for a year and a half, and we have a little over a dozen bloggers -- all Canadians, although occasionally reporting in from pretty remote parts of the world. Rod Edwards is now in Bangladesh, for instance!

WC Canada is also the first country-level version of the famous Worldchanging.com blog, which was founded by Jamais Cascio and Alex Steffen, and is still edited by Alex Steffen. Worldchanging.com has an estimated half million readers worldwide. Worldchanging, generally, is all about attentional philanthropy—bringing a spotlight of attention on solutions that ought to be better known.

Worldchanging.com has been around for about five years and have a rich database of thousands of solutions. Many of these solutions were compiled into a book from Abrams, which just came out in paperback. It aggregates many, many solutions between two covers.

Both the blog, and the book, are a great example of collective intelligence in the service of sustainable solutions. It is a particularly potent advertisement for the value of aggregating existing solutions.

Well, there were actually a number of books before this one, all in this space of so-called public intelligence—intelligence of various kinds used for the public good. The last volume was called Peacekeeping Intelligence. The next book in the series will be called Peace Intelligence, and I believe this will be followed by a volume on Commercial Intelligence, both due out in 2008. Each of these volumes will have a different editor. And there will be three more in 2009.

To a certain extent. An exciting example of this I saw recently was the use of USB keychain democracy. There was quite a bit of buzz about this at Berkman@10. In societies which are relatively closed, internet can give way to sneaker net, in the form of passing information from one USB keychain to another, often by use of an intermediate device much smaller than a laptop. The fact that the media and devices are so tiny means that information can be exchanged in public places, like the back of a cab or a public park. This offers many possibilities for openness.

Ah, good question. There is a great deal of room greater transparency in governments, some of which could be so easily enabled. The Sunlight Foundation is obviously doing great work here, with their mashups of earmarks and Google Maps, for instance, which allow you to easily see where, geographically earmarks are being allocated. You don't know which representative was responsible, but it helps the public to make some shrewd guesses.

Tim O'Reilly's column on Why Congress Needs a content management system is also instructive here. At the moment, no-one knows who adds what to bills. To programmers, and people who work with wikis, this is very odd, because every edit can be easily tracked. How can this be, some might say—"why don't they just check the commits?" So we've got this very interesting situation where new technology may modernize some of the older creakier parts of the democratic system.

Another place to watch are Jim Rough's ideas on Citizen Deliberative Councils, also known as Citizen's Assemblies or Wisdom Councils, which you can read about in his chapter. We've seen some very interesting examples of these up here in Canada. They're organized along the lines of juries—people are selected randomly, and in a way that they can be demographically representative. Democracy theorists called demographic representation descriptive democracy. These groups of people are then given lectures by experts on whatever they are supposed to deliberate on in as unbiased a way as possible. What has been found is that these can be remarkably successful in producing workable solutions for wide cross-sections of people. Even when their decisions are non-binding, the produce policy ideas which are nuanced, and useful for garnering political will. Tom Atlee has written some great stuff on these.

Jason Diceman is doing some really interesting work on small scale deliberative democracies with his Dotmocracy project. Thomas Homer-Dixon has done some interesting theorizing on the importance of winnowing policy suggestions from the public in a way that is both useful and will be perceived as fair.

I do anticipate opposition to what you are calling a free-information society. We're certainly seeing it in the copyright debates up here in Canada right now. I think that one of the remarkable stories in this space is the tremendous inroads that initiatives like free culture and the Creative Commons (as well as the open source movement) have been making, and the degree of cultural acceptance that they have been gaining. It's very interesting, in fact, that those movements have not encountered more opposition than they have.

I should probably make clear that many people in this space do not take the hard Stallmannian line that all information should be free. There are clear benefits to intellectual property in producing innovation, just as there are clear benefits to the provisions of the Creative Commons that the right to retain credit, or attribution for one's work, can be reserved. The question is where to strike the balance.

A very interesting question has to do with whether there is any reason to keep socially useful information, which has no clear competitive or strategic advantage, in closed information silos.

Look at Brian Eddy's work, for instance, which traces where our sustainability indicators come from. Most of the indices of sustainability that we see in the newspaper are not the original data points. Most trace their lineage back to large information silos—at the UN, NGO's, and government departments. Eddy's project allow you to discover exactly which silos are open and which are closed. His project is to get the closed silos to open up.

This kind of emphasis on socially useful information engages the public intelligence movement generally. There has been some very interesting work done, some of it documented in this book in Steele's chapter on the Smart Nation, in inviting intelligence services to be much more open with the information they collect. These would seem to be the ultimate closed shop when it comes to information, and yet there are real successes that can be reported there.

I see this as a process of being able to identify, in a deliberative way, the nuanced positions of each party so that common ground, or at least common cause, can be found. Mike Pilling's Open Policy initiative (openpolicy.ca) is a great example of this. It attempts to map the entire space of Canadian political discourse, in a way where everyone's opinion is represented. The key rule (analogous to NPOV) is that you can't modify any position in the wiki unless you make it stronger. That's crucial. That way you can interrogate the strong positions, rather than a bunch of straw positions. It also eliminates a great deal of controversy. The decisions on fairness are made by people voted by the community to be the fairest arbitrators. It's an interesting system.

For success in finding common cause, I'd look to the Save The Internet folks for examples. They've been very successful in this area.

The key question, as I see it, is how do you close the Ingenuity Gap? This is the gap that Thomas Homer-Dixon identified between the magnitude of the problems that face us currently, and what we know how to do about them. Since CI is seen to accelerate progress in other areas, how can it be used to accelerate progress in solving global problems?

Not yet! :) But perhaps you, or someone else, could work with folks like Librivox to start one!

Thanks very much for having me. I've enjoyed this. Hopefully we can do it again sometime!

Glad to be here. I'm looking forward to my first online, real-time interview, Dave!

It's quite an interesting and exciting format and I love the "viewer" participation possibilities, so everyone throw your questions at me and I'll do what I can to get to them.

For us, it's part of our mission: to be the site where you go to find the opinions of any person or organization on any issue, and in any language. To do that, whereIstand.com aggregates opinions of members, public figures, and organizations.

Users and editors propose issues and collaborate "wiki-like" to approve the ones that best frame arguments, and that are written in ways that are "open" enough to capture the opinions of public figures and organizations. These issues are translated into other languages, which is how we can show the same opinions in any supported language - regardless of the language in which the opinion was stated.

You can ask your friends to take a stand on an issue, of course, but you can also "request" the opinions of public figures - and users will jump on the ones with many requests and try to find the answers.

Take a look at our issue, Should Congress fund a troop surge in Iraq?

http://whereistand.com/Opinions/18520

When you hover over Obama's picture, you see an excerpt of what he said. If you click on it you see the full post, who posted it, who voted to agree or disagree with the evidence, and a link to the original source. Enough users have to agree (and not enough disagree) with the post for the opinion to be approved.

We had a complaint on this issue once from the campaign of one of the other candidates for President. We pointed out that the candidate had been quoted in a well known Web site, and noted that what he said was pretty clear. We didn't hear back from them again.

I just like bookmarking the people that interest me and following their latest opinions and commenting when they entertain or annoy me, or taking a stand if I haven't already.

When you search google, for example, for "opinions" or "comparisons" you'll frequently turn up whereIstand opinions that are probably favorites of other users.

Search "fund troop surge" and you'll see among the top links the Obama opinion I just linked above. Search "mccain politics" and his opinions on political issues on whereIstand.com shows up as the first result. Also, "jordan athletes overpaid"... since it's not all politics.

One of the implications for politics is that if you've already taken stands on the issues that interest you, you can quickly compare yourself to anybody on the site... a politician you just heard about, or a friend you invited... and quickly see where you agree and disagree. It's surprising to find where you disagree with friends or politicians you thought you agreed with! There was an interesting study a few years ago about people "thinking" they agreed with their politicians.

Using this creatively, if you're trying to pick potential VP candidates, go to the page of the presidential candidate and search for comparisons. For example, go to John McCain's page and search "giuliani" you'll get to...

http://whereistand.com/JohnMcCain/RudyGiuliani

...where you can focus in on where they agree and disagree.

The social networking aspects are certainly important to what we're doing... if anybody meets their perfect match through whereIstand.com... awesome! Love to hear about that.

In the first instance, any user posting evidence of a public figure's opinion, or voting on evidence posted by others, is participating in a form of citizen journalism.

Also, one of the features we're beta testing is where bloggers register on whereIstand, link their accounts to their blogs, and take stands on issues that they blog about. When they link their blog entries to whereIstand content, we'll show their entries as trackbacks on those pages, and group them by their opinions. So you'll be able to see and rate blog entries of "citizen journalists" that think, for example, that Obama and Hillary should be on the same ticket... or to those that don't.

In this sense, whereIstand is a platform for helping people to find bloggers based on their opinions.

I've heard from about a dozen people that think it's a good idea for internal use, but it's really not on our radar screen.

The way we'd like to see organizations engage is for them to get involved in proposing issues that are relevant to them and which interest other users. Then they become a part of the dialogue and can really add value that isn't just internal to them.

That's a good question. There are certainly anecdotes where people say they understand aspects of the election that they previously didn't.

We have an issue on the site that asks, "What is the effect of citizen journalism on news reporting?"

http://whereistand.com/Opinions/28676

There's also, "What effects do blogs have on politics?"

http://whereistand.com/Opinions/21044

To the extent that whereIstand.com helps voters discover information about the candidates, I'd say we're definitely having a positive impact.

Any registered user can propose an issue. Click the "issues" link in the header, then click the "proposed" tab and you can see the ones that have not been approved yet.

Click through the topics at the right to find the one most relevant to the issue you want to propose, and you can propose it there... again, only if you are registered. You can also send messages to the editors of that topic if you have any questions.

Once an issue is proposed, other users and site editors comment and suggest revisions. The editors of each topic approve issues when they meet the guidelines for a "good" whereIstand.com issue... these include that the issue be relevant, that the language is free from bias, that the wording works for finding public figure opinions, etc.

If you want to be an editor in a particular topic area, send a message to the current editors letting them know.

We'd eventually like to see any issue on which people disagree be represented on the site. We'll add functionality to let you do just that... limit the scope of an issue to a particular region.

For the foreseeable future, though, whereIstand.com editors probably would not approve this issue as written. It isn't going to be of much interest to people that live on "Elm St."

Instead, they would probably suggest something with broader appeal, such as, "Should all residential streets have sidewalks?"

One of the challenges (and benefits) of the structure is finding ways to frame an issue to increase the size of the interested audience.

This is true, I think, just with users "taking stands" and networking with their friends and contacts that have done the same. And, of course, it certainly helps extend the reach of their blogs to people that are more likely to be interested... if you're writing anything of substance, that is.

As a side note, I've found that knowing where you agree with people helps reduce the impact of the areas in which we disagree.

The most obvious is that we're working on presentation and usability improvements, like the ones we just rolled out a couple of hours ago!

We've been putting development effort into integrating with social networking sites so you can see how you compare with your Facebook friends, request their stands on issues, etc.

The biggest feature we're working on is something we call search by opinion (SBO). It's like doing a google search but then filtering the results to those from just people or organizations that have one or more particular opinions... such as "only show results if agreed with invading Iraq, but disagree with invading Iran".

And... we're going to roll out a mobile interface so people can quickly find that public figure opinion that will settle the big argument they're having... so they can get back to enjoying dinner!

Thanks! If I can squeeze this one in... oh...right to left languages are brutal!

We're looking forward to people posting evidence of opinions in other languages so you can compare where you stand with every leader of the world, for example, on a particular issue regardless of what language you speak. Definitely check back for that.

Thanks, again....

Let's hope so!

I'd say to definitely check out the "people" page. You're going to see more of this on the site soon, but basically, you can go through there to see opinions of people that fall into particular groups. So you can see just the opinions of celebrities on an issue, or of health organizations, for example.

Thanks, Dave. It's been a lot of fun. If anyone has any other questions or feedback, please send a message to help@whereIstand.com and we'll do our best to reply.

No problem - thank you for having me.

From the perspective of a community administrator, I think it's natural to see a shift from where you do less stimulating of activity and more managing of the actual discussions and contributions.

As you grow, you'll have more to deal with, moderation wise. That's just the way it is. That's not to say you will no longer post or that you will no longer be trying to bring people in... but, once your community reaches that self sustaining level of activity, there is more for you to manage, more times where you will need to enforce your guidelines or policies, and the time needed to do those things has to come from somewhere.

No problem, thanks for asking them! :)

I'm not sure if this is from the perspective of the people who run LinkedIn (in that example) or the people who use LinkedIn. I'm thinking the former, but I'll tackle both.

No matter what type of community it is, chances are there are some standards for interaction, even if they be loose. Things like racist, sexual or other inappropriate comments don't have a place on a site like LinkedIn. Nor does copyright infringement, direct linking of images and the like. So, you have these policies and someone has to enforce them. Whether or not they have the title of moderator... there needs to be someone who is responsible for dealing with these matters.

You want to encourage users of the site to help by making it easy for them to report these things when they come up. And then you need to have someone who is reading these reports soon after they are submitted and is taking action.

So, "moderators" of some stripe definitely have a role, even if they don't play the same traditional role as a forums moderator.

That's hard for me to say because NNTP (and Usenet and similar) came a bit before my time and I haven't really had the experience with it.

I would like to think that this question relates to something else I've been asked a few times, which is "what is the future of forums?"

My answer to that is that... I don't know. If I could tell the future, I'd be rich. :) But, it makes sense that as more and more bandwidth into the home (and office) becomes available, video and audio will become more and more a part of our internet experience. And that will trickle down to forums. It already has through the use of embeddable YouTube clips and similar things.

But, at the core of online forums, it's hard for me to envision a time where people will not want to communicate, learn from, help and laugh with one another through a text based discussion, where they don't have to look the person in the eye or listen to them.

That was the draw of Usenet, that was and is the draw of online forums and, again, it's hard for me to see a time when it won't be a fundamental part of the experience.

So, is "community" different? Yes and no. Community is always changing and it's always staying the same. No, in that it's still built around those interactions. Yes, in that it's easier to associate yourself with people online through the advent of member profiles, social networking and all of those great things. Innovation improves it, but the foundation remains the interaction that has always been there.

There's something that some people don't consider "promotional" that is actually tied to any promotional endeavor you undertake.

And that is activity itself. Activity breeds activity. Not only that, but if you spend money on an ad campaign, but your site has no activity, you are doing yourself a disservice because you will not be realizing the full potential of your dollar by sending people to a dead site.

On forums, you get many more replies than new topics. There are obvious reasons for this, but there is also the fact that it's easier to reply than to start a new discussion. Some people feel timid or uncomfortable - at least at first. If you are paying to bring people to your site and your site doesn't have anything going on... a lot of people are just going to leave.

So, activity is important. Create a good product, make sure there is some activity and that search engines can find you. Unfortunately, there aren't any amazing, unthinkable tips for this sort of thing.

Interesting question. There are personality traits that can make or break a moderator. I've had moderators who simply did not like upsetting people and did not ever want to be the bad guy. That just doesn't fly.

I don't want to be the bad guy. I treat people with respect, I let them know what they did that got their post removed. But, I realize that my role as the administrator, as the leader, is to make decisions that, at times, will make me lonely. And my moderators have to understand this, as well. I want to be friends with my members, but I am not there to be their friends. There is a subtle, but important difference.

I'd like to think that they can be made with experience. I didn't wake up one day and think "Hey, I want to receive e-mails from people referring to me as the most evil dictator in history." :) I started managing forums when I was 15 and I found out, over time, that it was a part of my job.

Training wise, we do have a number of things in place because I don't believe in allowing moderators to simply remove whatever they want. I don't think that makes sense. The community has goals and it's important that everything that you do put you in a better position to realize them.

I actually just wrote an article for SitePoint on this (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/develop-forum-leadership). More or less (this answer is already long, I know! :)), it revolves around the following:

- Create staff guidelines that detail what their responsibilities are, how they must act, etc. Before you allow someone on board, show them these.

- Develop what I call a "situations guide" that outlines typical situations they may encounter on your forums and how to deal with them.

- Document all violations to your forums in a private forum I call a "problem users" forum. Every time a post is removed, every time a member sends me a slightly nasty PM, I document it here. I also document any replies to those same PMs as well as any and all action taken. This allows your moderators to see how things are handled and also provides you with an incredible, very important reference point should you need to make any decisions regarding a member's ability to participate on your site.

- Establish an environment of respect where your staff where moderators are comfortable asking questions. It should be a friendly atmosphere, not one where staffers critique each other.

- Don't be afraid to correct your moderators when they remove a post they shouldn't have removed. Be kind, tactful and understanding, but don't let things like this slide.

And, as well as maybe a couple of other small things, that is what I do.

Decisions like this are made based upon what a user has done on the community. To do this, we have a system of documentation that I referenced in the last answer (and in an article I wrote for SitePoint a few years ago - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/manage-guideline-violations). Basically, it consists of two forums.

Problem Users: A forum where every member we have ever had to take any action, of any kind with, has a thread. The thread is titled with their username. We list everything from username changes and removed posts to PMs they have sent members of staff they were questionable and the replies to those PMs.

So, for example, if Member X sends me a PM where they act disrespectfully, I post that PM in the thread along with my reply, if there was one. This way, staff members see exactly what they are doing. This leads to everyone being on the same page when a member is banned and staff members being supportive of the decision.

Trash Bin: Where all post we remove go. We never edit posts as it creates sloppy documentation, harder mistakes to correct and leads to staffers being looked at as proofreaders.

When it becomes clear to me that, based upon the information in their problem users thread, they need to go, I make that call. I handle bans on my sites. I feel it's best to limit banning "powers" to as few people as humanly possible.

The process by which my moderators handle a violation is as follows (and is outlined in the article I mentioned above):

1. Recognition of violation.
2. Removal of violation to Trash Bin.
3. Documentation of violation (in Problem Users: link to the removed post, violation committed, quote of violation and action taken, such as "PM Sent").
4. Action (sending a PM, etc.).

So, that's how we do it.

By the way, thank you to everyone who has submitted questions! :) Great stuff.

Book wise, besides my own (:)), I'm not sure. I haven't done a lot of book reading in the category to be honest.

Website wise, I enjoy the following:

http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com (not just because you are having me on for a chat!)
http://www.chrispian.com
http://www.commoncraft.com/blog
http://www.problogger.net
http://www.communityguy.com
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com
http://lifehacker.com
http://www.communityspark.com
http://www.communityanswers.com
http://www.sitepoint.com

I run a few resources as well:

http://www.managingonlineforums.com
http://www.managingcommunities.com
http://www.communityadmins.com

Thanks for the question.

I don't know if I want to say the three biggest, but here are a few that jump out to me:

1. Not having a focus. Don't try to be a community for everyone - that doesn't work. You need to know who your community is, what you want it to be, who you want to attract. Everything you do, from your infrastructure to your guidelines and how they are enforced should put you in a better position to accomplish these goals.

2. Worrying about numbers or quota. Just because you have X members doesn't mean you need X moderators. Don't try to rationalize discretionary decisions by enforcing statistics based on restrictions that you don't need to have. (I don't usually use that many long words in a sentence).

3. Let's go with thinking your moderators and staff (and you) don't have to like one another. "It's just business." But, it could just destroy you. Having differing opinions is fine - but, creating a culture of second guessing and constant criticism and flare ups is something you don't want or need. You want productivity.

Thanks for the question.

Sure, I think that's natural. Some topics are more conducive to discussions, as well. Say, for example, a pro sports discussion versus a forum on some sort of non-widespread disease. Does that mean the latter will be any less useful or important? Absolutely not.

Audiences that tend to be more computer capable will be more likely to participate in forums. I know that's nothing revolutionary! :) But, computer know-how plus a topic that's always buzzing generally equals more potential. Size wise, anyway.

Thanks for the question.

Hey Mr. Moore, thanks for the question.

No. Actually, I don't believe in those ratios. I believe in promoting and keeping good people when you have them. Of course, if this is a pay position, it's different because of the budgetary restraints, but for most forums with volunteer moderators, I don't like to enforce any sort of staff member ratios or formulas.

If I had 5 good moderators and we had good coverage, but there was a 6th person who was awesome, I'd bring them on. On the flip side, if I had 0 moderators and there was no one on the community that I felt w