Editing Living Platform

'''Living Platform'''s are [[wiki]]s that help citizens or groups or parties create [[w:en:political platform|political platform]]s.  They are used at present mostly in [[Canada]]:
*[http://lp.greenparty.ca Green Party of Canada "lp."]
*[http://livingplatform.ca nonpartisan LivingPlatform.CA]

There are proposals for [[Global Greens]] and [http://simpol.org The Simultaneous Policy] to use very similar facilities - based either on [[tikiwiki]] or [[MediaWiki]] or [[GetWiki]].

Living Platforms have many problems similar to [[Consumerium:itself]] and so have lessons to teach in [[wiki governance]] and [[wiki management]], as well as illustrating the intersection of [[politics as usual]] and [[advocacy]] with the research of ordinary "facts".

== has similar Research vs. Publish division ==

Because political platforms are eventually published, they must have a [[Publish:policy]] to distinguish the official or ratified language for a [[petition]] or a [[platform plank]] or [[citizen initiative]] from many possible proposed versions.  This will obviously have to be very different from the [[Research:policy]] that helps the party or groups develop their [[issue/position/argument]] structures.  Without a full consideration of every [[political position]], choices will be restricted only to what is [[politically correct]] to discuss.  Accordingly, research might be best conducted in a very wide-open non-partisan setting, with publication restricted to the party official forum.

== has similar factional disputes and politics ==

The advantage of such facilities is that they integrate [[politics as usual]]:  [[faction]], [[tendency]], [[trolling]] and [[ad hominem]] tactics, all in a forum where they can be properly monitored and regulated by those actually familiar with [[moral politics]] and [[deep framing]].  This tends to lead to a much more mature discourse than the typical [[sysopism]] versus [[trollism]] that characterizes most [[large public wiki]]s.  For instance, the [[New Troll point of view]] is typically much more respected, as a political party has much more incentive to listen to its new members or potential members, and even to respond to its critics - since it will have to do so during an election, anyway, and might as well practice those responses early - to become a [[learning organization]] capable of taking the best of its enemies' observations and using them well.

== is also quite hard to manage ==

The disadvantage is that they are quite hard to manage, the [[administrator guidelines]] and [[terms of use]] necessarily are more complex and intricate, allowing for situations where minorities may take over the discourse, or, where formal leadership and structure may clash with the informal and emergent structure in the wiki itself.

Essentially, all such facilities are experiments in [[wiki governance]] and [[wiki management]] in extremis.  This is reflected by the controversies that arise in their use - see [[Green Party of Canada Living Platform]].