Living Platform

Living Platforms no longer exist

Living Platforms are wikis that help citizens or groups or parties create political platforms. They are used at present mostly in Canada:

• Green Party of Canada "lp."
• nonpartisan LivingPlatform.CA

There are proposals for Global Greens and 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 wikis. 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.