This year’s Netroots Nation Convention marks the launch of a bold experiment in participatory democracy.  The Netroots (i.e. the left half of the blogosphere) will use MixedInk’s collaborative writing tool to craft their very own political platform in advance of the Democratic Convention.  At two working sessions, participants will kick off the initiative by putting their best ideas and language together.

If you’re going to be there, come visit on Friday, July 18th and Saturday, July 19th, and stop by our exhibition booth!  These sessions are just the beginning of what will be an ongoing, public process that will continue in the weeks following the conference.  The final, collectively written platform will be presented to the DNC before the convention in Denver.

If you want to be involved from the beginning but won’t be at NN, sign up at MixedInk.com, and we’ll email you the URL as soon it’s launched.

We’d like to thank the folks at Netroots Nation and wmtriallawyer for helping to organize this!

This effort builds on a growing movement to use online tools to make our government more transparent, representative, and accountable.  Both Barack Obama’s campaign and the RNC have launched exciting initiatives allowing people to help shape their platforms.  Using the Barack Obama website, Democrats can organize “Platform Meetings” in their communities, during which they can discuss and then submit policy “planks,” or one- to two-sentence policy suggestions.  These planks will be reviewed by the team writing the Platform and some will likely be incorporated into the final document.

The Republican Party also has an exciting grassroots-driven platform development effort underway.  The site highlights a range of issues and enables people to submit policies and comments that will be considered by platform authors as they prepare for the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Also along these lines, 21st Century Democrats wrote their own Alternative Democratic Platform, which is currently being circulated as a petition.

We are thrilled to see the platform-making process opened up to the public – and proud that MixedInk will be the platform used by the Netroots.  MixedInk was built to enable exactly this kind of participation, and we look forward to seeing the results of these incredible people-powered efforts!

Don’t forget to sign up if you want to be notified when you can help create the Netroots platform.

Check out this video, singing praise for tools that tap people’s knowledge – whether using prediction markets to forecast everything from election results to American Idol winners to asking the audience tough questions answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  They point out that people – collectively – perform consistently better than the pundits and experts.  Our post on prediction markets makes many of the same arguments.

Based on our last test of MixedInk, we’re convinced that our 30-headed pundit did better than any individual one of us could have alone!