Talk:Theses on technology policy

From Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

[edit] Letters to the President, and the Dear Potus Project

I don't entirely understand what the nature of this wiki is. Nor the nature of Dear Potus vs this Letters to the President project. It doesn't appear to present pages full of truth, but rather of marketing, and so I don't understand whether I can comment on the marketing in the page itself or if only the organizers and their point of view get the front of the page and we who have alternate theories or would want to do this differently are relegated to the back pages (such as this talk page). In a wiki seriously oriented toward participation, I would just edit in additional bullet items, but I don't feel that's appropriate, and that's an earmark of exclusion, not inclusion, and a mark that the online/collaborative nature that was sought this year in CFP did not work. Here is an example of something I would have added:

• Survival. Climate change is conspicuously omitted here. This is a flaw of picking a topic (Computers, Freedom and Privacy) that appears to exclude it. And yet, "technology" includes not just computers but in fact manufacturing and other applications of science. For example, we may need every bit of compute power in the world to solve the massive problems of Climate Change quickly enough to be of any use before it's too late.

• What factors are influencing the weather?
• How can we model the effects, good and bad, of various proposed solutions?
• How can we make sure there's enough food in the world?
• What will we do if the ecosystem starts to break down?
• ...etc.

I don't understand why the Dear Potus exercise was one of information loss rather than information consolidation. A lot of people attending had detailed ideas about what needed to be done in terms of detailed policy. The lists I saw on the sheets at the first dinner were more inclusive and detailed than what resulted. I would rather have seen those sent to the incoming president, wordsmithed perhaps, but in their full content, rather than see it watered down to a level of detail so general that it already effectively covers (but in less detail) what you can get from most politicians' web sites. The focus should have been on leveraging what was different about this community: the unique understanding of what topics were omitted from present policies and proposals, leaving the obvious to other groups to push, and the unique ability to offer detailed rationales for the omitted topics and why they belonged in the list. But I think in general that the model of discussion should have been of inclusion, not exclusion. There is no sense in which we should have assumed that the incoming administration wouldn't read a longer letter if one had been written. And so the pressure to make a shorter one seems a pressure to waste a valuable resource--the momentary ear of someone in power. --Netsettler 15:44, 26 May 2008 (UTC)