A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn't say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization.
Well there's your problem. People didn't create democracy just to see if it would work. People created democracy to answer the question "how the heck are we going to run our nation?" There were firm goals. "Guard civilization against bandits, natives, and the French." (Or "bandits, barbarians, and the Spartans," depending on the era.) "Protect our liberty from the British." "Make sure the government stays beholden to the people."
If you want to build something, you need an actual, concrete thing to build. Locke didn't create modern democracy. That took Jefferson and Hamilton and the rest.
If I can't get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won't make any difference.
I agree. You don't actually want a web app that badly, and frankly, neither do any of us. I see two solutions.
1) Apply this to a real problem whose mere existence causes you real emotional pain. (e.g., "open source software projects are shoddily run," "the healthcare system is fucked up and bullshit," "the technology to do this awesome thing I want doesn't exist.") Use the enthusiasm this generates to get others involved. 2) Follow Zaine's advice. Build a toy example of your system that's fun for its own sake. Use that to gather data.
Either way, I would suggest you learn to write better before you go ahead with any project that requires outside participation. Basic things like sentence structure and punctuation are still holding you back. Posts like your stuff here in Discussion are the best way to do that. Keep writing, keep getting feedback, and focus on specific techniques.
Heh. Part of the reason I posted here was that Lesswrong is associated wtih CFAR. So I thought people would be more amenable to meta-improvement organisations. If people are interested in raising the sanity water-line of individuals, why not the sanity waterline of organizations? I see I was miscalibrated.
Zaines advice would most likely end up being a webapp of some flavour anyway :P The game would need to be multiplayer, no download required. And I may as well make it so the control market software in the game has an api and can be easily extracted from...
Or something like that1. As per this article on Control Markets I am looking to experiment with them. This requires an organization of some sort. This post is my first step to the creation of the organization.
My skills are in technology and not UI or people particularly. So I have mainly been doing what I know2, working around my day job.
So I decided it probably wasn't the best path, I was likely to get distracted and lose focus by myself. So other people would be useful.
There are three rough ways this can be attempted:
So what is possible with people from lesswrong? And which would people advise? Or is there a different way to attack this problem.
I've thought about kickstarter, but I don't think it is within the ToS. Also I would want a decent demo/visuals before trying this style of thing.
I suppose there is also.
1 I would want to use a kitty for a logo if we went with this name. This is probably why I shouldn't be allowed to make these sorts of decisions.
2 I've been noodling around with a django backend using tastypie to make a restful API, I was thinking about using AngularJS on the client (which I would need to learn). Still needs a lot of work. I also have a bad habit of wanting to make it highly available/scalable and other such things that aren't appropriate at this point.