The purpose of this space is to come up with an informal interview format so that Gerry can explain his vision of peer to peer democracy in  a way  that the average person would understand and want to participate.  These are notes to  trigger his responses and hopefully break down into a series of brief videos.  Essentially coming up with questions for Gerry to answser.

 

1. How do precinct captains function in peer to peer democracy as opposed to a precinct captain who is tied to a political machine?

The difference is motivation. A patronage job vs. producing assets in common. We can have as many captains as want to be active, maybe better to just call them workers. I imagine that most people will get more active in this network because they are motivated by local issues and candidates. The platform for P2P democracy has to support that. We don't want to pick candidates and parties. The commons of shared data we want to co-produce is nonpartisan. Individual workers may want to associate with specific issues and candidates, even parties, but I expect parties will be much less important in this system. During this current election cycle this is even more apparent with the offshoots of progressive organizations raising funds for progressive candidates.   At the very least the platform will support and even encourage the formation of finer grained interest groups and more that two parties that we have been stuck with.

The idea is that the platform should provide the tools so that groups can form at all scales, and they can collaborate within and among these groups to pursue common goals. These will be global goals that don't favor particular groups. For example, we want to register everyone to vote and drive high levels of participation not only at the ballot box, but also in the production of common assets. 

2.  With all these potentially rival groups, how do you keep things civil?

Time will tell. People are more and more sophisticated in their use of social media, and the communities have skills and experience with facilitation and conflict management. We'll have to be vigilant and work very hard on these issues to get it right. With current media silos and leaders who don't condemn hate speech we may also face the problems of remaining open to all views, but not becoming tolerant of hate speech and those who employ it.