Technical Specification for the Internet Rights Workshop

This is a technical specification for the Internet Rights Workshop, an exercise in collaborative democracy developed by May First/People Link.

Vocabulary

These specifications make use of short-hand terms that can be ambiguous. This is an attempt to settle on fixed meanings for the purposes of discussion.

Workshop

a concrete instance of running this exercise, happening at a specific time, in a specific set of Rooms, with a specified set of human languages. I'll call the count of the specific languages in any particular workshop "L". L = 1 for every workshop we've ever run. We're pushing to make this work for at least L = 2.

Room

An environment in which a number of Groups are physically present. Each room should have a projector showing the current state of the workshop (the "board"), a link to the central workshop server, and a (wireless?) network to connect the scribes. When there is only one room for the workshop, it makes sense for the server to be physically located in that room.

Group

a small breakout cluster of people, identifiable during the workshop. There is exactly one Scribe per Group. Groups have been identified by color names in the past, but should probably be identified by icons or the colors themselves in a multi-lingual environment. (since there aren't that many colors, icons might allow for a larger set of participating groups)

Scribe

A person with a laptop connected to the discussion system, with the technical ability to add, edit, and endorse Rights.

Right

a Right is one of the items under discussion/debate in the workshop. There is a maximum of R possible Rights in the workshop (R == 10, currently). Each Right is versioned; when an edit is made, a new version of the Right is created. A particular version of a Right is endorsable by any Group. Editing a Right clears all existing endorsements, and adds an endorsement by the editing Group to the new version.

Localization

A Right exists as an idea, but the idea must be expressed in human language. An expression of a right in language X is a "Localization" of that right. Each Right should have exactly one Localization per language supported by the workshop.

Endorsement

A specific version of a Right can be Endorsed by any Group. The endorsement means that the group believes that Right is worth promoting. The projector in each Room displays the current list of Rights, ordered by the number of endorsing Groups.