Abstract
Government, whether in the town hall or the Senate floor, depends fundamentally on conversations between citizens. Electronic government is no different--except that electronic government presupposes electronic conversation. Electronic conversation, besides being convenient, has advantages for users of scale, persistence, and distribution. However, current systems of digital conversation cannot realize these advantages, for various technical and sociological reasons. A Patterned System of Electronic Conversation (PSEC) should be constructed that leverages existing Internet technology like wikis and blogs for transport and front-end display, pattern languages for creating and managing the subjects of conversation digitally, and open-source topic map technology for back-end modeling, storing, and interchanging patterns and conversational material in the form of data. The PSEC should scale globally, persist indefinitely, and be capable of being distributed to almost any community. Many communities could adopt such a system to their own subjects of conversation. Because topic maps have the objective of ensuring that everything that is known about a subject is accessible from one location ("merged"), a PSEC would provide a natural forum for conversation-based activities like problem discovery, discussion, and consensus-building that depend on such subject-based merging. |
