Abe, interesting idea and one I would like to run with. @nicholascloud, you make a good point about the “baby-sitting” of documents but I believe it can be resolved by crowd-sourcing the project with a “vested” membership interested in seeing the project succeed. This would also allow for controlling the abuse of the site by spammers. One part of the project would be converting the bloated material into something readable for the average participant. Because the material editor will be working on something he, or she is interested in then it would be a labor that they would happily engage in.
@michael, you make a valid point but I believe a crowd-sourced vested individuals like Wikimedia would work in keeping the problems at bay.
@tobi, I would suggest that the concept be kept private and not government controlled as any government initiative would only create a bureaucracy that would stifle innovation and open discourse.
My country, Mexico is going through a national referendum right now with the drug war as a backdrop and part of the drama. Although it is a national election I call it a referendum because the results will give an insight into what our country wants in terms of dealing with the narco-types. Will we continue with the strategy, increase the engagement or back-off and let them do as they please?
My original idea was to crowd-source political commentary/analysis but your post is making me expand the concept to include your idea.
The initial countries I would like to include are the United States and Mexico as I have a basic understanding of their political processes but I would love for it to include as many countries as possible.
I noticed that there is a lot of interest in this concept/idea and therefore I want to officially put out a call for those interested in forming such a site. I am willing to put up server space, domain name (polit.co) and initial programming. With Abe’s permission and hopefully, his participation I have a created a Twitter handle @polit_co to start the organizing. I look forward to everyone’s participation. Let’s get this going.