wizardwatson
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[NOTE] This document is too long to post as an RPF thread. The full document is located here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W0zU76yzi3ozHW_i0-1K23FT8hmHBEkCyfKU-XxtKLM/edit?usp=sharing
The part I have clipped out of this thread post is indicated below. [/NOTE]
This document describes the conditions and purpose of the $100 RPF discussion contest.
I have an idea for a strategy to move forward and the $100 contest is a temporary tactic to market that idea and focus discussion. The details and conditions for winning the $100 is at the end. The bulk of this document is to outline my idea for a strategy. I've worked out a lot of the details and mechanics of the idea, some of which are outlined in this document, but a lot of work still needs to be done. I believe the idea is solid and it's described enough to where you should see exactly what the goal is. So while each individual detail might require a varying amount of time to work out the end goal is precise enough that any sub problem most certainly has a number of workable solutions. It's ambitious and long term but I think any strategy that is going to attract attention and motivate people has to be ambitious. If the project is too small or has limited goals it's easy to ignore or leave to someone else to worry about.
Basic Idea
There's an overall consensus on the philosophy of the movement and an overall consensus that political action is the way forward. However there is really no consensus or priority for where we should be focusing our efforts. Ultimately though everything we are trying to accomplish, or the vast majority of it, is related to changing, implementing, or repealing various laws. This project idea attempts to outline a strategy for making that happen in the most direct manner possible.
One of our major problems is we have no specific initiatives we are putting forward in any concrete way. We have ideas, we know which laws we don't like, but we aren't really pushing anything on any large scale. This is further complicated by the fact that we have no party and have instead opted to "infiltrate" and move the political center of an existing party in our direction. So instead of having a platform to push we are left with a strategy of trying to elect candidates who pass the "liberty" smell test in hopes that they can change the thought paradigm from within the political sphere and then encourage other politicians who are not on board to see the soundness and logic of our approach. Sort of a long shot "liberty by osmosis" strategy.
What I propose is this. Within the movement we develop concrete initiatives that can be submitted to the federal and state legislators directly. We then have working groups for each state that craft these into actual bills and get the respective legislators to bring them to the committees and get them voted on. We push every initiative all or nothing style. We poll elected officials monthly in order to get data on their support and feedback. We answer all questions from the public concerning the initiatives and we petition the public quarterly to gauge their support. Feedback from elected officials, questions and petitions from the public, initiative status in each state, and overall data and identities of those involved in the project is transparent and publicly available.
Numbers
This needs to be a long term goal. Doing this will require significant time and effort and results shouldn't be expected for at least a couple of years. If the project is going to be ubiquitous there are large numbers involved.
Now the question arises, "which elected officials?" I say all of them. "State? County?" All of them. Federal, State, County, City, Township. Any official who is elected by popular vote. The idea here is to put all government employees who are directly elected by the public and put them on the spot and collect data about there relationship to the project initiatives. We don't want to know what "they" are doing. We know what they are doing as a collective which is mostly nothing in relation to the major problems voters are concerned about. We want to directly communicate with all of them about our initiative. We answer their questions and address their concerns and comments and post that communication publicly. The metrics we want basically boil down to, 1. No response 2. Response but no comment or didn't read. 3. Support (with or without comments) 4. Don't support (with or without comments). At the same time we are petitioning the public for support of the project initiatives. So the project puts forward real solutions. We petition the public and show them what their elected officials think about our solutions or if they even took the time to comment on it. So there will be a measured contrast between what the public support is for the project and what the elected officials that the public put in office think about it.
Now the public petitioning and Q&A is pretty straightforward. The elected official communication however is an enormous task from a numbers and data perspective. Now the census bureau actually does a "Census of Governments" every five years but this is only for the number of governmental units. After some googling I was able to find a "popularly elected officials" document but it's dated 1992 and I can't find anything after that. So from what I gather they stopped counting the number of elected officials. But the 1992 document (http://www.census.gov/prod/2/gov/gc/gc92_1_2.pdf) had the number at 513,200. So let's work with 750,000 just to be on the safe side. Now the essential idea is that we are creating a "mirror" of the government so as a project I think we need to have at least as many participants. So let's go with 1,000,000 people actually working within the project. We won't need that many active people to get started that's just the end goal for the total pool of potential volunteers.
This system will be complicated by the fact that every two years a lot of these contacts are going to change. So in addition to who we're in contact with, where and what office they hold, we need to know when that spot is open for election. But since we won't be pushing initiatives until we've got all of them we have time to sort that out. Also, there's at least a month and a half before the switch occurs so assuming we're organized there shouldn't be a problem. If one participant can update and maintain a list of 100 officials in a month and we have an average of 15,000 officials per state we should be able to document an entire state in one month with 150 people. So if we have 600 people actively doing this initially we should be able to document the entire country in under a year. Then it's simply a matter of assigning volunteers in each state to maintain the lists and be responsible for initiating communication on a monthly basis. So if we figure each participant can manage communication with 50 officials then we need 15,000 participants total or about 300 per state.
So every month we're trying to communicate with all these people. Now naturally every official is not going to respond but let's say they do three times a month (you initiate, they respond, you answer, they respond again, etc.) and the project participants give a response to each and every communication. However, the person initiating the communication is not responsible for answering the questions necessarily. The communication requiring response all goes into a pool and the work is divided up among participants with priority given to those who have the highest reputation for answering questions about the initiative (process not described here). Doing some math, 3 times a month for 750,000 officials creates a workload of about 6,200 responses per day. Now the Q&A from the public concerning the initiative would follow the same format but those questions would simply be submitted semi-anonymously (name and location) and aggregated by county. So let's say the public communication plus the official communication comes to around a 20,000 response workload per day. So if we figure we have participants answering an average of 1 question per day then we need about 20,000 participants devoted to this task. That comes to 35,000 people or about 700 per state just to handle communication with officials and the public and data maintenance.
The Initiatives
As I said above an initiative is anything that would require a change in the law, a repeal of a law, or an addition of a law. There would need to be two essential processes. One process would involve breaking out the initiatives into logical pieces, researching them individually, debating them and approving them. Each initiative would be documented and explained to where an average person could understand not only what the initiative hopes to accomplish but should also address common concerns. Each initiative should be categorized with respect to whether it's a federal initiative, a state initiative that could apply to any state, or a state initiative that applies to only one state. Yes, we are communicating with officials at all levels of government but the scope is only towards the state and federal government legislative processes. County laws, budgets, local bond issues, etc. are outside the project scope.
Since the legislatures only meet for part of the year the initiatives need to be completed way before then. The initiatives that are finalized need to be prioritized and then the second process started. The second process is independent of the first. The second process involves crafting the laws into specific legislation to be submitted to the corresponding committee. Ideally, the teams for each state that do this and the federal team will be made up of lawyers and officials as well as and/or who are project participants. The feedback for how far each initiative got in the process will be recorded as part of the initiative data. The second process will require the most strategy. If we have say 30 initiatives for a team to implement and 6 months to do it then 5 initiatives per month need to be crafted. This is why we need a couple years before we even push any initiative. We will need to learn this process and develop the right contacts to do this. On the other hand, once an initiative has been crafted into law, resubmitting it during the next election cycle if it fails shouldn't be difficult. So the up front investment in research in both processes will be immense but after a few years of doing this it will be a known quantity and hopefully efficient.
Let me make a few points about this and then I will give an example initiative. As I said, we are going for an all or nothing approach. But that is only relation to public and official support of the initiatives. Meaning we aren't asking everyone to vote on specific initiatives. The project participants are pushing them all and we publish the metrics for how much support we have for the project as a whole, but each individual initiative can pass or not individually. The people working on these and crafting them are the public so it stands to reason that for any initiative to get a consensus it would also have a majority of support within the general public.
Example Initiative
Some of these initiatives, in the process of researching and getting a consensus will highlight other problems. Before going into ideas for managing this process let me give an example.
If this project gets off the ground one initiative I plan on working on is simplifying state taxes by collecting all taxes on land, property, and vehicles. Now there are many in the movement who have economic theories of why this isn't ideal, some related to theories that I think the average person doesn't really get or care about, and some who simply don't like any tax they can't avoid. Now I work for my state's department of revenue so I have first hand knowledge of the end result of our ridiculous tax scheme. In my opinion, it's unfair, way too messy, and above all it's self-reported and very susceptible to all manner of fraudulent practices. It's my view that the only thing the government really has a grasp on is how much land, property, and vehicles are out there and what their value is.
I'm not stating my case here but want to make a point about issues that would or could arise from such an initiative. From a theoretical standpoint some may have valid theories that it somehow punishes one sector over another. If this can be shown then that simply means that part of the initiative might be to discount certain sectors. For instance, some may complain that it eliminates the "Earned Income Credit" associated with an income tax return punishing working families. So in the process of researching the initiative things like that need to be considered and accounted for. Another issue that will crop up with many of these initiatives will be that we are downsizing various sectors. For instance this kind of tax initiative would basically eliminate most of my department in addition to a sizable chunk of the tax accounting industry in my state. So we would likely need a serious initiative to deal with unemployment and also with the main source of people's fear of unemployment which is strongly tied to the availability of healthcare. So in addition to describing the legal aspects of an initiative we also need to address the perceived social impacts of these initiatives and where possible relate them to other initiatives that are being developed.
Notes on the Banks
A core focus of the movement is banking reform. So naturally a lot of people will want to be involved and push this initiative. I've personally spent a lot of time over the last 10 years looking into this problem and my main issue with moving forward quickly on such a huge monster is that we have sketchy data. The banking problem needs to be approached delicately and should be done incrementally. For instance, "end the fed" might be the end goal but it isn't going to be done in a single legal stroke. We need to be creative and strategic when approaching the banking problem. Audits would be a start. Personally I would like to see laws passed that make public any firm or individual that receives over a million dollars in loans per year from the banking system. The inflation and bubble issue is subtle but the main effect the banking system has is distributing massive economic power directly through loans completely irrespective of whether that economic actor is healthy for the economy as a whole. Competing sound money currencies would be another angle and if federal legal tender laws could be repealed we could implement this on a state by state basis. The public may not go for private entities issuing this currency and it may not even be a good idea but certainly a state should be able to do this (it was done in the colonies before independence) and if it does the mechanics should be transparent.
Communication processes and moderation
The process of communicating with officials and the public via Q&A and documenting and publishing this information is straightforward. The process of dividing up the work of implementing the initiatives into legislation also has well defined inputs and outputs even though the up front organizing and making the proper contacts will be difficult. These components are mostly mechanical in nature. The bulk of what we are doing, however, is communicating. And the main problem with communicating online, as anyone who has spent a significant amount of time online can tell you, is information overload and noise.
The main thing-the most important thing-that needs to be kept in mind concerning this is that we are trying to reach people and teach people. The best way in my opinion to teach and reach people is a stream of discussion which relates our strategy and our philosophy to current events and our project initiatives. Not only to discuss what we've got a consensus on as far as initiatives but also to discuss the project itself, how to improve it, how to build on it, etc. Everyone loves to talk naturally, but this project is not about creating some gigantic forum for 10's of thousands of people to talk endlessly in 1000 different directions. I would say we need isolated discussions. 1 for general philosophy and strategy. 1 for federal. 1 for each state. 1 for each initiative. 1 for discussion about project infrastructure and protocol. These would be discussion streams dealing with current problems and issues. This isn't to say we're limiting people's interactive discussions we're simply constraining the discussion we are publishing and moderating. People are of course encouraged to collaborate independently. All the stuff that's already been nailed down like introductory material, how to access the published data, initiative documents, project protocols, would be static for the most part and as condensed as possible. This would not be a forum to discuss esoteric economic or political theories that are only related to the project goals in an abstract sense. There are plenty of places online to do that. The idea would be to give people a direction on what to study, empower people and show how the ideas we believe in relate to action.
So we aren't creating a standard forum. We are creating an on topic discussion stream. Basically a glorified and moderated community blog. The thing that limits this is people's time. This document is already 2800 words. If you are an average person supposedly you read at around 250 words per minute so you have spent 10 minutes of your life reading this and another 35 minutes if you read the whole thing. Assuming you were a hardcore project participant or member of the public and spent three hours a day reading project material and assuming each post was around 1000 words average you would only have time to read 45 posts per day. Ignoring individual initiative discussions that most people probably won't read we would still encourage people to read the philosophical, state, federal and project protocol discussions periodically when they have the time. So let's blow this figure up twenty times and let's assume people are spending say 40% of their time looking at state level discussions. So we have 600 posts per day for national level topics and 20,000 posts per day for state level discussion (400 state level posts * 50). So assuming we have participants who post an average of one post every two days we'd have around 40,000 people devoted to posting to discussion streams. This means then that if we have a participant goal of 1,000,000 people only about 1 out of every 1250 people will be contributing to the discussion per day on average.
The process shouldn't be too difficult though if we break it down. We need a protocol for how the discussion is structured, perhaps question/response format, with a limit to say four posts per question. We'd also need some kind of reputation system that gets people good at expressing ideas and discussing them into the mix but doesn't allow perpetual monopolization of the stream. We would also need a process for moderating noise and off topic and controversial/trollish posters. In the beginning it would likely be heavy on moderation until a medium can be found between what's good moderation and a fair and accountable protocol. But again, the constraining factor needs to be only publishing enough discussion to where an individual we are trying to reach can consume it. If we go beyond that we make the system too complex and require categorization and all that goes with it. People who spend an inordinate amount of time online can use a forum. We don't want to reproduce that or complicate the project by catering to them specifically when there are already plenty of venues for them to frequent.
Protocol and Initiative Consensus
The project itself really has relatively few components. Even so, there are many details and protocols that will have to be worked out. Establishing a workflow for all this will be a huge task. One thing to keep in mind though is that this process need not be real time. It would be nice of course to reach that point eventually but in the interests of simplicity and time we should start out with large enough time cycles that the process is manageable. Even with respect to the discussion streams we're not going to post things to the stream until they've been moderated. The complex part of the whole thing is that essentially we're building a cooperatively managed voluntary system that encourages participants to suggest modifications to rules and protocols for the project itself. So there's a self-referencing aspect. The leadership and moderator structure is ideally a result of a fixed protocol that is modifiable by the participants. Dealing with large numbers of people makes reaching a consensus on modifications a problem as well as disseminating the changes themselves. As a starting point I'd suggest we use a simple method of randomly selecting a subset of the entire group and fielding and resolving objections.
Another significant issue is technology. The primary vehicle for all this is going to be email. However, the data itself will be distributed via a website. Many people who come to ideas like this dealing with large numbers of users seem to automatically gravitate to "let's build a website to do this." I am an application developer by profession and before that I worked on websites. My personal opinion on this is that trying to map a complex protocol onto an application is not only difficult, but even with a low level of complexity the overhead and effort to modify that application is immense. Yes we should use email. Yes we should publish the final data product at regular intervals-the smaller the better-to a common web address. But the application footprint needs to be as small as possible and wherever possible there should be a flexible but efficient human interface. So there's a tradeoff between larger time cycles to get your end product and flexibility of the workflow with respect to coding the protocols in an application. With humans more in control it takes longer to cycle a process but with applications you get less flexibility in terms of how long it takes to change the workflow and retool the data on which it depends.
Marketing in general
Obviously we need to spread the word and attract attention to any project to get it going. I have an idea and strategy for that but first I want to comment on traditional marketing in general.
If the banking system is to be considered insidious in an economic sense I would consider the current practices of marketing in this world equally insidious from a psychological perspective. We are constantly manipulated by buzz words and images that are specifically crafted to alter our behavior. While the average person is well aware of this on a case by case basis their behavior is nonetheless affected in the long run. It's common in every sphere whether it be commercial, political, intellectual, religious, etc. All of the circumstances of our life culminate for all of us in a vocabulary of words we use to market our ideas to one another. Our vocabulary, for better or worse, is heavily influenced by marketing. It's the nature of language and communication to do this but when we self-identify with a word or label we run the risk of having our behavior modified by those who manipulate those words and labels for their own agenda which may or may not be in our best interests.
I spent a couple years working as a research director for a marketing firm about 10 years ago. Primarily I worked on conducting and constructing campaign surveys. The behavior we wanted to manipulate was voting obviously. Either a candidate wanted to get elected or some firm or public entity who was interested in passing a tax increase or a bond issue would hire us. With candidates we first researched what issues people are concerned with which usually had nothing to do with the candidates actual agenda. Based on the research and polling the candidate knew which topics to avoid and which topics to focus on, which topics were hot button issues for whatever party you were trying to reach, which wording was best to use, etc. We had a tax increase initiative where most of the money went to economic development (publicly subsidizing companies to come into the city which is usually organized and pushed by real estate owners and associations) and some went towards repairing bridges (even though the public works portion simply went into the general fund). What the research showed was that people were not receptive to the idea of using tax money for "economic development" because they connected that with private company subsidizing. However they were receptive to "creating jobs". So we tooled the communication to read "Jobs, Roads and Bridges" and we got the city tax increase passed, the government sanctioned association that was comprised of the real estate tycoons of the city got their slush money, and the city got some more fast food restaurants.
Now this process isn't "evil" it's just standard operating procedure pretty much anywhere. The point is that there is no interest or incentive for being transparent with your agenda unless your agenda is for the public good. Using public money to finance private individuals under the guise of "economic development" is never in the public good or else they would make an effort at showing exactly who gets the money and where it's going. So in general, in my opinion, people are very intuitive about this process of deceptive marketing even though they may not say it outright. They know that whenever someone employs traditional marketing there's a 99% chance that they are not marketing their true agenda and intentions. But we are exposed to it so much and from so many angles our decisions can't help but be affected by the process.
The nature of this project is outside any label or fixed "idea" and any overt attempt to market it directly under some banner of "liberty" or "social justice" or whatever else is bound to be inadequate and turn off some people. I would prefer the project not have any name. I would rather the project simply spread by word of mouth and through social networks and not market it through any traditional marketing apparatus like television/newspapers/google ads/banners at all. Obviously the legal entity responsible for managing the data, the money, and the website will have to have a name for government reasons. But I would say, for that purpose, something like "Candy Corn Clouds LLC" is infinitely preferable to something like "The Social Justice Initiative" or "Citizens United for Accountability" or the like. We aren't going to hammer out a philosophical mission statement or a set of beliefs that participants must take an oath about. We are pushing initiatives. Those initiatives are what counts and they should speak for themselves. If you want to discuss your social positions in the streams that's one thing. But whether or not a specific initiative agrees with your intellectual or spiritual mindset is your own affair and there should be no collective attempt to attach those rigid positions to the project in general. If an initiative is solid that should be all that matters. Whether you are a progressive or a conservative or a muslim or a christian, while it might be relevant to your choice to support it, is not relevant to the project or initiative. Attempting to call or label an initiative "libertarian" or "agorist" or "anarchist" or "christian" is pointless and only generates unnecessary conflict.
A specific marketing tactic
That said, any project, especially one with an epic end goal like this one, could use some help getting off the ground and attracting interest. While I don't like the idea of direct marketing and trying to nail down and condense the project into a 30 second ad I do like the idea of marketing it in an indirect way.
This part of the project many might not agree with or may have better ideas but I've thought about it for a while and it's kind of stuck with me. I wanted something simple that requires little overhead and that doesn't try to frame the project with buzz words and jingoism. My idea is to have people pledge $50 a month towards a fund that will be randomly distributed to one of the pledgers when a threshhold of $15,000 is reached. This would be given to a maximum of 5 people a month with each person receiving no less than $15,000 and no more than $100,000 which means that this marketing tool would not kick in without at least 300 participants and would max out at 10,000.
I've actually worked out a lot of the details of how this could be done but I just want to hit on the main points. First, you don't just "get" the money. You must spend all the money within 30 days "Brewster's Millions" style. In order to qualify (aside from identifying yourself and certain protocols related to verifying the bank account) you'd need to be social networking friends (Facebook for instance) with a few other pledgers. A month before the money is distributed your social network (friends, family, local news, etc.) would be notified that you were to receive the money and the protocol for how you are expected to spend it. Some of the rules would be that you can't pay off your own debts, you can't spend it on close friends or family, you have to spend it on consumables (not for you) and physical products. No gift cards or investments, no buying ad time or space, no marketing of any specific political or social agenda, a $500 limit or so for any 1 person, all purchases must be documented, no paying off people's existing debts, there must be a witness to all your transactions, and other restrictions along those same lines. The point would be to do this creatively. You could go into a bar or restaurant and pay for people's food or pay for someone's walmart purchase at the checkout line but you wouldn't be able to donate to a political candidate or spend all of the money on a car or paying off someone's medical bills.
Essentially it's a publicity stunt that's agnostic to your belief system or personal agenda. You are simply expected to follow protocol and do creative and (hopefully) relatively good things in your community. Some might think that this is a bad idea and everyone will try to game the system for personal benefit but I'm guessing most people would do it properly. Even if 20% of the people cheat for their own personal gain I would still consider it a success. Others may think that this is a complete waste of resources altogether and that the idea of potentially spending $500,000 a month on nothing other than indirect publicity is ridiculous. First off it's voluntary. You are not obligated to participate in it to help with the project. Secondly, if the project is to appeal across the whole political and ideological spectrum what endeavor could we find involving money that everyone would agree on? And even if we found one it would likely benefit a specific person monetarily and that is what we want to avoid.
The more you think about it the more you will realize this isn't necessarily going to be fun for the person doing it. First they have to get a statement from a tax accountant to figure out how much of the money is going to go towards taxes. Then they have to deal with everyone around them bugging them and trying to give them ideas. It will be even more stressful if they have people close to them who are struggling with their finances. They also have to worry about security. It will probably be stressful in many ways. It's a moral test in that you have to ignore your personal situation in order to support the cause. It's also an experiment in faith and trust in that many people might think the idea is interesting but have little faith that a regular person wouldn't break the protocol for their personal benefit. That to me is the main appeal of the idea. Any cooperative system will fall apart if we don't have faith that the people participating are sincere in their efforts to cooperate so this marketing tool is an experiment to demonstrate just how well that commitment is adhered to in the individual chosen to spend the money.
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[NOTE] The content here (between the "A specific marketing tactic" section and the below "The Contest" section) has been removed as the post was too long for an RPF thread. Please refer to the google doc linked at the top of this post for the full document.
I marked that document with red [THIS PART CLIPPED IN RPF POST] tags to indicate which part is missing from this post.
[/NOTE]
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The Contest
The contest then isn't part of the project. It's just a tool I'm trying to use to focus discussion on strategy and other people's opinions on the project and the movement in general. It is also a means of managing my time. It is kind of a prototype though for how the discussion streams mentioned in the project could operate. The specific details about the contest rules can be found on the contest thread. This section outlines the general rules.
In order to be eligible you need to have joined RPF in 2011 or before and have a post count of at least 500. If you don't then someone who does must nominate you. The contest is open to 12 people. The contest requires that you answer the contest question in essay form with between 1000 and 5000 words. Responses for round 2 and 3 must also be between 1000 and 5000 words. You have 3 days from the date you enter the contest to submit your first round answer. If you enter the contest but fail to meet the deadline or your answer isn't in the word range the next contestant will be chosen and will have three days to answer the question. I will respond to all 12 entries. A two day public RPF poll will then be held to eliminate 3 contestants based on their essays. After the conclusion of the poll the remaining 9 will have 3 days to follow up to my response (and read the others responses as well if they so choose) and another two day poll will again be conducted and another 3 contestants will be eliminated. The remaining 6 will again have three days to generate another follow up response which I will again reply to. After that another two day poll will be held to eliminate all but one contestant. That contestant will receive $100 as an award.
I will respond to each answer and follow up response as they come in but the voting will take place regardless of whether I have responded. If you get your response in early I may respond before the voting happens. I will also respond to the last response but the entire cycle will last 12 days from the receipt of all 12 entries and I am giving myself 10 days beyond that to submit all my responses and before I commit to starting another cycle. The rules may change in future cycles. The contest isn't guaranteed to pay out until I get 12 qualified contestants who submitted the first round of answers. After the first round though if you don't meet the deadlines you are simply eliminated and there is no replacement. If only 1 of the 9 replies in time for the second round he or she wins by default. If the responses aren't received early enough for me to respond you may have to base your round 2 and 3 responses on the answers of others and my response to them or simply elaborate on your original answer..
The question is as follows:
"The idea that prompted this contest is related to a strategy for improving social conditions by promoting transparency and intelligent participation in government. The target audience for this idea are those individuals who express interest in promoting a social order that is made up of individuals who through nonviolent means inhibit and diminish the propagation of organized deception and aggression. What are your thoughts on such a society and what strategies do you see as being a means to bring people closer to it? How does your personal philosophy or spirituality and your technical and theoretical knowledge factor into your action towards these goals? Do you have any specific opinion on the strategy that prompted this contest? What is your opinion on the goals of the movement you see yourself or others as being part of?"
The question is broad and you won't be disqualified because you didn't answer any part of this question directly. You can talk about whatever you want as a rule and I will respond though your response may be voted on in whichever way by the RPF members who participate in the poll and can view your answers and responses. The main topic is simply strategy that works towards the goals of the movement but you are free to relate it to your own views and experiences, your theories, or whatever you'd like. You can talk about how you think everything is hopeless, you can talk about what you think my motivations are, trust issues you have with ideas like these in general, anything is game.
Observations about the contest
I made a point earlier about rigid rule systems related to applications. Video games work for interaction because a computer has no other means to operate than by a fixed set of rules. Dealing with human behavior however is a different animal altogether. Any voluntary system of cooperation based on human action is bound to have holes in it no matter how well defined the protocol. In this contest for instance perhaps no one will participate. Or perhaps some will enter but not meet the deadlines. Or people will try to game the voting. The more the personal reward is the more people who are driven by that award will try to work the system. Others who see this might not want to participate simply because they see how others would game it even if they wouldn't themselves. So any system of voluntary cooperation needs to take this into account. You can't eliminate it but you can discourage it. I'm aware of these problems and considerations but I don't think they really matter. It's just a means I'm using towards an end. I don't have great expectations that the contest itself will generate some epic reaction. The information about how it progresses is all I really expect.
Blanket statements
I've made a lot of generalizations in this document that some may agree with and others may find insulting, wrong, or irrelevant. I am operating blindly though. I'm only given opinions and my insights on a very broad problem and I have no idea who will even read this or what their positions and opinions are. It's much easier to give a more exact opinion about someone else's opinion in relation to another specific observation. We could all write books on all the various things we know about and understand but dialogue between opposing views works more efficiently at getting to the root of a problems components. I could elaborate all day on the intricate minutia of this or that part but if 75% of the people interested see problems with the fundamental premise then that's what needs to be discussed.
So this document is really a generalization of a problem. It's a guidepost and the contest is intended to further the discussion in the direction of implementing solutions in line with it. I'm not attacking or judging the "movement" and I'm not going to be disrespectful to people because they don't agree. This isn't something where if I don't get 100 people interested in two weeks I'll moan and wail and damn anyone who doesn't support it.
My mini-bio
I'm 34 and have been an application developer (computer programmer) for about 6 years now. Worked in market research for a few years and with family businesses prior to that. The short time I was in the military, around 19, I worked as a health physics technician. I did well in school, was strong in math, mostly A's with a few B's and one or two C's. From about 17 though I became interested in "social problems". A lot of it stemmed from being from a lower middle class family and witnessing a lot of the effects of the breakdowns in family and community that in no small way were related to uncontrollable economic factors.
Two things really set my course when I was young. As a teenager I became interested in martial arts for self-defense and overall "coolness" factor. Watching a movie about Bruce Lee's life I found out that he had written a book titled the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Jeet Kune Do is the name for the "art" he had developed and it was based on his study of philosophy and life in general. His basic premise is that for any art to be fully developed the individual must be fully developed and he must operate outside any fixed style. That any commitment to a method or style psychically opens you up for attack for anyone who understands that technique but is not committed to it. That life is movement and you must follow that movement and adapt your methods for solving the problems that life creates accordingly. The problem is always changing so no specific method, style, or theory will ever apply in all cases. The thought occurred to me then that this same mentality could be used to approach social problems. And I saw, sure enough, later on that indeed people do get caught up in theories and ideals so much that they aren't even looking at the problem anymore.
So that was the first thing. I was instantly hooked on eastern thought and philosophy in general. The second thing that happened was around 19 when I happened across a book in the library called "Financial Terrorism" published in 1993 by the John Birch Society. I knew intuitively that the problem with society, in addition to general suffering caused by violence and injustice, was also related to economic problems. Reading this book changed the whole game as it confirmed many suspicions I had about massive public debt and the federal reserve. So these two factors were really the initiating and guiding forces for my future work and study in this arena. That being my personal philosophy and my growing awareness of the huge economic factors that lead to social deterioration.
Christianity also factors heavily into my thinking but it wasn't until my mid 20's that it really started to sink in. In high school I was all about science and outwardly purely atheistic. I got great enjoyment out of ridiculing Christians and the idea of some guy who claimed to be God and seemingly failed in every possible way in his mission. I was exposed to it and read about it quite a bit but I didn't understand it and it's easier to ridicule something you don't understand than admit your unsure of what it means. Even in my late teens when I understood some of the general ideas and related them to other schools of religious thought I didn't talk about it or give it importance. The message and meaning that it has to me now though I consider fundamental and it is very ironic that I thought so highly of my intellect and knowledge when I was young but something so fundamental and obvious escaped me for such a long time.
So prior to 2007 when I became aware of the Ron Paul movement I was already familiar with a lot of economic theory. I had studied banking and the federal reserve, I'd read Henry George and others, I was aware of Gary North (who writes for Lew Rockwell's blog) and his economic ideas from his writings on Y2K, I had looked into digital currency alternatives, I had looked into Catherine Austin Fitts ideas for creating neighborhood equity corporations and numerous other ideas people had put forward related to solving this difficult problem. When the Ron Paul movement had formed I was even more focused on understanding this problem as I realized there was a huge number of people following a similar line of thinking and if any solution was to be found and adopted it could happen through this crowd more than any other. Voluntarism, sound money, nonviolence, grassroots action, all of the necessary components seemed to be right in front of us.
Over the next few years I watched what was happening and how people were interacting and it gradually dawned on me that the problem wasn't our potential or our ability to understand the social problems. It was our lack of ability to cooperate and form strategies on a local and personal level. We have a similar vision but on a personal level we still have trust issues with dealing with other people, we still feel like people are prone to do things just for money, we are aware that most people's ideas are half-baked and lack potential, etc. Essentially we still can't act. In the beginning there was a lot of action and it was creative but based on a lot of the attitudes coming from higher up a lot of people's balloons got popped. It seems to me now that a lot of people have reverted to thinking that the grassroots has power for sure, but the guidance and leadership must come from people higher up.
That's what this project is about to me. It is about empowering people to act at a local and personal level and outline and develop tools to actually cooperate. Not endless talk about cooperation and voluntarism but figure out what the specific necessary steps are to achieve that. This has been my focus as of late and even though I've only started forming specific ideas along these lines over the last couple years it's been 17 years in the making as far as I'm concerned. I think the people in this movement have tremendous potential and even though some may think the end goal is overly ambitious or even unachievable I think what we learn on the journey between here and there is probably more valuable than the specific initiatives themselves. Developing tools that allow people to have measurable effects on the society to which they belong outside the sphere of their own personal job and economic situation I think is the very substance of a self-governed society.
End
So there you have it. That's my take on this mess we're in. If you want to participate in the contest and potentially win $100 worth of federal reserve notes the details on entering and participating are on this thread:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?414226-100-RPF-Discussion-Contest-(CCCC-No-1)
If you can't wait to get started you can email me or private message me directly at wizardwatson at gmail dot com but I have no specific work for you to do at the moment I'm just trying to gauge interest and I don't know if that will happen on any significant scale or how long it would take. Humans are unpredictable on an individual level so we'll see how it goes. I'd encourage people simply to think it over and discuss it but if you do email me, as I said, I'll do my best to respond and give you input on others who have responded to me directly. It's all based on time so if hardly anyone cares or pays attention it will be easy to get back to you but if too many people do the necessity for organized cooperation and communication will be obvious and I'll try to deal with it. Before that though I'll probably do some kind of poll to see how many are interested in general so that whoever might be interested in organizing can at least have a general idea of the number of potential volunteers.
This thread
The contest is where I'll spend the most effort responding in detail to ideas but you can use this thread to ask questions or whatever but I don't know how much time I'll have to respond to it. If you are the only one reading this and no one joins my contest then perhaps we can talk quite a bit and I'll get to keep my $100.
- David Watson
P.S. Again THIS IS NOT THE CONTEST THREAD. So don't post here that you want to enter. Go over to the thread above and read and enter there but keep general questions in this thread.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W0zU76yzi3ozHW_i0-1K23FT8hmHBEkCyfKU-XxtKLM/edit?usp=sharing
The part I have clipped out of this thread post is indicated below. [/NOTE]
This document describes the conditions and purpose of the $100 RPF discussion contest.
I have an idea for a strategy to move forward and the $100 contest is a temporary tactic to market that idea and focus discussion. The details and conditions for winning the $100 is at the end. The bulk of this document is to outline my idea for a strategy. I've worked out a lot of the details and mechanics of the idea, some of which are outlined in this document, but a lot of work still needs to be done. I believe the idea is solid and it's described enough to where you should see exactly what the goal is. So while each individual detail might require a varying amount of time to work out the end goal is precise enough that any sub problem most certainly has a number of workable solutions. It's ambitious and long term but I think any strategy that is going to attract attention and motivate people has to be ambitious. If the project is too small or has limited goals it's easy to ignore or leave to someone else to worry about.
Basic Idea
There's an overall consensus on the philosophy of the movement and an overall consensus that political action is the way forward. However there is really no consensus or priority for where we should be focusing our efforts. Ultimately though everything we are trying to accomplish, or the vast majority of it, is related to changing, implementing, or repealing various laws. This project idea attempts to outline a strategy for making that happen in the most direct manner possible.
One of our major problems is we have no specific initiatives we are putting forward in any concrete way. We have ideas, we know which laws we don't like, but we aren't really pushing anything on any large scale. This is further complicated by the fact that we have no party and have instead opted to "infiltrate" and move the political center of an existing party in our direction. So instead of having a platform to push we are left with a strategy of trying to elect candidates who pass the "liberty" smell test in hopes that they can change the thought paradigm from within the political sphere and then encourage other politicians who are not on board to see the soundness and logic of our approach. Sort of a long shot "liberty by osmosis" strategy.
What I propose is this. Within the movement we develop concrete initiatives that can be submitted to the federal and state legislators directly. We then have working groups for each state that craft these into actual bills and get the respective legislators to bring them to the committees and get them voted on. We push every initiative all or nothing style. We poll elected officials monthly in order to get data on their support and feedback. We answer all questions from the public concerning the initiatives and we petition the public quarterly to gauge their support. Feedback from elected officials, questions and petitions from the public, initiative status in each state, and overall data and identities of those involved in the project is transparent and publicly available.
Numbers
This needs to be a long term goal. Doing this will require significant time and effort and results shouldn't be expected for at least a couple of years. If the project is going to be ubiquitous there are large numbers involved.
Now the question arises, "which elected officials?" I say all of them. "State? County?" All of them. Federal, State, County, City, Township. Any official who is elected by popular vote. The idea here is to put all government employees who are directly elected by the public and put them on the spot and collect data about there relationship to the project initiatives. We don't want to know what "they" are doing. We know what they are doing as a collective which is mostly nothing in relation to the major problems voters are concerned about. We want to directly communicate with all of them about our initiative. We answer their questions and address their concerns and comments and post that communication publicly. The metrics we want basically boil down to, 1. No response 2. Response but no comment or didn't read. 3. Support (with or without comments) 4. Don't support (with or without comments). At the same time we are petitioning the public for support of the project initiatives. So the project puts forward real solutions. We petition the public and show them what their elected officials think about our solutions or if they even took the time to comment on it. So there will be a measured contrast between what the public support is for the project and what the elected officials that the public put in office think about it.
Now the public petitioning and Q&A is pretty straightforward. The elected official communication however is an enormous task from a numbers and data perspective. Now the census bureau actually does a "Census of Governments" every five years but this is only for the number of governmental units. After some googling I was able to find a "popularly elected officials" document but it's dated 1992 and I can't find anything after that. So from what I gather they stopped counting the number of elected officials. But the 1992 document (http://www.census.gov/prod/2/gov/gc/gc92_1_2.pdf) had the number at 513,200. So let's work with 750,000 just to be on the safe side. Now the essential idea is that we are creating a "mirror" of the government so as a project I think we need to have at least as many participants. So let's go with 1,000,000 people actually working within the project. We won't need that many active people to get started that's just the end goal for the total pool of potential volunteers.
This system will be complicated by the fact that every two years a lot of these contacts are going to change. So in addition to who we're in contact with, where and what office they hold, we need to know when that spot is open for election. But since we won't be pushing initiatives until we've got all of them we have time to sort that out. Also, there's at least a month and a half before the switch occurs so assuming we're organized there shouldn't be a problem. If one participant can update and maintain a list of 100 officials in a month and we have an average of 15,000 officials per state we should be able to document an entire state in one month with 150 people. So if we have 600 people actively doing this initially we should be able to document the entire country in under a year. Then it's simply a matter of assigning volunteers in each state to maintain the lists and be responsible for initiating communication on a monthly basis. So if we figure each participant can manage communication with 50 officials then we need 15,000 participants total or about 300 per state.
So every month we're trying to communicate with all these people. Now naturally every official is not going to respond but let's say they do three times a month (you initiate, they respond, you answer, they respond again, etc.) and the project participants give a response to each and every communication. However, the person initiating the communication is not responsible for answering the questions necessarily. The communication requiring response all goes into a pool and the work is divided up among participants with priority given to those who have the highest reputation for answering questions about the initiative (process not described here). Doing some math, 3 times a month for 750,000 officials creates a workload of about 6,200 responses per day. Now the Q&A from the public concerning the initiative would follow the same format but those questions would simply be submitted semi-anonymously (name and location) and aggregated by county. So let's say the public communication plus the official communication comes to around a 20,000 response workload per day. So if we figure we have participants answering an average of 1 question per day then we need about 20,000 participants devoted to this task. That comes to 35,000 people or about 700 per state just to handle communication with officials and the public and data maintenance.
The Initiatives
As I said above an initiative is anything that would require a change in the law, a repeal of a law, or an addition of a law. There would need to be two essential processes. One process would involve breaking out the initiatives into logical pieces, researching them individually, debating them and approving them. Each initiative would be documented and explained to where an average person could understand not only what the initiative hopes to accomplish but should also address common concerns. Each initiative should be categorized with respect to whether it's a federal initiative, a state initiative that could apply to any state, or a state initiative that applies to only one state. Yes, we are communicating with officials at all levels of government but the scope is only towards the state and federal government legislative processes. County laws, budgets, local bond issues, etc. are outside the project scope.
Since the legislatures only meet for part of the year the initiatives need to be completed way before then. The initiatives that are finalized need to be prioritized and then the second process started. The second process is independent of the first. The second process involves crafting the laws into specific legislation to be submitted to the corresponding committee. Ideally, the teams for each state that do this and the federal team will be made up of lawyers and officials as well as and/or who are project participants. The feedback for how far each initiative got in the process will be recorded as part of the initiative data. The second process will require the most strategy. If we have say 30 initiatives for a team to implement and 6 months to do it then 5 initiatives per month need to be crafted. This is why we need a couple years before we even push any initiative. We will need to learn this process and develop the right contacts to do this. On the other hand, once an initiative has been crafted into law, resubmitting it during the next election cycle if it fails shouldn't be difficult. So the up front investment in research in both processes will be immense but after a few years of doing this it will be a known quantity and hopefully efficient.
Let me make a few points about this and then I will give an example initiative. As I said, we are going for an all or nothing approach. But that is only relation to public and official support of the initiatives. Meaning we aren't asking everyone to vote on specific initiatives. The project participants are pushing them all and we publish the metrics for how much support we have for the project as a whole, but each individual initiative can pass or not individually. The people working on these and crafting them are the public so it stands to reason that for any initiative to get a consensus it would also have a majority of support within the general public.
Example Initiative
Some of these initiatives, in the process of researching and getting a consensus will highlight other problems. Before going into ideas for managing this process let me give an example.
If this project gets off the ground one initiative I plan on working on is simplifying state taxes by collecting all taxes on land, property, and vehicles. Now there are many in the movement who have economic theories of why this isn't ideal, some related to theories that I think the average person doesn't really get or care about, and some who simply don't like any tax they can't avoid. Now I work for my state's department of revenue so I have first hand knowledge of the end result of our ridiculous tax scheme. In my opinion, it's unfair, way too messy, and above all it's self-reported and very susceptible to all manner of fraudulent practices. It's my view that the only thing the government really has a grasp on is how much land, property, and vehicles are out there and what their value is.
I'm not stating my case here but want to make a point about issues that would or could arise from such an initiative. From a theoretical standpoint some may have valid theories that it somehow punishes one sector over another. If this can be shown then that simply means that part of the initiative might be to discount certain sectors. For instance, some may complain that it eliminates the "Earned Income Credit" associated with an income tax return punishing working families. So in the process of researching the initiative things like that need to be considered and accounted for. Another issue that will crop up with many of these initiatives will be that we are downsizing various sectors. For instance this kind of tax initiative would basically eliminate most of my department in addition to a sizable chunk of the tax accounting industry in my state. So we would likely need a serious initiative to deal with unemployment and also with the main source of people's fear of unemployment which is strongly tied to the availability of healthcare. So in addition to describing the legal aspects of an initiative we also need to address the perceived social impacts of these initiatives and where possible relate them to other initiatives that are being developed.
Notes on the Banks
A core focus of the movement is banking reform. So naturally a lot of people will want to be involved and push this initiative. I've personally spent a lot of time over the last 10 years looking into this problem and my main issue with moving forward quickly on such a huge monster is that we have sketchy data. The banking problem needs to be approached delicately and should be done incrementally. For instance, "end the fed" might be the end goal but it isn't going to be done in a single legal stroke. We need to be creative and strategic when approaching the banking problem. Audits would be a start. Personally I would like to see laws passed that make public any firm or individual that receives over a million dollars in loans per year from the banking system. The inflation and bubble issue is subtle but the main effect the banking system has is distributing massive economic power directly through loans completely irrespective of whether that economic actor is healthy for the economy as a whole. Competing sound money currencies would be another angle and if federal legal tender laws could be repealed we could implement this on a state by state basis. The public may not go for private entities issuing this currency and it may not even be a good idea but certainly a state should be able to do this (it was done in the colonies before independence) and if it does the mechanics should be transparent.
Communication processes and moderation
The process of communicating with officials and the public via Q&A and documenting and publishing this information is straightforward. The process of dividing up the work of implementing the initiatives into legislation also has well defined inputs and outputs even though the up front organizing and making the proper contacts will be difficult. These components are mostly mechanical in nature. The bulk of what we are doing, however, is communicating. And the main problem with communicating online, as anyone who has spent a significant amount of time online can tell you, is information overload and noise.
The main thing-the most important thing-that needs to be kept in mind concerning this is that we are trying to reach people and teach people. The best way in my opinion to teach and reach people is a stream of discussion which relates our strategy and our philosophy to current events and our project initiatives. Not only to discuss what we've got a consensus on as far as initiatives but also to discuss the project itself, how to improve it, how to build on it, etc. Everyone loves to talk naturally, but this project is not about creating some gigantic forum for 10's of thousands of people to talk endlessly in 1000 different directions. I would say we need isolated discussions. 1 for general philosophy and strategy. 1 for federal. 1 for each state. 1 for each initiative. 1 for discussion about project infrastructure and protocol. These would be discussion streams dealing with current problems and issues. This isn't to say we're limiting people's interactive discussions we're simply constraining the discussion we are publishing and moderating. People are of course encouraged to collaborate independently. All the stuff that's already been nailed down like introductory material, how to access the published data, initiative documents, project protocols, would be static for the most part and as condensed as possible. This would not be a forum to discuss esoteric economic or political theories that are only related to the project goals in an abstract sense. There are plenty of places online to do that. The idea would be to give people a direction on what to study, empower people and show how the ideas we believe in relate to action.
So we aren't creating a standard forum. We are creating an on topic discussion stream. Basically a glorified and moderated community blog. The thing that limits this is people's time. This document is already 2800 words. If you are an average person supposedly you read at around 250 words per minute so you have spent 10 minutes of your life reading this and another 35 minutes if you read the whole thing. Assuming you were a hardcore project participant or member of the public and spent three hours a day reading project material and assuming each post was around 1000 words average you would only have time to read 45 posts per day. Ignoring individual initiative discussions that most people probably won't read we would still encourage people to read the philosophical, state, federal and project protocol discussions periodically when they have the time. So let's blow this figure up twenty times and let's assume people are spending say 40% of their time looking at state level discussions. So we have 600 posts per day for national level topics and 20,000 posts per day for state level discussion (400 state level posts * 50). So assuming we have participants who post an average of one post every two days we'd have around 40,000 people devoted to posting to discussion streams. This means then that if we have a participant goal of 1,000,000 people only about 1 out of every 1250 people will be contributing to the discussion per day on average.
The process shouldn't be too difficult though if we break it down. We need a protocol for how the discussion is structured, perhaps question/response format, with a limit to say four posts per question. We'd also need some kind of reputation system that gets people good at expressing ideas and discussing them into the mix but doesn't allow perpetual monopolization of the stream. We would also need a process for moderating noise and off topic and controversial/trollish posters. In the beginning it would likely be heavy on moderation until a medium can be found between what's good moderation and a fair and accountable protocol. But again, the constraining factor needs to be only publishing enough discussion to where an individual we are trying to reach can consume it. If we go beyond that we make the system too complex and require categorization and all that goes with it. People who spend an inordinate amount of time online can use a forum. We don't want to reproduce that or complicate the project by catering to them specifically when there are already plenty of venues for them to frequent.
Protocol and Initiative Consensus
The project itself really has relatively few components. Even so, there are many details and protocols that will have to be worked out. Establishing a workflow for all this will be a huge task. One thing to keep in mind though is that this process need not be real time. It would be nice of course to reach that point eventually but in the interests of simplicity and time we should start out with large enough time cycles that the process is manageable. Even with respect to the discussion streams we're not going to post things to the stream until they've been moderated. The complex part of the whole thing is that essentially we're building a cooperatively managed voluntary system that encourages participants to suggest modifications to rules and protocols for the project itself. So there's a self-referencing aspect. The leadership and moderator structure is ideally a result of a fixed protocol that is modifiable by the participants. Dealing with large numbers of people makes reaching a consensus on modifications a problem as well as disseminating the changes themselves. As a starting point I'd suggest we use a simple method of randomly selecting a subset of the entire group and fielding and resolving objections.
Another significant issue is technology. The primary vehicle for all this is going to be email. However, the data itself will be distributed via a website. Many people who come to ideas like this dealing with large numbers of users seem to automatically gravitate to "let's build a website to do this." I am an application developer by profession and before that I worked on websites. My personal opinion on this is that trying to map a complex protocol onto an application is not only difficult, but even with a low level of complexity the overhead and effort to modify that application is immense. Yes we should use email. Yes we should publish the final data product at regular intervals-the smaller the better-to a common web address. But the application footprint needs to be as small as possible and wherever possible there should be a flexible but efficient human interface. So there's a tradeoff between larger time cycles to get your end product and flexibility of the workflow with respect to coding the protocols in an application. With humans more in control it takes longer to cycle a process but with applications you get less flexibility in terms of how long it takes to change the workflow and retool the data on which it depends.
Marketing in general
Obviously we need to spread the word and attract attention to any project to get it going. I have an idea and strategy for that but first I want to comment on traditional marketing in general.
If the banking system is to be considered insidious in an economic sense I would consider the current practices of marketing in this world equally insidious from a psychological perspective. We are constantly manipulated by buzz words and images that are specifically crafted to alter our behavior. While the average person is well aware of this on a case by case basis their behavior is nonetheless affected in the long run. It's common in every sphere whether it be commercial, political, intellectual, religious, etc. All of the circumstances of our life culminate for all of us in a vocabulary of words we use to market our ideas to one another. Our vocabulary, for better or worse, is heavily influenced by marketing. It's the nature of language and communication to do this but when we self-identify with a word or label we run the risk of having our behavior modified by those who manipulate those words and labels for their own agenda which may or may not be in our best interests.
I spent a couple years working as a research director for a marketing firm about 10 years ago. Primarily I worked on conducting and constructing campaign surveys. The behavior we wanted to manipulate was voting obviously. Either a candidate wanted to get elected or some firm or public entity who was interested in passing a tax increase or a bond issue would hire us. With candidates we first researched what issues people are concerned with which usually had nothing to do with the candidates actual agenda. Based on the research and polling the candidate knew which topics to avoid and which topics to focus on, which topics were hot button issues for whatever party you were trying to reach, which wording was best to use, etc. We had a tax increase initiative where most of the money went to economic development (publicly subsidizing companies to come into the city which is usually organized and pushed by real estate owners and associations) and some went towards repairing bridges (even though the public works portion simply went into the general fund). What the research showed was that people were not receptive to the idea of using tax money for "economic development" because they connected that with private company subsidizing. However they were receptive to "creating jobs". So we tooled the communication to read "Jobs, Roads and Bridges" and we got the city tax increase passed, the government sanctioned association that was comprised of the real estate tycoons of the city got their slush money, and the city got some more fast food restaurants.
Now this process isn't "evil" it's just standard operating procedure pretty much anywhere. The point is that there is no interest or incentive for being transparent with your agenda unless your agenda is for the public good. Using public money to finance private individuals under the guise of "economic development" is never in the public good or else they would make an effort at showing exactly who gets the money and where it's going. So in general, in my opinion, people are very intuitive about this process of deceptive marketing even though they may not say it outright. They know that whenever someone employs traditional marketing there's a 99% chance that they are not marketing their true agenda and intentions. But we are exposed to it so much and from so many angles our decisions can't help but be affected by the process.
The nature of this project is outside any label or fixed "idea" and any overt attempt to market it directly under some banner of "liberty" or "social justice" or whatever else is bound to be inadequate and turn off some people. I would prefer the project not have any name. I would rather the project simply spread by word of mouth and through social networks and not market it through any traditional marketing apparatus like television/newspapers/google ads/banners at all. Obviously the legal entity responsible for managing the data, the money, and the website will have to have a name for government reasons. But I would say, for that purpose, something like "Candy Corn Clouds LLC" is infinitely preferable to something like "The Social Justice Initiative" or "Citizens United for Accountability" or the like. We aren't going to hammer out a philosophical mission statement or a set of beliefs that participants must take an oath about. We are pushing initiatives. Those initiatives are what counts and they should speak for themselves. If you want to discuss your social positions in the streams that's one thing. But whether or not a specific initiative agrees with your intellectual or spiritual mindset is your own affair and there should be no collective attempt to attach those rigid positions to the project in general. If an initiative is solid that should be all that matters. Whether you are a progressive or a conservative or a muslim or a christian, while it might be relevant to your choice to support it, is not relevant to the project or initiative. Attempting to call or label an initiative "libertarian" or "agorist" or "anarchist" or "christian" is pointless and only generates unnecessary conflict.
A specific marketing tactic
That said, any project, especially one with an epic end goal like this one, could use some help getting off the ground and attracting interest. While I don't like the idea of direct marketing and trying to nail down and condense the project into a 30 second ad I do like the idea of marketing it in an indirect way.
This part of the project many might not agree with or may have better ideas but I've thought about it for a while and it's kind of stuck with me. I wanted something simple that requires little overhead and that doesn't try to frame the project with buzz words and jingoism. My idea is to have people pledge $50 a month towards a fund that will be randomly distributed to one of the pledgers when a threshhold of $15,000 is reached. This would be given to a maximum of 5 people a month with each person receiving no less than $15,000 and no more than $100,000 which means that this marketing tool would not kick in without at least 300 participants and would max out at 10,000.
I've actually worked out a lot of the details of how this could be done but I just want to hit on the main points. First, you don't just "get" the money. You must spend all the money within 30 days "Brewster's Millions" style. In order to qualify (aside from identifying yourself and certain protocols related to verifying the bank account) you'd need to be social networking friends (Facebook for instance) with a few other pledgers. A month before the money is distributed your social network (friends, family, local news, etc.) would be notified that you were to receive the money and the protocol for how you are expected to spend it. Some of the rules would be that you can't pay off your own debts, you can't spend it on close friends or family, you have to spend it on consumables (not for you) and physical products. No gift cards or investments, no buying ad time or space, no marketing of any specific political or social agenda, a $500 limit or so for any 1 person, all purchases must be documented, no paying off people's existing debts, there must be a witness to all your transactions, and other restrictions along those same lines. The point would be to do this creatively. You could go into a bar or restaurant and pay for people's food or pay for someone's walmart purchase at the checkout line but you wouldn't be able to donate to a political candidate or spend all of the money on a car or paying off someone's medical bills.
Essentially it's a publicity stunt that's agnostic to your belief system or personal agenda. You are simply expected to follow protocol and do creative and (hopefully) relatively good things in your community. Some might think that this is a bad idea and everyone will try to game the system for personal benefit but I'm guessing most people would do it properly. Even if 20% of the people cheat for their own personal gain I would still consider it a success. Others may think that this is a complete waste of resources altogether and that the idea of potentially spending $500,000 a month on nothing other than indirect publicity is ridiculous. First off it's voluntary. You are not obligated to participate in it to help with the project. Secondly, if the project is to appeal across the whole political and ideological spectrum what endeavor could we find involving money that everyone would agree on? And even if we found one it would likely benefit a specific person monetarily and that is what we want to avoid.
The more you think about it the more you will realize this isn't necessarily going to be fun for the person doing it. First they have to get a statement from a tax accountant to figure out how much of the money is going to go towards taxes. Then they have to deal with everyone around them bugging them and trying to give them ideas. It will be even more stressful if they have people close to them who are struggling with their finances. They also have to worry about security. It will probably be stressful in many ways. It's a moral test in that you have to ignore your personal situation in order to support the cause. It's also an experiment in faith and trust in that many people might think the idea is interesting but have little faith that a regular person wouldn't break the protocol for their personal benefit. That to me is the main appeal of the idea. Any cooperative system will fall apart if we don't have faith that the people participating are sincere in their efforts to cooperate so this marketing tool is an experiment to demonstrate just how well that commitment is adhered to in the individual chosen to spend the money.
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[NOTE] The content here (between the "A specific marketing tactic" section and the below "The Contest" section) has been removed as the post was too long for an RPF thread. Please refer to the google doc linked at the top of this post for the full document.
I marked that document with red [THIS PART CLIPPED IN RPF POST] tags to indicate which part is missing from this post.
[/NOTE]
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The Contest
The contest then isn't part of the project. It's just a tool I'm trying to use to focus discussion on strategy and other people's opinions on the project and the movement in general. It is also a means of managing my time. It is kind of a prototype though for how the discussion streams mentioned in the project could operate. The specific details about the contest rules can be found on the contest thread. This section outlines the general rules.
In order to be eligible you need to have joined RPF in 2011 or before and have a post count of at least 500. If you don't then someone who does must nominate you. The contest is open to 12 people. The contest requires that you answer the contest question in essay form with between 1000 and 5000 words. Responses for round 2 and 3 must also be between 1000 and 5000 words. You have 3 days from the date you enter the contest to submit your first round answer. If you enter the contest but fail to meet the deadline or your answer isn't in the word range the next contestant will be chosen and will have three days to answer the question. I will respond to all 12 entries. A two day public RPF poll will then be held to eliminate 3 contestants based on their essays. After the conclusion of the poll the remaining 9 will have 3 days to follow up to my response (and read the others responses as well if they so choose) and another two day poll will again be conducted and another 3 contestants will be eliminated. The remaining 6 will again have three days to generate another follow up response which I will again reply to. After that another two day poll will be held to eliminate all but one contestant. That contestant will receive $100 as an award.
I will respond to each answer and follow up response as they come in but the voting will take place regardless of whether I have responded. If you get your response in early I may respond before the voting happens. I will also respond to the last response but the entire cycle will last 12 days from the receipt of all 12 entries and I am giving myself 10 days beyond that to submit all my responses and before I commit to starting another cycle. The rules may change in future cycles. The contest isn't guaranteed to pay out until I get 12 qualified contestants who submitted the first round of answers. After the first round though if you don't meet the deadlines you are simply eliminated and there is no replacement. If only 1 of the 9 replies in time for the second round he or she wins by default. If the responses aren't received early enough for me to respond you may have to base your round 2 and 3 responses on the answers of others and my response to them or simply elaborate on your original answer..
The question is as follows:
"The idea that prompted this contest is related to a strategy for improving social conditions by promoting transparency and intelligent participation in government. The target audience for this idea are those individuals who express interest in promoting a social order that is made up of individuals who through nonviolent means inhibit and diminish the propagation of organized deception and aggression. What are your thoughts on such a society and what strategies do you see as being a means to bring people closer to it? How does your personal philosophy or spirituality and your technical and theoretical knowledge factor into your action towards these goals? Do you have any specific opinion on the strategy that prompted this contest? What is your opinion on the goals of the movement you see yourself or others as being part of?"
The question is broad and you won't be disqualified because you didn't answer any part of this question directly. You can talk about whatever you want as a rule and I will respond though your response may be voted on in whichever way by the RPF members who participate in the poll and can view your answers and responses. The main topic is simply strategy that works towards the goals of the movement but you are free to relate it to your own views and experiences, your theories, or whatever you'd like. You can talk about how you think everything is hopeless, you can talk about what you think my motivations are, trust issues you have with ideas like these in general, anything is game.
Observations about the contest
I made a point earlier about rigid rule systems related to applications. Video games work for interaction because a computer has no other means to operate than by a fixed set of rules. Dealing with human behavior however is a different animal altogether. Any voluntary system of cooperation based on human action is bound to have holes in it no matter how well defined the protocol. In this contest for instance perhaps no one will participate. Or perhaps some will enter but not meet the deadlines. Or people will try to game the voting. The more the personal reward is the more people who are driven by that award will try to work the system. Others who see this might not want to participate simply because they see how others would game it even if they wouldn't themselves. So any system of voluntary cooperation needs to take this into account. You can't eliminate it but you can discourage it. I'm aware of these problems and considerations but I don't think they really matter. It's just a means I'm using towards an end. I don't have great expectations that the contest itself will generate some epic reaction. The information about how it progresses is all I really expect.
Blanket statements
I've made a lot of generalizations in this document that some may agree with and others may find insulting, wrong, or irrelevant. I am operating blindly though. I'm only given opinions and my insights on a very broad problem and I have no idea who will even read this or what their positions and opinions are. It's much easier to give a more exact opinion about someone else's opinion in relation to another specific observation. We could all write books on all the various things we know about and understand but dialogue between opposing views works more efficiently at getting to the root of a problems components. I could elaborate all day on the intricate minutia of this or that part but if 75% of the people interested see problems with the fundamental premise then that's what needs to be discussed.
So this document is really a generalization of a problem. It's a guidepost and the contest is intended to further the discussion in the direction of implementing solutions in line with it. I'm not attacking or judging the "movement" and I'm not going to be disrespectful to people because they don't agree. This isn't something where if I don't get 100 people interested in two weeks I'll moan and wail and damn anyone who doesn't support it.
My mini-bio
I'm 34 and have been an application developer (computer programmer) for about 6 years now. Worked in market research for a few years and with family businesses prior to that. The short time I was in the military, around 19, I worked as a health physics technician. I did well in school, was strong in math, mostly A's with a few B's and one or two C's. From about 17 though I became interested in "social problems". A lot of it stemmed from being from a lower middle class family and witnessing a lot of the effects of the breakdowns in family and community that in no small way were related to uncontrollable economic factors.
Two things really set my course when I was young. As a teenager I became interested in martial arts for self-defense and overall "coolness" factor. Watching a movie about Bruce Lee's life I found out that he had written a book titled the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Jeet Kune Do is the name for the "art" he had developed and it was based on his study of philosophy and life in general. His basic premise is that for any art to be fully developed the individual must be fully developed and he must operate outside any fixed style. That any commitment to a method or style psychically opens you up for attack for anyone who understands that technique but is not committed to it. That life is movement and you must follow that movement and adapt your methods for solving the problems that life creates accordingly. The problem is always changing so no specific method, style, or theory will ever apply in all cases. The thought occurred to me then that this same mentality could be used to approach social problems. And I saw, sure enough, later on that indeed people do get caught up in theories and ideals so much that they aren't even looking at the problem anymore.
So that was the first thing. I was instantly hooked on eastern thought and philosophy in general. The second thing that happened was around 19 when I happened across a book in the library called "Financial Terrorism" published in 1993 by the John Birch Society. I knew intuitively that the problem with society, in addition to general suffering caused by violence and injustice, was also related to economic problems. Reading this book changed the whole game as it confirmed many suspicions I had about massive public debt and the federal reserve. So these two factors were really the initiating and guiding forces for my future work and study in this arena. That being my personal philosophy and my growing awareness of the huge economic factors that lead to social deterioration.
Christianity also factors heavily into my thinking but it wasn't until my mid 20's that it really started to sink in. In high school I was all about science and outwardly purely atheistic. I got great enjoyment out of ridiculing Christians and the idea of some guy who claimed to be God and seemingly failed in every possible way in his mission. I was exposed to it and read about it quite a bit but I didn't understand it and it's easier to ridicule something you don't understand than admit your unsure of what it means. Even in my late teens when I understood some of the general ideas and related them to other schools of religious thought I didn't talk about it or give it importance. The message and meaning that it has to me now though I consider fundamental and it is very ironic that I thought so highly of my intellect and knowledge when I was young but something so fundamental and obvious escaped me for such a long time.
So prior to 2007 when I became aware of the Ron Paul movement I was already familiar with a lot of economic theory. I had studied banking and the federal reserve, I'd read Henry George and others, I was aware of Gary North (who writes for Lew Rockwell's blog) and his economic ideas from his writings on Y2K, I had looked into digital currency alternatives, I had looked into Catherine Austin Fitts ideas for creating neighborhood equity corporations and numerous other ideas people had put forward related to solving this difficult problem. When the Ron Paul movement had formed I was even more focused on understanding this problem as I realized there was a huge number of people following a similar line of thinking and if any solution was to be found and adopted it could happen through this crowd more than any other. Voluntarism, sound money, nonviolence, grassroots action, all of the necessary components seemed to be right in front of us.
Over the next few years I watched what was happening and how people were interacting and it gradually dawned on me that the problem wasn't our potential or our ability to understand the social problems. It was our lack of ability to cooperate and form strategies on a local and personal level. We have a similar vision but on a personal level we still have trust issues with dealing with other people, we still feel like people are prone to do things just for money, we are aware that most people's ideas are half-baked and lack potential, etc. Essentially we still can't act. In the beginning there was a lot of action and it was creative but based on a lot of the attitudes coming from higher up a lot of people's balloons got popped. It seems to me now that a lot of people have reverted to thinking that the grassroots has power for sure, but the guidance and leadership must come from people higher up.
That's what this project is about to me. It is about empowering people to act at a local and personal level and outline and develop tools to actually cooperate. Not endless talk about cooperation and voluntarism but figure out what the specific necessary steps are to achieve that. This has been my focus as of late and even though I've only started forming specific ideas along these lines over the last couple years it's been 17 years in the making as far as I'm concerned. I think the people in this movement have tremendous potential and even though some may think the end goal is overly ambitious or even unachievable I think what we learn on the journey between here and there is probably more valuable than the specific initiatives themselves. Developing tools that allow people to have measurable effects on the society to which they belong outside the sphere of their own personal job and economic situation I think is the very substance of a self-governed society.
End
So there you have it. That's my take on this mess we're in. If you want to participate in the contest and potentially win $100 worth of federal reserve notes the details on entering and participating are on this thread:
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?414226-100-RPF-Discussion-Contest-(CCCC-No-1)
If you can't wait to get started you can email me or private message me directly at wizardwatson at gmail dot com but I have no specific work for you to do at the moment I'm just trying to gauge interest and I don't know if that will happen on any significant scale or how long it would take. Humans are unpredictable on an individual level so we'll see how it goes. I'd encourage people simply to think it over and discuss it but if you do email me, as I said, I'll do my best to respond and give you input on others who have responded to me directly. It's all based on time so if hardly anyone cares or pays attention it will be easy to get back to you but if too many people do the necessity for organized cooperation and communication will be obvious and I'll try to deal with it. Before that though I'll probably do some kind of poll to see how many are interested in general so that whoever might be interested in organizing can at least have a general idea of the number of potential volunteers.
This thread
The contest is where I'll spend the most effort responding in detail to ideas but you can use this thread to ask questions or whatever but I don't know how much time I'll have to respond to it. If you are the only one reading this and no one joins my contest then perhaps we can talk quite a bit and I'll get to keep my $100.
- David Watson
P.S. Again THIS IS NOT THE CONTEST THREAD. So don't post here that you want to enter. Go over to the thread above and read and enter there but keep general questions in this thread.
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