Good morning from Santa Barbara --

I got a private note asking a question about this tagging system. My friend raised an important issue, and I thought I would post my answer here.

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GD: I'm only seeing the "think globally" part of this information infrastructure. How does your design also help us "act locally?" We need both, balanced, to have an optimized information system. Thanks so much for this.

Bruce: Thanks for the note and the energy.

Lots of questions around all of this stuff – in part because it is so compact --

But here is a quick answer to your question:

1. Any tag can be an “issue”
2. Any tag can be a “position on an issue”
3. Any tag can be a proposed action on that issue
4. Any tag can be “regionalized” (put on a google map)
5. There are any number of ways that this system can develop “voting” and collective decision-making or collective intelligence. We can look at things like sociocracy and holacracy – and also, at something like the book suggested in the last couple of days on NCDD, on “small group democracy” – which looks great to me: http://tinyurl.com/DSG2Kindle

So – a network can form around any issue in any region, considering any position(s) that anyone who is interested cares to introduce.

The same network structure could be used to organize advocacy at a local level around any issue.

And – opponents of that position could also organize in the same regional space – and then – those two networks taking different positions could negotiate towards a “win/win” approach that includes "everybody who cares" about that issue -- one way or the other.

This is one way this entire concept can immediately become “transpartisan”.

I've been describing this framework in broad terms as "a universal people's parliament" -- that can take on anything anyone wants to bring forward, and intimately regionalize when the issues are local.

How local can an issue be?

Probably right on down to the family dining room table....

Google maps run on "latitude and longitude" -- so, all you have to do to intimately "locate" or regionalize your tag is enter an address that Google can recognize. That's easy and fast.

So for right now -- the development issue is -- get some people and some tags into this framework, and start unfolding and exploring the best way to lay all this out. I've got five different computers and five different browsers -- though that's not really enough. We need a layout for hand-helds and smartphones -- really tiny, no wasted screen space, minimum graphics. But this is not hard to do.