UnityWiki

	UnityWiki

The Unity Wiki is available for anyone interested in working collaboratively on content relating to the transformation of politics in an inclusive, muli-partisan, civil, compromise-oriented way using technology and online organizing connected with concrete political alliances with U.S. politicians. The wiki is part of a larger Unity Movement that currently has Unity08 (wikipedia link) at it's core. The Unity Wiki was started by JenniferForUnity.

Here is the {{UnityBlurb}} from the Unity Wiki (as of October 2006):

The Unity Movement (see Unity08, the Mission Statement, the Issues, the Who's Who, the Convention Rules Committee, and check out the Web Forum) is an effort to hold an online convention for every registered voter in the U.S. to select a unifying crucial-issue-oriented presidential ticket in 2008. Think of it as "the vote focused part" of the general political mobilization of the net for 2008. Our first political candidate and an admirable spokesman for the cause is Harry Welty.

What Kinds Of Things Happen There?

• A major source of participation is political bloggers. The Unity Movement is explicitly multi-partisan and trying to find compromise solutions to political issues that professional politicians are either incapable or unwilling to deal with directly. The hope is that political mobilization on the net will produce new dynamics and possibilities that permit issues like the national debt, international economic competitiveness, climate change, and other issues crucial to the welfare of Americans to be addressed. Bloggers are a large group already used to doing politics on the net and the Unity Wiki has a page for Bloggers who support the Unity Movement (and want to up their page rank) to list themselves.
• Another major theme of the movement is that politics is interacting with the the net (think Howard Dean, and the Kos's effects on the 2006 democratic primaries a la Lieberman) and the potential for doing something transformingly good is involved. Setting up an online, multi-partisan, country wide online presidential convention by 2008 is going to involve a programming effort and leads to the inclusion of issues that normal politicians don't always give lots of lip service to, like Free Culture and Open Source.
• A third strand of the wiki is that the Unity Movement is growing especially fast among young people who are beginning to get an inkling of the monstrous debt that older generations are building up and expect younger generations to pay down. Lots of organization is happening on college campuses and the Founders Council of Unity08 was composed of almost 50% college students. If we want the elderly to not be parasites on us we're going to have to say so at the ballot box. We're the "internet generation" (or the "myspace generation?") and this is our medium.