History

Re: Federated Polity Software Project

Ryan Magnon — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:11:52 GMT

Well, as you know, there's plenty of forums that allow individuals to express themselves as individuals or in a group. There aren't any (that I know of) that allow them to do it based on a regionally structured republic model, so this is a bit of a social experiment. It's my hope that it elevates the individuals best suited to articulate the concerns of the group and encourage other participants to aspire to be that representative. Hopefully, in their aspiration, they educate themselves as well as communicate with and understand the concerns of the people nearest to them. Regardless of whether or not they are elected to be that representative, I believe they will still recognize that they will have a greater influence with this structure than they would as a lone voice. Furthermore congregating individuals by region rather than by classification may discourage the "group rights" mentality. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that users get frustrated by the perceived constraints of the debate and never use the software.

In The 5,000 Year Leap, I don't think Cleon Skousen uses the specific phase " federated polity", that may have been Woods' description of the concept. Instead, he refers to it as the Anglo-Saxon era government model. I believe the new "Glenn Beck" version has a detailed explanation of the model at the end of the book as an appendix.

The video of Tom Woods was exclusive to CFL and available for purchase, and so I am not supposed to share it. Woods also mentions the concept in Question 10 of his book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed To Ask. I've also found the concept in following articles:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods31.html

http://www.humanevents.com/rightangle/index.php?id=20280&title=More_Politically_Incorrect_History

In regards to the SourceForge page: Sourceforge allowed users to create a wiki page and I put the details and figures of the project there, but as of last Thursday, they quit hosting wiki pages on all accounts, so I am working to repost the information on the forums they provide or restore the wiki elsewhere. That being said, there is not much on the sourceforge page, but here is the URL: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fedneighbors/

Please bear with me, I am an experienced programmer, but this is the first opensource project I've done.

Re: Federated Polity Software Project

E. R. Olovetto — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:06:45 GMT

"Elected" and "represent" kind of turn me off........ but I am not familiar with federated polity. Do you have a link to the Woods video or your sourceforge page? The foreward to the new version of that book is written by Glenn Beck. I just downloaded the guy's complete works but it is in HTML so I can't easily search for polity. Do you remember what chapter/area he talks about it in?

Federated Polity Software Project

Ryan Magnon — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:34:08 GMT

I recently heard Dr. Woods on a Campaign For Liberty video discussing the philosophy of a Federated Polity. I had been exposed to this philosophy earlier by the book, The 5000 Year Leap a while ago and it inspired an idea in me of using it as a foundation of an opensource social networking site.

Here's the gist of what I'm trying to do: Basically it's a social networking site like Facebook or Myspace with the difference being that instead of just adding your friends, each user would have their neighbors added to their friends lists automatically (let's say 10 - 20 households of neighbors). Those neighbors discuss issues though a forum, share photos, comments, have profiles, etc. Of those 10-20 neighbors, one is elected to represent those 10-20 neighbors on the next level, let's call it level 2. In level 2, that user interacts with users elected to represent other groups of 10-20 neighbors. This goes on to an indefinite number of levels until the entire country is covered.

My hope is such a site would inspire a more robust national debate. I put the project on sourceforge and I've been trying to drum up some support from other programmers, designers, researchers, and historians because I surely can't do it alone.

Please feel free to reply to this or email me with more questions, thank you.

Ryan Magnon

r.m.magnon@gmail.com