Help pilot “What Are They Thinking” — A crowdsourced tool to help understand political perspectives
Do you like to write? Do you have opinions about politics? I need your help piloting an experimental website called What Are They Thinking (WATT). My goal with WATT is to crowdsource the many political and ideological perspectives that don’t get covered in today’s media. For example, on WATT you might find articles like:
- What a conservative thinks about the national debt
- What a socialist thinks about healthcare
- What a libertarian thinks about gun rights
But more importantly, you might also find articles like:
- What a midwest conservative thinks about the national debt during the Trump presidency
- What a millennial socialist thinks about Bernie Sanders’ medicare for all plan
- What a New England libertarian thinks about a ban on assault rifles
Sometimes, it’s good to get an overview of how a large group of people thinks. That’s most of what you get with today’s media — what do conservatives and liberals think? What do Democrats and Republicans think? But as you go deeper into the issue, those groups splinter. Factions branch off from those groups based on state laws, generation-defining events like wars, or any other host of factors. These details are critical to understanding the real context on an issue, and therefore critical to creating policies and solutions to resolve those issues.
But few organizations have the time or resources to research and report about all those perspectives. That’s why What Are They Thinking is designed as a wiki — to allow for people with different perspectives to contribute their point of view.
In order to find out how something like this might work, I’m going to pilot an edit-a-thon for WATT. We’ll connect over Google Hangouts or Skype for about an hour, and we’ll each write an explainer for how we perceive a particular issue. Here’s a prototype example. Some things will go right, others will not, and we’ll learn together about how something like WATT should work.
Interested? Sign up here. Questions, comments? I’m @sonofdiesel on Twitter.
