Three Steps
The process of organizing consists of three basic steps, which guides our thinking in the design of essembly:
- Step 1: Discuss ideas and through this discussion identify who believes what. This is accomplished through resolves and discussions.
- Step 2: Use social, geographic, and ideological connections to form into groups, or for existing groups to recruit new members.
- Step 3: Take action with these groups.
We fully admit that we are not there yet in allowing for organizing in these three steps. In order to make essembly the platform for discourse and change we want it to be, we need to make each of these steps work. While we would love them all to work asap, we have to start somewhere. We are going to approach these steps in the order listed above. We are doing this because we believe the steps build upon each other. You cannot do the third step of taking action without getting people into groups, and you can’t form into groups unless meaningful discussion is occurring.
Right now we are hard at work on the first step, discussion and identification of beliefs. Some of our goals are to make the profile a “window into your thoughts,” a sort of auto-generated blog that has the advantage of being connected through resolves to the community at large. We also are trying to make the homepage do a better job of giving users a sense of the “zeitgeist” (thanks to Micah Sifry for that) of the site as a whole, the member’s network, and the member’s groups. We also are going to work on the flow between resolves to make it easier to move between interesting resolves. We welcome ideas and feedback on these goals and how we implement them.