There is an increasingly recognized need for technical tools that would allow for real co-ordination, decision making and collaborative authoring to take place amongst progressive groups, without requiring participants to actually meet all the time. These tools will be based on collective production, filtering and editing of content, automated information sharing, participatory decision making, transparency & peer-review, and a mechanism to perpetually improve the tools being used. Whatever form they ultimately take, the next generation of technical tools also needs to fit into people’s lives more seamlessly.

There is an increasingly recognized need for technical tools that would allow for real co-ordination, decision making and collaborative authoring to take place amongst progressive groups, without requiring participants to actually meet all the time. These tools will be based on collective production, filtering and editing of content, automated information sharing, participatory decision making, transparency & peer-review, and a mechanism to perpetually improve the tools being used. Whatever form they ultimately take, the next generation of technical tools also needs to fit into people’s lives more seamlessly.

E-mail, listserves and web sites were revolutionary tools because they allowed individuals and communities to communicate instantaneously and internationally, and the advent of dynamic user-provided-content web sites provided a participatory alternative to the mainstream media. However, e-mail is disorganized, web-based resources are dispersed, and users often suffer from “information overload