On the advice of one wikipedia admin I've already recruited, I'm emailing this list to seek a few others to help me with a research experiment I'm hoping to undertake. Basically, I'm interested in trying to graft Wikipedia's highly effective consensus-editing model onto some currently-jammed political discourse. I've become interested in (the lack of) productive political discourse on the web---the polarization and flame wars that seem to be the norm---and I'm beginning to think about ways to improve the situation. In particular, I'm thinking about social tools that can encourage and help groups to understand their differences and reach agreement _at least_ on the underlying facts of an issue even if they draw different conclusions. A particular example that I find quite interesting is on Wikipedia. There is an article about the Obama health care plan and, more interesting, an article about the debate about the plan. The latter allows users to "go meta" and present some highly non-NPOV opinions about the plan by writing neutrally about the fact that some people hold those opinions. This seems like a really good model for how people who strongly disagree could nonetheless work in good faith to map out the issues of the disagreement. Recently I met the founder of politifact---http://politifact.com/ ---a cool site that "fact checks" statements by politicians. Apparently, each time they publish one, they get a slew of angry responses on twitter/facebook about how wrong they are---from _both sides_ of the discussion. Since this is a clear case of an underlying _fact_ that is being checked, it seems like an obvious target for reaching consensus. So we brainstormed an experiment. We recruit those angry folk who think politifact got it wrong, and see if they can work together to figure out the "right" answer. Ultimately, we imagine creating some tools to help do this. But we wanted to start with some experiments to understand how the discussion process might play out. So we though to start simply by locking all participants in a room---ie, a wiki page---and letting them hash things out there. Obviously that's going to require some ground rules---which we can lift straight out of Wikipedia, taking the page about debate about Obama's plan as a model. But equally obviously, it's going to require some _enforcement_ of those ground rules. Since Wikipedia admins are familiar with the ground rules, the enforcement process, and the tools supporting it, it seemed natural to see if we could recruit some of you as the policemen to walk that beat. So that's the story. If you're interested in participating, please contact me. thanks -- David Karger Professor, EECS MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab 32 Vassar St. Cambridge, MA 02138 http://people.csail.mit.edu/karger