Caracas Chronicles

I’m still more or less floored by the response to my call for volunteers to craft a Conditional Cash Transfer Program proposal. There’s amazing expertise out there. I’m only a little bit concerned I won’t really have the resources to keep all y’all busy over coming months. But then, I even have volunteers offering to coordinate communications among the other volunteers – plop!

The more I think about it, the more I think this is a great opportunity to bring a kind of Open Source sensibility to the policy-drafting process. If thousands of volunteers can collaborate to make something as complicated as a computer operating system at a distance, with no definite boss and no organizational hierarchy, then we can certainly work together to craft a detailed policy proposal that stands up to scrutiny using a radically decentered model.

As with Linux, I grasp that some volunteers have more experience and more developed skills in given areas than others, so this isn’t about some out of place egalitarianism. Those able to do more will have to do more. But the principle that the work is public, the data are rueda libre and the formulas are open to anyone’s scrutiny will be very important here.

One nice thing is that there’s a good attitude at the political level to a project like this. The MUD has already included Conditional Transfers on its list of 100 Solutions for the People – its de facto common platform. It’s #51.

MUD know they need to start now the process of drafting specific plans. But, like everyone in Venezuela who’s not plugged into the petrodollar stream, they’re on survival mode. They need support.

Well, this is something real and specific that the Diaspora can do to help. Let’s!

#21…I can’t believe I said “radically decentered” in a post…