A Funny Thing Happened
Pseudolus: Wait!
Hero: Yes?
Pseudolus: A brilliant idea!
Hero: YES?
Pseudolus: That's what we need, a brilliant idea.
-- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)
When we first began to design the structure of the Institute, there were two legacy features of the ol’ MWP we knew we wanted to incorporate: Forums and Roundtables. As a political party our community had never quite gotten them to work as intended, or at least not up to their potential. But we always loved the concepts, and we thought our new form and mission might be a better fit for both.
It turned out we were right. And not only did we think we could get them to function a lot more smoothly and effectively, we realized we should actually make them the foundation of the Institute’s work. After all, the Forums were always supposed to serve primarily as an idea generator, and the main purpose of the Roundtables had always been to refine the ideas into concrete policy proposals. Perfect for a think tank.
Simple enough. Or so we thought. Enter our invaluable consultant, Taylor Valley, who seems to have a knack for suddenly taking things a level or two higher than you may have expected to go. And he had an idea for handling the Forums (we’ll discuss the Roundtables in depth in our next blog post) which not only snapped them into place immediately, but actually changed and expanded our vision of the Institute’s very nature.
You see, it all comes down to the issue of community. We could have just built a think tank along the usual lines -- raise some money, open an office, hire some research fellows and off you go -- and there are elements of that model we do indeed anticipate using. But it just didn’t feel like enough for us; too many Whigs had too many good things to say to be left out in the cold, excluded from some insular entity which took it upon itself to hurl missives from on high in their name.
We needed to be inclusive. And although we are by no means populists (far from it, in fact), we are most assuredly participatory. After all, our roots lie in opposition to the tyranny of the crown and in support of -- indeed, insistence on -- legislative primacy. It’s only natural for one of the most important institutions within our movement to reflect those values and characteristics.
So when it came time to design the tech stack of the new website, Taylor presented several options for hosting the Forums. The one he recommended -- and the one we eventually selected -- was Discourse, a flexible, open-source platform created to support self-governing community discussions. And as it turns out, not only did that particular application fit perfectly with our mission to serve the wider Whig community, it also opened up a new way of thinking about the Institute.
By placing the Forums at the very start of our process and funneling as much work (like our Members Blog, for instance) through them, we’ve established a model of broad, unified group action we quite frankly didn’t have in mind in the early conceptual stages of the Institute’s development. We suddenly had the opportunity to put the work of the Institute literally in the hands of the members themselves.
We’re actually not Davos.
"World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2008" by World Economic Forum is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
To be clear: we always had some form of cooperative effort in mind, and we always expected the Forums to be at the heart of it. But now we could actually center the Forums and build the Institute around them. The constant, ongoing conversations and debates Whigs and our sympathizers have been conducting on social media (and still do) could be put to use within the Institute on a familiar-feeling, but more functional, platform than sites like Facebook could provide.
Our process now begins with formal, dues-paying membership. Once someone joins, they’re immediately sent a welcome email with instructions for creating an account on Discourse (at no additional charge, of course) and joining the Forums. Once there, members will find our five main Policy Halls, plus some additional Categories (the term Discourse uses for channels) we thought prudent to add. Users are immediately able to post anything they like and comment on any of the existing threads.
At this point we haven’t hit the user threshold to make Discourse fully functional, but we’re very close. As soon as we get there more features will open up and the Forums will take on a life of their own. Any individual member, through constant participation, will be able to move up into roles of greater influence and responsibility. Already, any suggestion can find its way to the Roundtables through consensus, but as the user base grows we expect to refine even that process even further.
What’s more, the platform places the same intense emphasis on civility as we do and have formalized their attitude in the Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse. We highly recommend new users review them, if for no other reason than to get the feel of what we’re trying to do and how we intend to go about it -- although of course compliance will be enforced by the community itself.
We are confident by taking this approach the Institute will do something unique in the world of think tanks. Our member-centered model is already pretty innovative. By taking it a step further and making the actual work member-centered as well we think we’ve taken a giant stride toward achieving a goal our community has had in mind all along: creating a Modern Whig culture of policy development based on authenticity, civility and service.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org.
