Meta Questions: What is Possible?

It has been pointed out that left wing blogs are more action oriented than right wing blogs, which are largely editorial.  Many comments on this site seem to be groping at some sort of solution to this discrepancy.  It should be unsurprising that many of these comments are themselves ironically editorial in nature, urging any number of solutions to the GOP’s woes.

Of course there’s a place for editorializing, and I do my fair share too.  I’ll try not to editorialize here, but rather ask some questions I think need answering with the hope that somebody out there has better answers than I do.  Please feel free to chime in with either solutions or more problems in need of solutions.

The right lacks a decision making mechanism to focus our collective idle brainpower on specific campaigns or issues unless we’re smacked over the head with something like Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  How does any community of “online activists” decide what issues to focus on, what (down ticket) races to follow, what represents the acceptable/orthodox, and what is unacceptable/unorthodox?  (I’ve seen much more diversity of thought on this site than I had anticipated, so this is no small task.)

I’ve seen more than one suggestion of a new Contract With America, each accompanied by a unique set of more or less specific policies.  What is the mechanism for whittling those policies down to a “sellable” slate of ideas that candidates might latch on to?  Simple online polls are not scientific, particularly without identification or exclusion mechanisms.  (Otherwise Ron Paul would be the Republican nominee.)

The congressional race in my own district is likely to be unexciting.  But other races in Pennsylvania (in my case) are interesting.  A focused outside effort could perhaps swing a given race, but a diffuse effort is unlikely to move the needle.  I’m at least an hour’s drive from a population center in any given adjacent district, so I’m reluctant to dive head first into a race with which I have no natural connection.  What infrastructure exists (or could exist) to help an online community “adopt” a particular race?  How do we deal with the existing campaign infrastructure?  Campaign managers are not the type of folks to hand over a big chunk of their organization to a bunch of cyberpunks.

Do we face a problem of too wide a geographic disbursement?  Democratic areas tend to have high population density while Conservative areas tend to have lower population density.  Does this prevent us from utilizing Meet-up style technologies as effectively as Democrats?  How much does this inhibit spontaneous real-world participation?

How does a community promote follow-up on good ideas?  I’ve seen a few good ideas floated here, but so far it seems like most of the online right is a suggestion box waiting impatiently for the powers-that-be to spontaneously get with the program.

This is a bit out of step with the rest of this post, but I’ll throw in a suggestion for this site that’s been used on other sites like Slashdot.  A moderator should arrange for an interview with some well-known or important individual, and the community can suggest (and debate) questions to be asked of the interviewee.  It won’t work quite as well without a social moderation system to weed out the stinker questions, but I think you guys are bright enough to pick out about ten good questions for such an exercise.

So in summation, I’ve suggested a few problems to get us started... sadly no solutions.  What are some other problems we face to which technology might be a solution, and what might those solutions look like?