P.S. Here's the link to my Purple People Support Group Facebook Page: 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/NBD-Santa-Barbara/180393283140

and the official page for the Purple People in Italy (use google translator to read in English)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Il-popolo-viola/196502997854?ref=ts

Ron

Ron Robinson wrote --- Hey Bruce, Welcome back. Just a quick thought. I've been participating as an educational support group for the "Purple People" in Italy. They are attempting to preserve their democracy and minority rights in the face of prime minister Berlusconi and the Mafia's assault on them. The right wing in the US has a long history of supporting facism and the Mafia in Italy. Karl Rove and Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute have been recently leading the way. Perhaps there's a way of connecting aspects of the "Purple Alliance" concept with the "Purple People" movement in Italy. However, transpartisanship in the face of a growing antidemocratic, proto-fascist movement in Italy won't work, since Partisans are needed to stop this trend... Let's talk. Best, Ron --- On Wed, Jan 13, 2010, in msg269517, Bruce Schuman wrote --- Back from a month on the beach in Thailand, I'm experiencing a strong creative surge. I've been building some community network things for my new friends in Thailand -- and in the last couple of days, suddenly had the drive to put our "Purple Alliance" concept into working form. It's an intense creative process. Something in me knows this is right, and it's what I really want to do. A design like this will work, when everything else is just more talk, more illuminating but overloading insight into the thousands of simultaneous factors that are coming together to form this new vision. For me, it's not so much a new idea from somewhere or somebody who sees the light of a new world. It's how the pieces come together. For me, book-heavy and too informed, it's not more pieces of the jig-saw puzzle I'm looking for. What I need -- what we need -- is a way to put the pieces together. I've been attracted to this "bullet point" approach for a long time. We don't have the time or energy or mental bandwidth to wade through more endless prose. Get to the point. And for me, there's some inspiration to be found in the very popular format on Twitter. Be BRIEF -- get it said quickly. Give us the bottom line. And that's what we need on these hundreds or thousands of contributing insights that are coming together to form this emerging new integral vision -- we need bottom-line simplicity on every single aspect of this vision. Figure it out, get it clear, test it in broad co-creativity in the context of as many voices as possible, and give it to us in mono-syllables. The way I see it right now, all the moving parts of an emerging new political vision can be brought together in this way. Driven by a bottom-up democracy and constrained by integral design, we can bring thousands of "little pieces" together into one integrating framework, where "everything can be put into relationship with everything else." Where do we get the pieces? Motivated people and organizations bring them to us, and we have the broadband framework to contain them all. We're design engineers, we can handle a big flow. All motivated aspects of every motivated issue, from every side of every question, all held together in the simplest possible format, with a "fast click" voter/participant interface that does not overload. That's where this is going, I think. It's workable, because it helps us overcome the massive cognitive overload of thousands of simultaneous factors that our educated and trusting souls know are essential and must be included, but which can never be held in our limited mortal minds in the integral simultaneity of their reality. That was the inspiring motto for this vision -- "Everything at once". I had it prominently displayed on this interface -- but it's too confusing, too far out. I toned it down. But it's there. This feels to me like it just might work. All those underlying design questions seem to be finding answers. How could this really happen? How do we solve all these flow of control and happy user experience issues? How can we be totally persuasive on so many things at the same time, and not be a turn-off to a normal healthy mind? Maybe that's a new motto -- "everything at once, one at a time". Maybe we'll figure that out. Here's a snapshot of this emerging framework, now running online at http://purplealliance.us --- ---