Preface

CivicWiki is an odyssey to discover freedom -- to understand what freedom is, what is good about it, why we should want it, why it is important; and to understand how much we can retain personally and how much must be given up to ensure social order. Developing this understanding is a philosophical and historical pursuit. Part of CivicWiki is devoted to this pursuit.

Perhaps more importantly, CW is also an application of our understanding to the question of how we want our government to behave. Perhaps, most importantly - at least for some of the CW audience - CW is an application of our understanding to debates about the issues that come up in our economic, social, and political lives.

So we have to understand something of its philosophical underpinnings, its social evolution, and the political theory that will ensure it. Then we have to think about the practical effects of all this in terms of government organization and policy as well as social mores.

To those for whom all this 'understanding' stuff is a bit too dry and want to get to the arguments, it is very easy to go straight to the issue debates.

CivicWiki is a personal odyssey. Here, at the beginning, it is the project of one person (though the hope is to attract a number of others to write and edit CW articles). So, perhaps a personal statement is in order.