Webocracy Island

[Ian David]

If you mashed up Survivor, Second Life, and a Florida timeshare, you’d have Tribewanted.com, the latest experiment in Internet-enabled democracy. For about $230 a year, you get membership in a global tribe located on the undeveloped island of Vorovoro – just a short connecting flight, a jeep ride, and a boat excursion from Fiji’s Nadi International Airport. The fee entitles Vorovorans to a weeklong stay on the 200-acre paradise (travel costs not included), but more important, it gives citizens access to the tribe’s online presence, where they can participate via email and forums to make consensus decisions, select leaders, and even designate holidays.

Since April 2006, when recruitment started, more than 1,000 of a projected 5,000 people have joined. Last fall, the first band of 100 members – including Ben Keene and Mark James, the earnest twentysomething Brits behind the effort – arrived on Vorovoro to establish basic infrastructure, like a garden and the Great Bure (the community’s main sleeping quarters). Meanwhile, members from more than 25 countries elected their first leader and, in their first referendum, voted by a landslide to install a block of composting-style toilets. And should things ever get too Lord of the Flies, the Mali tribe – which is renting Vorovoro to the Brits on a three-year lease – could just vote the whole project off the island.

More:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.01/start.html?pg=8