Today I spent some time on Al Gore’s We Can Solve It website for fighting climate change. I was looking through the “actions,” which include:

• write congress to support a global climate change treaty
• write congress to support more clean energy jobs
• tell your friends about our fucking video

Rant

One of government’s traditional roles is to smooth the rough edges of a free market, passing laws to protect elements — like the environment — that are in no single player’s economic interest to protect.

But legislation is an indirect and sloppy way to solve a problem — new laws almost always have loopholes and unforeseen consequences. They punish everyone for the behavior of a few.

The ideal solution is to allow the free market to work; if you have a problem with the behavior of an organization, stop patronizing them, and allow rational economics to drive their policies.

Of course, it’s rarely works that way. Using global warming as an example, let’s look at why not:

1. I don’t know which of the companies I patronize are the greatest perpetrators
2. Because “exiting” these companies could be a great inconvenience, I must consider whether my exit will have an impact
3. Because of the size of these companies and my isolation from the networks of their customers, I rationally conclude that my exit would have no impact

We turn to government because we have incomplete information. We don’t know which companies to go after, and we don’t know if enough others will join us to actually have an impact.

Or at least that’s the way it was. The Point is the antidote, it is the amalgamation of ideas and technologies that bring us closer to the libertarian ideal. It is here today! It’s on the shelves!

So when I see these activist groups, stuck in the old world, waiting around for the government to solve their problems, websites with hardly a corporate target to be found but no shortage of forms to enter your email address, it reminds me of our role, of the importance of what we’re doing.

We have a new, beautiful, easy to use website coming out shortly. Now, our burden is not to build a better mouse trap, but to show the world what a mouse trap is.

Over the past few months, we’ve slowly whittled away at the feature set as we get a clear sense of what’s truly essential. Now that we’ve cut it just about to the bone, I thought I’d lay out the complete list of snips.

CAMPAIGNS

News

News is getting merged into discussion as a special “Announcement” posts the organizers write.

Details

Details on current campaigns are rambling and unfocused. People don’t read them. We’re replacing details with “The Pitch,” a text blob with a (tentative) 1,000 character limit for the creator to make his or her case.

Similarly, we’re getting rid of “Member credentials” and “Explanation of tipping action.”

Multiple organizers

Useful, but not widely used or necessary. We’ll add it back when our users can’t live without it.

Organizer-approved & domain-limited campaign joinabilities

These are temporary cuts. We’ll add them back in when we feel they’re the most important feature to add.

Questionnaire

This one is temporary too, simply to allow us to deliver cute cats more quickly.

Action Tensing

No longer relevant

Forums

We’ll have a general discussion/community area of the site, but it will be post launch. We’ll import current forum content at that time.

Targets

Are gone completely. We may add companies back at some point, but for an entirely different purpose — to give organizations a more formal way to interact with our community.

Problems

Gone. Problem content will be pulled into the general discussion area at some time post launch.

Users

Dashboard

No dashboard. The dashboard won’t really be useful until we can do a good job at suggesting campaigns. As long as we have an easy way for people to get to a list of their campaigns & contacts, there’s really no need for a dashboard right now.