Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Done with Democracy From Scratch, which was the big hurdle because…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Done with Democracy From Scratch, which was the big hurdle because it's a book, not a bunch of easy-to-skim articles that basically give you the gist in the first page.
In Democracy From Scratch, Fish categorizes members of the Russian democratic movement into four categories: Compromisers, Pragmatic Radicals, Saints, and Fanatics. He details characteristics of each one, and the problems they had working together. At the end of the section I felt as though I could write a small role-playing game where players each choose one of these identities and the goal is to overthrow communism. Leonard and I came up with a name: Democratizers and Dupes. "The KGB infiltrates your organization; twelve hit points." Leonard thinks that I should actually attempt to write this game. Maybe after I find a frickin' job.
