I see three major challenges in trying to write an effective constitution:
1) establishing priorities and general rules that intelligent people can rightly interpret long into the future, covering matters that cannot be foreseen in detail -- for instance, that powers and rights not specifically reserved for the federal government belong to the states, and those not reserved by the states belong to individual citizens.
2) establishing independent judiciary, legislative, and executive branches, with each with sufficient powers to balance the powers of the others.
3) providing sufficient detail to be clear, but otherwise keeping the framework reasonably loose, allowing for changing interpretations as conditions change over time, and providing broad enough scope to cover unforeseen circumstances.

A constitution is not a detailed step-by-step manual about how to run a government. Rather it is a set of guidelines intended to help reasonable people make good and consistent decisions, and to work together toward common goals. What matters is actual practice over time, not high-sounding words and phrases. The actual content of the constitution is the decisions that are made on the basis of it -- how people in positions of authority use it to guide their conduct. A constitution will only last and be useful if the people elected under it and empowered to enforce it treat it with respect and act reasonably in the best interests of the people as a whole.

(In response to David Weinberger's General Comment #13:) Here's a couple of tentative ideas (please consider these as discussion-starters rather than fully-formed opinions:

• QTDR might be premature for Mss in the very early stages of writing, where reviewers' comments might have to be too extensive...
• QTDR may be inappropriate for Mss where the writer wants the reviewers' comments to be independent from one another. QTDR fosters a communal response to the Ms as a whole, rather than an individual one; so one influential and/or vocal reviewer's comments might swamp or sway others'...
• QTDR is probably "overkill" when a very small number of reviewers (or co-authors) work on a document and can be physically (one room) or temporally (conference-call) together...
• QTDR may be less effective for Mss whose paragraphs are very large (NB: at present, the finest-grain that a Comment Icon (aka "comment-munchie") can be assigned to in running text is the Paragraph or List Item. But Real Soon Now, yet finer granularity will be possible... perhaps we'll cover this in the Chat!)
• I somehow see QTDR being more "attuned by design" to technical or "matter-of-fact" Mss rather than to "creative writings," whatever those are...
  
  OTOH:
  
• QTDR is perfect when a Ms is somewhere past the first-draft stage, where comments on individual text components can be profitably given...
• QTDR is ideal when a Ms needs to gain the consensus of a committee that is temporally or physically distributed and difficult to gather synchronously in either space or time. Examples of this include standards documents and technical specifications or reports.

And in another example of "Hey, this tool might solve this new problem that it probably wasn't originaly designed for," I've also used QTDR in planning a potluck dinner for about 35 people who are mostly non-techie, but moderately experienced QT users.

I put up a first-draft Doc containing a rough description of the place, the time, the food and drink categories, and then opened up the doc to the group via QTDR, asking them to comment on each of the "munchies" (-: pun intentional :-). In effect, then, we were treating each of the text objects as a thread. Folks would comment in the "Desserts" munchie, seeing what was committed already and signing up to bring more dishes. Periodically, I'd close the currently-being-discussed Doc for new comments, run a "Document Review" and create a new rev of the "Party-Planning Doc" incorporating all new info thus far. Then I'd put a pointer to the new Doc in the last comment of the old one, and the cycle would begin anew. QTDR was absolutely an ideal tool for a multi-topic discussion in one place.

Anyone else's thoughts?

Does anyone know what relationship the Federalist Papers had with the Bill of Rights (if any)?

Dan, re #16:
> QTDR may be inappropriate for Mss where the writer wants
> the reviewers' comments to be independent from one
> another.

The Enterprise Edition (that's what I'm calling an upcoming fee-based version) can be configured so each reviewer is working in isolation.

Another way we've used QTDR is to keep track of calls made to a long list of contacts. We uploaded a document containing names and numbers and have a comment link on each. Now we can keep track of calls to each as well as overall progress.

Another usage: your group has a recurring discussion that always has a given structure, for example a questionnaire. For each new discussion, you re-upload the template document that forms the discussion structure.

Edited by author 10-10-2001 10:17 PM
Steve Yost's #18:

>Dan, re #16:
>> QTDR may be inappropriate for Mss where the writer wants
>> the reviewers' comments to be independent from one
>> another.

>The Enterprise Edition (that's what I'm calling an upcoming fee-based version) can be configured so each reviewer is working in isolation.

SuperNifty!

>Another way we've used QTDR is to keep track of calls made to a long list of contacts. We uploaded a document containing names and numbers and have a comment link on each. Now we can keep track of calls to each as well as overall progress.

I wouldn't classify QTDR (as I understand it now) as a full contact-management system allowing, e.g., sorting by deal size, negotiation stage, last-contacted-date, quarterly rollup... though. But to a first approx., a good tool.

>Another usage: your group has a recurring discussion that always has a given structure, for example a questionnaire. For each new discussion, you re-upload the template document that forms the discussion structure.

Yes. I've been thinking about doing the same thing for party-planning. Some generic things need to be discussed/decided: Time, place, drinks, snax, main courses, desserts, ... ... so if there's a template one can upload it and then successively refine it as comments/committments are made. Same thing.

Yes Steve, that's one of the most appealing features of QTDR. There's lots of power and selectivity placed in the user's hands -- but it's still preposterously easy. :-)

This is a General Comment on the Ms done before the synchronous demo.

A specific comment on Item #8 of the document...

Testing a comment

Here's a general comment on the Ms as a whole

I'm the first person to write anything about item #5.

I'm the second person to write...

Now I have commented on it

I'm also the third person to write.

I came, I saw, I wrote.

Ok, so how many windows can I read/write in at once? This is definitely a stretch for me!