I'm someone who was drawn to this exercise EXACTLY FOR THE REASONS YOU JUST STATED ABOVE. And since I was pretty gung ho about trying this exercise, let me see if we can talk a bit about why. Because I actually agree with you that I am not 100% on board for the current result. But I do really love the process--collaborative, open and democratic--that was used. Because that's what I came here for (and I think we agree on that one).

So I urge you to take a closer look at the mixedink site and "how the planks were created". I personally find the excitement is far less in what was written here (there are some good and I admit, some bad planks). It is more in how it was made and who made it.

How: completely openly and collaboratively. Who: anyone from the netroots who learned about it and wanted to join.  No one set out to write a left wing platform. And I think if more people had found this it would be a very different document.

The way it worked was anyone could join, write a plank, edit others, recombine, rate up or down planks. The places this ended up working strongest were generally where activity was relatively high. Wisdom of crowds, open source, an attempt at harnassing the innovative, pluralistic nature of the netroots. An experiment with mixed results, so far. But not a bad experiment at all. We will need a way in the future to write collaboratively and develop ideas together. Here's an attempt.

I have to say I wasn't actually drawn to this as a platform writing exercise per se, but as an opportunity for netroots folks to begin using tools to collaborate on a project, any project, and work across geography and time to build something together. In a sense, the fact that this is low-stakes (who reads the platform?) makes it a perfect first experiment to see how a process like this can work and what needs to be tweaked to make it work better.

That said, I would venture to say that simply by invoking an open-source method for building a platform, one that has the option of being reopened at any time, perhaps there is a chance that we can make the exercise of platform writing more relevant and useful. If we reopened that electoral plank, someone like you could come back and improve it. And others could rate the new version showing what we really want, or provide you with an even better idea. I think that's very different from 20th century platforms, or at least it has the potential to be. It opens up the process to all, creating mutual investment in the result(and thus accountability).

About the process a bit: At the beginning there were blank pages and it was a completely open opportunity to be elastic and break the boundaries--anyone could play. The mixedink collaboration software seemed to do a terrific job of allowing people first to author then to edit then to vote on preferred statements.

The biggest problems I saw 1) not enough participation, and 2) not enough time and in some cases 3) not broad enough participation. This is definitely the type of exercise where getting a large quorum of participants, and some of the thought leaders involved is key to the success. We had mixed results with that--some planks are strong on thought leaders but weak on other participants, some planks go the other way and some are just right....

In many ways what are seeing is more of prototype than an ideal result. It's also possible that something this broad is too big for the software it's written on. Possible, but I'm not 100% sure about that. I think the biggest problem was timeframe--this got more momentum as it went, but we really wanted to end the process in time to submit to the Obama/DNC platform exercise.

I have heard many people say they were sorry they did not participate at the time or they would have added x or edited y. I hope we'll keep open to that opportunity--rather than nip a promising idea about collaboratin in its tender bud.