Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] [MG] Pirate Party Germany - "Opinion Forming Tool" (WorkingGroup) - Next Meeting

["marc" <marc AT merkstduwas.de>]

Pietro Speroni di Fenizio wrote:
> Surely you can use this division to classify tools, but what is your
> aim? To get some mental clarity or to find and build a tool that
> reaches the widest possible consensus on a topic?

It's more for clarification. Because 'to reach the widest possible 
consensus' is just one single part of the overall problem.

There are dozens of tools around focusing on different topics and following 
several appoaches. All this tools wants to solve nearly the same problem: 
How could we improve democracy to enable more participation and 
transparency?

Unfortunately the discussion between the different concepts often becomes 
kind of relegious fight for 'the best solution'.

The aim is to stop this relegious fight.
Let's have a look on what is equal instead of what tears apart.

The idea is to have a common base (framework of workflows and entities) for 
all tools to enable the interaction and extensibility of the overal process 
of decision-making. Therefore we need a common understanding of how 
workflows and entities interacts in the process.

The thesis is: there are Workflows and Entities that are common to all tools 
in the domain of decision-making!
At a higher abstraction, the tools just differ by the method / strategy they 
implement.

And of course they differ by the area they fall into. For example our 
working group split the process of decision-making into the following three 
areas (or systems): Information, Discussion and Decision.

> What you risk doing is to list all the tools that fit nicely in your
> schema, and then have a bunch of rogue tools. That try, somehow, to
> work at the same time with two or all three of the aspects. For
> reasons that should be clear after having read my previous email,
> those last tools are the ones where I would expect the app that makes
> it to reside.

IMHO it's always not a good idea to build an abstraction and force somthing 
into it. The abstraction should naturally evolve from the special to the 
general. So to define such classification is not to restrict but to start a 
discussion about the similarities of all those tools.

And as always, it is not just black or white. So one tool can easily be 
classified by multiple categories or tags, why not? But I guess there will 
be always a main category for each tool it fits into.

Does this explenation makes the aim a bit clearer?

Cheers
Marc