Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] [AG Liquid Democracy] Anybody checked out placeavote.com?

[Martin Stolze <pirate.martin AT stolze.cc>]

​​​Hello Friend,

Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on the details. I agree that this got a bit out of hand on the different mailing list and it’s also my last comment.

As for the “big problems”. I am admittedly quite smug in that I only see them as technicalities somebody smarter than I will solve. I tend to favor pragmatic approaches.

I don't want to discourage anybody and I have the utmost respect for everybody who is putting time and effort into any of the mentioned projects.

As far as I understand it placetovote uses a pragmatic approach of identifying people via social security details with a bit of private-public key encryption probably at a too high expense of anonymity for our emacs fraction.

Delegation, again another technicality. One can probably easily hack around it like you can today via postal ballot. It’s just not done more widely because elections are just too rare and unspecific.

They are aiming at the primaries in the US, I don't see why they couldn't take some of us on board and branch it off to Europe, Canada, the local tennis club, … with different specs.

My intention was really to find somebody who is hooked on the guys in the states. I am under no illusion that they will probably fail and drop it. However, I believe they are better in execution. I personally put an extreme high premium on execution.

You'll hate me for it but I do believe that a solution that originates in the US has a much higher chance of being recognized, supported and accepted, unfortunately nothing trumps the immense concentration of capital and talent that is available there.

I​ ​mean​ ​this​ ​project​ ​is just a sidekick of 59daysofcode.com and I do belive buying those kids would be better investmetn then, let's say, sending out another round of paper inviations to the GA, damn, our pirate-party-micky-mouse-club-membership-cards were probably more expensive :)

- It was more than 590 days ago when I looked into the Liquid Feedback last time and I didn't notice a difference since.

In fact, back in 2012 part of me thought that any pirate politian will just abuse his mandate to make it a 4 year coding assignment and disfranchise every possible resource to catapult the movement into a semi-operational beta status. -Wrong judgment on my end.

My issue is that I can’t see much traction for anything that is currently being developed indigenously. It mesmerizes me that pirates of all people actually do such work on a local level that is so clearly something that should be developed internationally.

If you hear social network you think Facebook, if you hear video playback you think “VLC” if you hear digital democracy you think ...?

let me know. I would appreciate a pointer if you come across something that has a serious chance.

Best wishes

Martin​

On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 6:37 PM, Jacob Kanev <j_kanev AT arcor.de> wrote:

Dear Martin,

regarding voting systems there are currently some big problems that still have to be solved.

(1) Traceability vs. Anonymity.
In normal elections you can vote anonymously (i.e. no-one knows who it actually was that ticked that box) and the election is traceable, at least to the point that tampering of the system would get noticed by the human observers.
In an online system this is not possible. You have an either-or relation. Either the system is traceable, but then it must be traceble back to the actual persons who did the voting. Or it allows for anonymous voting, but then traceability flies out the window and you end up with a system that is prone to manipulation.
I don't know what placeavote.com have done in this respect and I enrole to find out, so I cannot judge here.

(2) Delegations
One single person cannot vote on all little minor special issues that arise in a democracy. Hence the idea of being able to delegate single votes to single persons (there are also many different ideas and ways of doing this). I quite like the idea, but to my suprise there are many people who don't. I guess a system without delegations won't work, and a system with delegations might have difficulty taking off, cause so quite a few people are opposed to it. This question first has to be solved to everybody's agreement.

But I guess you know this already.

As for qKonsens, it tries to tackle the easy-vs.-complex problem you mention. You can have different views on each question (depending on whether you just want to spend a first glance or read into it a bit), and the voting system is simple -- you click a "++", "+", "0", "-" or "--" button, much like having "like" and "dislike" buttons. This is much like your onion idea.

That said, I don't see a nation-wide implementation of any of these yet. Placeavote is a nice try, but I dought they will gain much momentum. Would be interesing to see how they solved (1) and (2) from above. The other tools are intra-German-Pirate-party tools used for research and testing. qKonsens is in its proof of concept phase (aka we're still implementing), noddr is a one-person project without much resonance otherwise. Even the German pirate's party-wide LQFB implementation is not accepted by the majority of the party members (delegations may be the main problem here).

So, I think best you can do is listen in on the liquid-democracy and the meinungsfindungs-tool teams and possibly join their discussions. The meinungsfindungstool people have quite a lively email discussion, also discussing implementations and ideas by other people.

Hope I could help,
lots of regards, Jacob.

P.S.: Sorry for doing cross-list posts. This was my last one, and I apologize.

On Monday 02 June 2014 11:46:43 Martin Stolze wrote:
> Hey Jacob,
> Thanks a lot that is one exciting idea! I try to look at approaches mostly
> under the aspect of whether they can work and create traction. There are a
> few criteria that I found significant. Simplicity, is the most important of
> them. Think about limesurvey, the only tool producing any meaningful
> feedback as of now.
> Anything "Meinungsfindungstool" is like 10 Degrees more complex and for
> that it seems to be not implementable right now. - And who speaks German
> anyway? ;)
>
> I like to think of it like layers of an onion. The first layer must be very
> simple, not even as complex as “yes” or “no”. Just a simple "like/+1" may
> suffice. This and a focus on seamless integration to wherever people spend
> their time must be the priority. Once somebody is hooked we can go down the
> rabbit whole and do all the “Meinungsfindung”.
> - It’s what I like about Silicon Valley and placeavote.com, they keep it
> simple and deliver something appealing, the rest is iteration. In contrast,
> udeci.de seems to take the opposite approach.
>
> Best Regards
> Martin
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Jacob Kanev <j_kanev AT arcor.de> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi Martin,
> >
> > you might also want to connect with the people from our "AG
> > Meinungsfindungstool" [1]. They're busy implementing something called
> > qKonsens, an online system that combines voting and discussing.
> >
> > I'm not sure how far it is, I haven't followed the discussion in detail,
> > but as far as I can see some good ideas have met some programmers.
> >
> > Lots of regards, Jacob.
> >
> > [1]
> > ag-meinungsfindungstool AT lists.piratenpartei.de
> >
> > On Sunday 01 June 2014 20:49:39 Martin Stolze wrote:
> > > ​​
> > > Hi Together,
> > > I keep arguing that a lack of infrastructure is actually our biggest
> > > challenge. I guess, by now, it is safe to say that we don't actually have
> > > the capacity to build something ample ourselves (Liquid Feedback, shitty
> > > mailing lists, limesurvey you name it). The way I see it is that we
> > simply
> > > don't manage to activate the talent that would be necessary to develop
> > > something pioneering. All the good ideas and innovations coupled with our
> > > lofty idealism is worth nothing if nobody is pouring them into Java or
> > PHP.
> > >
> > > The guys at placeavote.com have been gone through the news as they try
> > to
> > > shoehorn direct democracy into any form of electoral system by means of
> > > levering it out and replacing politicians with proxies that only relay
> > > decisions made by the corresponding constituency.
> > >
> > > Of course implementation, especially in the US, is highly unlikely.
> > However
> > > using it at least internally to a certain degree or forking it a little
> > can
> > > be a chance for us to move out of the technological middle ages that we
> > are
> > > stuck in.
> > >
> > > It also seems not to be open source (yet?) but I am thinking more along
> > the
> > > lines of sweet-talking the guys behind it into working for us as some
> > kind
> > > of software consultants, maybe we can flatter them with a bit of the cash
> > > that should come our way in form of election refunds?
> > > ​ :)​
> > >
> > >
> > > What do you think?
> >
> > --
> >    ____________________________
> >    Pungenday, 7th of Confusion, 3180.
> >    jacob kanev
> >      twitter: @j_kanev
> >      jabber: jkanev AT jabber.ccc.de
> >
> >

--
   ____________________________
   Pungenday, 7th of Confusion, 3180.
   jacob kanev
     twitter: @j_kanev
     jabber: jkanev AT jabber.ccc.de