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

[Henri Nathanson <henri.nathanson AT gmail.com>]

Hi Mike,

we can go on cross-posting. I have not the smallest problem with that. 

I checked through your web pages again. I still like your graphics, but I did not find much on democracy.

Votorola is said to be a Liquid Democracy application. Well, Liquid Democracy is all non-sense. Sorry, to say that. Regarding discussion systems, we may talk about that after we fix the core problem. Such is with decision systems. To say with democracy.

In the german language we have a term "Grundlagenforschung". We have to get the basics, before we start with anything else. As I said before, the fundamentals of democracy are laid by two forms of it. A centralized and a decentralized version. They are both fairly known. The latter one is less known, though. It works with programs. Which can be seens as a stack of proposals. But it does not have proposals any more. Not at all. There is a single ruling person, which more or less just publishes its decisions.

So how can you build a liquid transitive decision system with a decentralized version of democracy? How do you build a discussion system for such? And why is a representative, decentralized, program-based, market democracy the democracy of the future? 

I put an awful lot of attributes in the last sentence. And perhaps you may get a small idea of what I am talking about: You have no idea about democracy, yet.

Grab yourself a pen and a paper, put up an amount of smilies voluntarily on the paper, draw a line around two of such smilies to form a first group, and ask yourself why such group can dominate all others? That is decentralized dominance. Unite et impera. Ask yourself, what happens, if such group-buildings goes on. What ideal structures come up? Work with contracts to get a civilized version. And you are fit with democracy.

Regards
Henri 

2014-06-20 10:31 GMT+02:00 Michael Allan <mike AT zelea.com>:

Martin and Henri,

Martin Stolze said:
> As I am digging deeper and deeper I am forming a strong opinion that
> neither, voting platforms nor opinion-aggregation are actually
> attainable goals or at all worth pursuing.

Let's think entirely out of the box, then.  Suppose I told you there
are 3 basic plans for moving forward in this field (digital democracy
or whatever we call it) and they look like this:

    Plan A           Plan B           Plan C
   ----------       ----------       ----------
   1. Do this       1. Do this       1. Do this
   2. Do that       2. Do that       2. Do that
   3. Do this       3. Do this       3. Do this
    ... etc          ... etc          ... etc

Imagine we're looking at real plans here, Martin, with all the steps
filled in.  Then you could say to me, "Mike, where *have* you been?
You're talking about plan C.  Don't you know that step 3 of plan C is
now considered infeasible?"  You could point me to where the matter
was recently debated and I'd be forced to admit that plan C is
probably a no-go.  I'd stop offering suggestions drawn from it.

But there *was* no debate.  The step-wise plans *aren't* identified,
laid out side by side, and reasonably discussed.  So, should we start
doing that?  Would it be a reasonable way forward at this juncture?

> ... the geek in me would love to hack something like an [opinion]
> aggregator together. Though the details are extremely tricky,
> i.e. just the AI for language processing would be insanely complex.

(There'd be no language processing, however, because the opinions are
pre-formalized.  Just about every digital democracy site is concerned
with bottling up opinion in some form, or other.  Technically, these
are votes.  The forms are translatable by simple, non-AI machines.
The translations can be aggregated; not just centrally, either.)

But there isn't enough context here for you to evaluate my proposal,
nor for me to evaluate your counter-proposal (behavioural taxation).
Each is just a single step from a larger plan, without which it's like
a fish out of water.  So first, I think we need to expose each of the
big plans and its main steps.  If we do a good job of *that*, then the
rest should fall into place almost automatically.


Henri Nathanson said:
> I checked out Michals stuff (Votorola?) some time ago. Some nice
> graphics, but I did not see much interesting thoughts on democracy.

You're looking at the pictures, Henri, but are you reading the text?

Where do you get bored?  Or fail to see the connection with democracy?
I'd be happy to answer your critique if you could be more specific.

Probably a single list would be better for this.  I'm in these lists:
http://zelea.com/.mutt/

Mike

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