Post in Societal and cultural effects of broad consensus (was, Delegate cascade...)

May 07 14:44 UTC

Craig Burton wrote:
> The specification of the Smartocracy implementation for Open Social is
> now done and the development work runs to the end of June...

But you are unable to post the spec?  Will you be able to show running
code in June?  (Or will that also be under wraps, until the production
release?)

>                                                        ...  It will be
> for political questions, especially "hard" political questions as we are
> using the "proxy" method in Rodriquez' paper.  We judged this one to be
> the simplest one to try out with an existing network.

What do you mean, Craig, by an "existing network"?  Do you mean that
Google's servers will host your application (as OpenSocial allows)?

> We are most interested to see if an existing network can be used and if
> it will illustrate Smartocracy's "emergent representative" phenomenon,
> if I can call it that.  This is where ballots have carefully chosen tags
> and voters create proxies on upcoming elections via tags.  Voters vote
> in their domain of expertise and delegate their votes in other domains
> to people they know who have some ideas.  Network effects hopefully form
> and some "experts" get lots of proxies.

Something like an oracle, then?  Who will frame the hard political
questions, to put before it?  Could we ask it questions like:

  How ought we to amend the zoning bylaws, consistent with the new
  park on Cleaver Street?

  What ought to be the City's plan for public transportation?

  Who ought to be Mayor?

BTW, if anyone is planning to experiment with voting mechanisms (in a
real-life, political context), you might wish to consider using
Votorola, as your development base.  I've sketched some notes on this
here (sorry it is somewhat rough, but please ask if you need more
info):

  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/a/design.xht#extended-electoral-services

Basically, you would focus on coding the actual voting mechanism, and
the electoral rules, without worrying too much about the voter
register, and the basic UI framework (Web, email, etc.) - provided
you are content with the default implementations of these, that are
built into Votorola (otherwise, they too are pluggable).

My own voting mechanism (delegate cascade + recombinant text) should
be ready for beta in June.  The exact timing of the trials will depend
on the system administrators in each local jurisdiction, where the
trials will be conducted.  (But we already have running code online,
which you can try out.)

  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.xht