Meta XRepublic

195:49) 19-AUG-2002 22:11 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)
on the one hand, it does insure that some collaboration and consensus will actually be reached. on the other is your very point when it comes to the question of wonking.

something of this left me in a quandry yesterday. should house membership actually limit citizens from participating in other houses? maybe that's ok. i always expected that there would be cross-house wonking so i wasn't too worried about it. since there are partisan groups who can recruit from multiple houses, and resolutions must be wonked into existence, it might not be so bad.

on the other hand, i could easily see a community the size of brainstorms as one single house. i would definitely want some houses to be exclusive -for example a house of journalists, historians or of actual legislators could show some unique promise.

it does raise the question of wonk requirements. must there be a pro AND a con before a resolution can be created? must pro and con be numerically balanced? i tend to think not because i want to encourage initiative in wonking. i expect to see some resolutions which are manifestoes. but i still haven't worked out the details of resolution generation. that's about where i am now, having thought through promotion of posts to the sidebar.

195:47) 18-AUG-2002 10:36 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)

I think their first mistake was making a popularity scale purely based on volume of posts written. While you do concurrently have to entice people to vote for your stuff, using outlandish language helps, which may keep things interesting, but un-encyclopeadic.

The works are very link rich. That's an interesting effect of the interface, and some things get a fairly good treatment. I think that if they got rid of the dwarf to wizard guild thing and concentrated on 'C!ing' which is exactly 'banging' above, you'd still generate a goodly amount of writeups. It just might not be so much fun.

The discussion of microwaving CDs held my attention for several posts. That was really a funny and interesting read. As I was writing up the credibility dimensions, particularly that of Authority, I kept flashing back to Slashdot's 'Funny' rating. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle humor which is insightful, or just plain silly subjects.

I hope to avoid cults of personality by letting people have control of the character of their Houses. I have several layers of punishment for anti-democratic behavior. They range from putting someone on a 'time-out' to expulsion from the house. I just know this is going to be abused, but I think it's very important to give that kind of power to the people.

I am very worried about identity spoofing because I can't think of any way to stop it. So far the only thing I think would work is charging a one dollar fee and requiring a credit card. I can imagine an individual removed from a discussion or actually PNG'd from a house designing a new identity and returning. The only other thing I can think of to help people retain their identity.. hmm brilliant.

If you get PNG'd from a thread or a house, all of your Posts within that context go anonymous and there is no way to reclaim them. Also everything you've wonked transfers to the other wonks.

I know people will want to game the system. I want to try to design it such that collaboration and resolution are given the highest rewards. But I also want to keep track of the most salient points of discussion. So for example when a resolution closes and the voting is done, I want people to still be able to see the original discussions, the sidebars, the wonking and polishing and the voting record. So if there was compromise built into the resolution and a 'purer' solution was available, the same source material could support another resolution. This is the purpose of wonking, and I expect a class of individuals to emerge who craft alternate resolutions from the same source material and campaign for people to vote again on the same subject. I think, in the end, they will have to use the leverage of partisan groups and cannot do so alone.

195:44) 17-AUG-2002 23:02 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)
if we leave single posts intact and take bolded and italicized excerpts from them these can be crafted into the key language. your original post would be noted on the sidebar of the discussion thread and your strong and unrefuted 3 points would then be polished into the key points by wonks on the topic. that part of the post which has been excerpted can be bolded or colored. this is the distinction between a 'talking point' and a 'key point'. a key point has been polished by a wonk for the express purpose of supporting a resolution.

this way even if you don't care about the resolution and/or you find some wonks biased, you can still recognize the salient talking points which are voted to the sidebar by peers. i want the sidebar to be a relatively easy hurdle, but i expect no more than 2-5% of all posts to make it there.

195:40) 21-APR-2002 14:13 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)

i have picked up the ball again and am doing programming on the xrepublic. the goal right now is to put the pieces together such that i can make a database / flat file interface. instead of keeping large textual amounts of information in the database, i will simply index threads. within each thread as stored are markers for each statement. for the moment i have decided to organize threads in a blog kind of format. so what i have done, elementarily, is to write a perl routine that will read a softcoded threadfile and then output it.

the format for the statement key is [hhh:ttt:sss] where hhh is the house, ttt is the thread and sss is the statement. i am debating whether or not i should embed some non-printable character as a break between statements. but i don't need it so far. since in this first version, i am not allowing html so embedding the statement text into html is simpler - but i haven't yet figured out how to get my perl into cgi format. this is due to apache being poorly configured by me. right now the error says it cannot spawn the process.

the next step is to write a simple input but not until i get the cgi working. since almost nothing opensource is written for win2k, it's a bit exasperating...

Oct 2001
one provision that i want in the system is the ability to represent the arguments of historical figures. some credible individual might be a thoreau scholar and represent him in the republic. we could run through several notable thinkers, plato vs socrates, or machiavelli vs foucault on the subjects where their writings intersect. this is one way to seed discussions - by starting with famous 'resolutions' and seeing how people weigh in on those matters.

secondly, the xrepublic should be very suitable for representing actual legislative processes.

thirdly, as a matter of marketing, i would peddle the system to activists who are more or less doing this very thing in what i might call a 'biased vacuum'. if you check out marijuana.com, you can imagine how participants there might be drawn to this style and structure.

finally, i recognize that many individuals, and all people sometimes are dedicated to talking just to hear themselves talk. they can wander in and out of the agoras, cracking jokes (like some notables at the well, <boswell> and <vard> or mcdee) but occasionally drop that pearl of great wisdom. but i have always very much expected that other individuals would be drawn to wonking and try to frame a discussion more formally.

i would also add that the ability to organize artifacts for ready reference is an important feature of xrepublic. for all the 'cyber' of discussion groups, threads are very linear creatures. also noting the difference between the wtc joke threads here and at the well, the ability to embed graphics in bs threads is a significant advantage.

more directly to your question of limits, having some wonk draw up a resolution is just the sophisticated form of political push polling. people actually like to take interesting surveys, but those we get from cnn, roper et al are overly simplistic. i very much like the idea of having more subtle choices. having responses to a poll imposes something of a deadline. but more importantly different quorums over time can come back around to the same subjects and weigh in. one group of 50 might never decide, but another group 2 years later is convinced. we want to capture that.

there are two schools of thought. the first is that some formal taxonomy is adopted for generating 'gravity' in discussions. this also falls under the heading of 'master topics'. the idea being that there are some fixed and permanent subjects which will always be up for debate in an open society and that there is some best way to descretely organize them. so discussions will ultimately hover around those subjects because little else is really debateable. the second school is that discussions will naturally 'chunk', that people will demand some resolution to any and all ordinary conversation and that the variety of opinions will limit themselves and coalesce around whatever these issues are.

in either case (i am fond of both schools) any individual can design a ballot and call the question. doing so makes them somebody. i expect that as people debate, certain arguments will stick in their heads as issues become thornier and more complicated. the desire for some resolution or at least a better organization of data will cause people to 'wonk', to search for strong arguments among many discussions which clarify or inform a position. 'wonking' makes you somebody. everything done in the xrepublic is up for peer review. people get power by gaining credibility cookies, as it were. 'power' in this sense only means they become more referenceable, as does the work they do. but they don't get any more votes allocated to them or transcend any rules.

195:34) 20-AUG-2001 13:18 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)
i've been pseudocoding and defining classes over the weekend. this is a good way to go - so i won't be worrying about selecting an implementation language for a while. things are becoming clearer.

right now i'm reviewing the idea of the sleeve and wondering how big a deal this feature is. it strikes me as very compute intensive to have a user-defined profile of an arbitrary length which could be compared to that of every other individual in the agora.

currently - the proposed idea goes something like this: at some point there will be a set of [political] litmus tests - imagine a top end limit of about 500. each one will have perhaps 4 - 7 responses, think of the daily polls at slashdot. a citizen should be able to pick an arbitrary number of these (max around 20?) which best define his politics. then that person should be able to seek out friends and enemies based on this 'affinity template'. this will be color coded and weighted very much like the market map at www.smartmoney.com.

there will also be aggregates of these affinity templates for Partisan Groups and for Houses - all to assist individuals in the agora to find like-minded people to round up and begin crusades...

the other issue that is making my scratch my head is the matter of personnas. i think they are a great idea but i ma having a very difficult time figuring out an appropiate method for selecting the authority required to allow a personna to be created and maintained. ..hmm.. how about a special class of partisan group? ok sounds good:

a personna is an historically accurate avatar. people who literally ask 'what would jesus do' have the opportunity, in the xrepublic of forming a partisan group whose function is to use public domain materials to 'respond' to certain issues in the actual words of the personna they create. personnas sure to appear would be jesus, karl marx, socrates, thomas aquinas, cato, etc. some editorial authority would be necessary to insure that those words 'spoken' by personnae are accurate.

i wasn't running into any limitations, because i haven't worked on it that much. the php stuff is very good for prototyping and some of my interface ideas have come from php-nuke. but i suspect that i will run into things like multiple threading issues.

my basic idea is this: when it comes to the description for the activities of the republic, i don't want to have to depend on the structures of a relational database or 4gl to be the language of conversation. 

the other thing is that i have just started programming with javascript this past week and it is reawakening some old buried object-oriented prejudices i have. the ease with which i am able to quickly create new properties of objects and methods against those is really powerful and i suspect will be so against java classes accessible to the ui. so i am really enthused about that right now. i've also found fewer sites which host php4 than i would have expected by now - a minor nit, but real. ultimately, i would love some very knowledgeable programmers to assist. i expect they would like java and jsp as the best implementation method. as for jdbc, it can't be worse than some of the database interfaces i've deal with in the past. my real technical strength will be more on the database side anyway, so i don't worry about that so much.

my real issue comes down to the process of prototyping and tuning the online experience over a long period of time. i want a system that will allow me to reconform (and leave old options open) a large number of parameters. for example, imagine that we have multiple methods of voting. we might have multiple token weighted voting, we might use a simple majority, we might need a 2/3rds majority of the average minyan size of the last 50 days on this(itemForVote).

the core of what i am trying to express in the xrepublic is, i think, revolutionary: that is a model of deliberation which will ultimately replace robert's rules of order by taking specific advantage of internet time and space. i don't want this hacked up in some sytem that cannot, by design, handle the world's democratic (and pre-democratic) populations. i'm sure that we are 10 years from having anything close to that built. but scalability and flexibility should be designed in. is php going to do that? maybe.is j2ee going to do that? i'm convinced.

195:6) 03-JUL-2000 15:44 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)

one's affiliation list is the set of partisan organizations one has formally joined. attached to any partisan group would be its authors/wonks and so the group inherits all issues and artifacts of those authors. part of the trick is to see if a group sleeve gets out of spec with the sleeves of its authors over time. the sleeve is a device to quickly assess affinity. and so as groups grow and shift, there would be some method of quickly showing possible coalitions and the outstanding sticking points.

195:12) 06-JUL-2000 15:45 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)

195:4) 03-JUL-2000 15:35 Michael D. C. Bowen (mbowen)

Q: I assume that the intent of this is to make the world a better place. The deficiencies of our system manifest, and are themselves manifestations of, wild imbalances of power. Let us imagine that this system were perfectly democratic in terms of access, i.e., universal internet access, no fee. If this system were to be established under current law, I would imagine it would be perverted fairly quickly. the first form of abuse would be a rather elderly one: literacy testing. If you aren't suitably informed, your vote is void, or diminished in some way.

This is the way we comport ourselves interpersonally all the time--play fast and loose with the facts, ignore counterarguments long enough, and I'm not going to come out and play in your online discursive playpen. This is dangerous for a government which holds it self-evident that all men are created equal, and promises equal justice under the law.

A: i can't handle that criticism. and i'm really not sure how my agora would scale to the level of national governments (my assumptions of your assumptions about massive power imbalances). if it could pass the sniff test of municipal government for small towns, i would consider it a breakthrough. i don't want it implemented as a legal standard, rather as that which people decide for themselves most accurately reflects their opinions on matters of concern. that said, there is a great deal to be tweaked about the matter of standing as to management of the system. probably the most delicate aspect of designing such a system is understanding where all the knobs should be and who should be allowed to frob them. for example, i have asserted the idea of a 'litmus test'. these are designed to give one a quick overview of partisan group's interests. it serves as some qualifier to entry in such a group. the idea being that as one takes litmus tests, it becomes a public expression of their ideas. imagine right next to my name a sleeve. this represents my responses to litmus tests on select issues.

it can be established that the only method of modifying a sleeve is by, say, RFC 1234.a. i strongly believe that only by developing such a model in the open source community can international standards (whatever credibility you attache to some 'RFC 1234.x'). the sleeve is by definition self-representational. and you can modify your sleeve any time. if you have no opinion on school vouchers, then you are grey. but the idea is that everybody doesn't care to weigh in on every issue at equal depth. so literacy is relative. i would expect that any expert partisan group may have some arbitrarily discriminatory rules for entrance requirements, and these would be the same groups who sponsor a lot of wonking and polishing, but i'm not sure that there is any way around that. nevertheless this is a different creature than that of poll taxes and other restrictions on participation in open elections.

what i meant to imply in that 'What if you couldn't vote on any matter of substance until you demonstrated competence on all the core issues?' was that one's sleeve was accessible as well as one's credibility cookies as part of the wonking and authoring processes. it was more directed at allowing citizens to assess the thoughtfulness of their peers when they find themselves in a majority or minority on any issue.

03-jul-2000 14:05 michael d. c. bowen (mbowen)
this thread is conceived as a design review, and ad-hoc brainstorming session for ideas regarding the implementation of an open source computer mediated deliberative space.

03-jul-2000 14:25 michael d. c. bowen (mbowen)
somewhere i read that the best software can be understood by examination of its data structures. forget the procedures, just show me the objects and i can tell what the software is supposed to do. so i figured that i would design some big hunking objects and describe their relationships to one another and that would be a good place to start.

--

the basic premise behind the project is that legislative and policy documents can be created through the interactive work of individuals drawn to the subject matter via the web in a method as efficient and effective as those presented by traditional methods.

this is also an experiment in taking web conferencing to the next level of sophistication. web conferencing has demonstrated its ability to generate a greate deal of interest, but not to explicitly assist and decision-making, consensus building and measurement of affinity. this is also an attempt to change the concept of citizenship and participation in democratic processes. by overcoming distance, time and by embedding and enhancing legislative and deliberative procedures into a web interface, we intend to demonstrate the ability to achieve significant increases in voter registration etc.

the system also intends to create a unique record of deliberative processes which can give insight into how people decide given inforation, passion and interaction with other individuals similarly and oppositely motivated.

195:2) 03-jul-2000 14:27 michael d. c. bowen (mbowen)
the individual the system begins with the individual. all creation and destruction of ideas and policy comes from the decision making power of the individual.

individual attributes:
1. voting record
2. sleeve
3. affiliation list
4. credibility
5. authorship