Re: [ga] online decision making

[Joop Teernstra <terastra@terabytz.co.nz>]

At 12:46 PM 18/08/1999 -0700, Rick H. Wesson wrote:
>
>I was working on a thing called "open and Transparent Democracy - OTD" a
>system to help the decision making process that does not work well via
>e-mail lists.
>
>The system I implemented allows participants to create ballots in 
>XML. Once a ballot is in the system all participatnts can then "vote"
>on the issues in the piticular constituency. the system was designed with
>the DNSO in mind but does not reflect the current DNSO configuration.
>
Rick, 

You are not alone in having worked on this.
The polling booth in use by the IDNO has been functional for over two years.
It allows not only a web based voting system (8 options) but also allows
the comments to each vote  to be coherently listed , while showing the
progress of the voting  as your system does. (this feature can be turned
off too--sometimes it is better to cast the ballots in the dark).
In this fashion, it avoids the s/n ratio problem and focuses on the
business at hand.

Cynics say the S/N ratio problem of totally open and unstructures mailing
lists is used as a convenient excuse to avoid on-line decisionmaking that
actually works, so that participation can remain  limited to the happy few. 

OTOH, when it comes to politics, rather than engineering, there is almost
as much info in the noise as there is in "substance".

--Joop Teernstra LL.M.--  , bootstrap  of
the Cyberspace Association,
the constituency for Individual Domain Name Owners
http://www.idno.org