[ga] online decision making

["Rick H. Wesson" <wessorh@ar.com>]

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.

Voting is on-line with realtime graphs of the current vote, voting is
*not* secret, and everyone can see who participates and how anyone voted
on a piticular topic.

I did not design the OTD system to reflect voting systems for political
purposes like one might find in elections for government officials. I
designed it to specificly tackle the problem of online group decision
making, something which might be of interest to DNSO constituencys.


If folks would like to check it out see http://www.ar.com/ there are a
couple of old ballots that are not realy applicable any more, but show
how things are formatted and that the vote talley grphs actually work.
you'll need a browser that supports java script, but everything else is 
very standard.

I would not mind improving on the system or helping folks write XML
ballots if folks think OTD could actually help us make more efficient
decisions.

regards,

-Rick