Dec 16 2012: If tribunal members are drawn from the general population, money invested in influencing that population will affect them too. Since they are also susceptible to corruption through personal threats or incentives they're more susceptible to influence than the general population.
Of course doing that would be criminal, but in the USA you have congressional leaders on record passing out checks on the floor of the house to influence votes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAC2xeT2yOg) - do your really think sequestration would prevent such people from having their way?
Dec 16 2012: You assume randomly selected tribunes will not be subject to undue influence by the wealthy and powerful. Not much chance of that. In fact there can be no democratic systems that are not influenced by money. Whether by advertising, lobbying or outright bribery, money talks, and always has.
So I think the problem to solve isn't influence so much as undue and secret influence. The way representative democracies are set up, only the super-wealthy can use their money to influence decisions. The only way to create an equitable system is to balance direct democracy against the plutocrats, actively and publiclly redistributing their lobbying money back to the people - who can use it to exert influence in their turn.
I felt strongly enough about this to implement it myself as a Facebook app. The system is in public alpha right now - see http://www.doshmosh.com - all feedback very welcome.
While not its primary purpose, the semi-lattice of category and subject tags in DoshMosh could be used to construct an arbitrarily complex structure of rules, with the detail for each rule depending on whatever document is linked to the highest karma opinion within it.
The trouble is, this becomes far too sophisticated to be practical, and does so with alarming speed.
For example, say we pick the somewhat obscure sport of Geelf (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfGeelf). We could make a context for each rule - (#geelf #club), (#geelf #sharing), (#geelf #hitting #ducks) and so on. And then create a subject for the effect of each rule. (#geelf #hitting #ducks $disqualification) for instance.
Say you feel disqualification is too severe a penalty for winging a duck. You put up an opinion in DoshMosh saying "In #geelf, #hitting #ducks should just be a $100-point-penalty, not a %disqualification". And then the various Geelf afficianadoes - point - could vote for or against this and other alternatives.
I might even reply saying I'd be willing to support your opinion so long as you agreed with "$disqualification from a #geelf game for #hitting #ducks #on-purpose". Voting theory being a very deep and subtle domain, we could rapidly achieve a set of compromise rules for Geelf that rival the sophistication of Calvinball (http://littlebobeep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Calvinball1.gif).
So I suggest that a governance procedure be layered on top of the DoshMosh system whenever it's to be used for a real-world decision. It's not clear to me that reps are required to create or enforce such a procedure ...
Obviously in a democracy there must be some limitation of franchise or else you get a situation like American Idol where people vote thousands of times an hour.
We've considered quite a few different limitation models for DoshMosh and put up the simplest one to play with in the alpha release. The notion is that each user can use a limited number of votes per day for free - currently 10. If they run out they can come back the next day and use another 10. A 24 hour delay for a reward is a game dynamic that has served Zynga very well so this seems reasonable on its face.
Now the text about paying for votes that you're referring to is on the "Subscribe" page in the app, and I believe you're right in saying it's a bit insane. The idea was to offer a kind of freemium service where, if someone uses up their daily allotment of free votes, and they don't want to wait 24 hours, they can get an extra bundle of votes in a monthly subscription.
Reflecting on your remarks, however, I agree this will throttle the system as a democratic mechanism. A freemium should be based on value add, not gated service, which has obviously disproved itself in the case of online newspapers. And anyway in alpha we're really not worried about monetization at all.
So we're going to kill subscription for now and just keep the 24-hour delay model and bonus votes. Might bump up the vote limit too - if you have a suggestion on that I'd be very interested.
DoshMosh is new - it really hasn't been used in anger yet. I invite you to introduce a complex issue there, something of direct concern to you. I would be delighted to help you pursue an exploration both of your subject of interest and of its dynamics in DoshMosh. That way we refine it by seeing what pains arise from using it.
Liquid Democracy is a great way to enforce accountability in representative government, a very nice generalisation of the original Swiss canton system.It's great to see it used by a real party, and more power to them.
DoshMosh as a form of direct democracy uses negative feedback as its method of governance. Where Liquid Democracy enables members to delegate decisions to others, DoshMosh provides bonus votes to users when others vote for their opinions. This encourages alliance and outreach, and enables the negative feedback to achieve a concrete effect.
Simply, if a DoshMosh user's karma drops below zero, bonus votes are no longer awarded to them. This encourages users to put up opinions that will appeal to their audience and raise their karma, and to abandon opinions that cause their karma to drop.
Each subject in DoshMosh can be represented by its most popular opinion, providing something akin to the Liquid Democracy refinement of decisions. But DoshMosh has a semi-lattice information architecture in its social and semantic structure where Liquid Democracy uses tree structures. Semi-lattices enable a richer space of social relationships per Chris Alexander's famous observations in "A City Is Not A Tree" - http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/A%20City%20is%20not%20a%20Tree.pdf .
The Facebook open graph integration encourages the same semi-lattice style of relationship. So DoshMosh focuses on provision of a peer to peer democratic social network where Liquid Democracy better supports a hierarchy of political relationships.
That is by intent on both parts. Combining the two systems in some manner is an interesting idea. I'll give it some thought. Meanwhile please feel very welcome to try DoshMosh out, Austin - where the Pirate Party is a going concern, DoshMosh has only been on its feet for a week, and we're actively looking for folk like yourself to help it shake down.
Oct 8 2012: I don't mean to pop your bubble Francesco but I think democracy isn't so much about values as it is about how to stop the people upstream from polluting waters needed by the people downstream. Not in theory but here, today, as it's happening. Think globally, but if you can't bring it into local reality it can mean very little.
This is why DoshMosh is a social network game rather than a website. On a website your decisions are only validated by a tiny audience, the people who happen to stop by. It's what wikizens used to call a walled garden. We need democracy on the open graph, with a billion participants, before we can influence the world.
Happily, we can integrate. DoshMosh offers a portlet, called a MoshPit, a line of script that you can use to integrate your content with our service. You can see a simple example at http://moshpit-demo.herokuapp.com/smh . Bringi your content into contention with all the other content on the open graph, and coordinate it with all the other world democracy sites. This is a way to expose your ideas to the people where they live rather than burying them in a website linked by just a few.
Oct 8 2012: Hi Richard, that's an interesting notion. DoshMosh is based on a system of distinctions rather than questions. So, for example, rather than ask "Who should be US President?", DoshMosh enables you to tag a context, "#US #President" in multiple opinions with different subjects. For example, "$Obama is a great #US #President. Re-elect him in #2012" vs. "$Romney will never make #US #President in #2012 or any other year."
By enabling people to reply to each others' arguments while promoting their preferred subjects, DoshMosh enables the pros and cons of different choices to be considered from all sides, and enables users to add new $subjects to the debate as they please. If you prefer a different system to this I hope you will proceed to implement same - I think I should really only implement one democratic mechanism in this lifetime or else people will get confused about me ;-)
If IBIS integrates with Facebook I'd be very interested in comparing it with DoshMosh. Does it?
Reddit lets you vote up a submission on a topic until it hits a subreddit front page, but it doesn't tag subjects or compare subjects by category as DoshMosh does. Furthermore on Reddit only users and opinions can have karma where on DoshMosh subjects have karma per category.
So on Reddit you may vote on one of many pages about Citizen Kane. But after a while that page will slide down the rankings. You can't vote for the subject $Citizen-Kane as, say, a #black-and-white #movie. Or as an #Orson-Welles #script - which as a different context we score separately. And we can vote for $Orson-Welles as a #director as distinct from as an #American #Actor ... without the ability to distinguish subject and categories in an opinion, Reddit votes can never contribute to preferring one subject over another.
Which is as it should be - Reddit is a news aggregation site, not a democracy like DoshMosh.
Another significant difference is that Reddit doesn't implement social voting. When you vote on Reddit, your vote is invisible to people who vote the same way you do. Connecting people who vote the same way, and permitting people to filter out those who vote differently on their preferred subjects and categories enables DoshMosh to maintain a plurality of views, not just one. Think cantons and sub-cantons.
DoshMosh can link opinions to and from any external page to form an arbitrarily complex document out of subject and category tags. In Beta, DoshMosh will field an API to enable closed communities to do this, and provide an aspect-oriented view of external content too.
Now I see nothing a representative can do that DoshMosh can't. Obviously it lacks governance conventions to finalise or enforce outcomes. That's by intent - governance assumes franchise, and DoshMosh neither prefers nor enforces same.
Interested in your books, but to my way of thinking technology changes the world. Books are theoretical, perhaps beautiful, but lacking effect.
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A reply on Conversation: Present democracy is like a verdict by a mob that does not attend a trial. Tribunocracy is a better way.
Of course doing that would be criminal, but in the USA you have congressional leaders on record passing out checks on the floor of the house to influence votes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAC2xeT2yOg) - do your really think sequestration would prevent such people from having their way?
A comment on Conversation: Present democracy is like a verdict by a mob that does not attend a trial. Tribunocracy is a better way.
So I think the problem to solve isn't influence so much as undue and secret influence. The way representative democracies are set up, only the super-wealthy can use their money to influence decisions. The only way to create an equitable system is to balance direct democracy against the plutocrats, actively and publiclly redistributing their lobbying money back to the people - who can use it to exert influence in their turn.
I felt strongly enough about this to implement it myself as a Facebook app. The system is in public alpha right now - see http://www.doshmosh.com - all feedback very welcome.
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
While not its primary purpose, the semi-lattice of category and subject tags in DoshMosh could be used to construct an arbitrarily complex structure of rules, with the detail for each rule depending on whatever document is linked to the highest karma opinion within it.
The trouble is, this becomes far too sophisticated to be practical, and does so with alarming speed.
For example, say we pick the somewhat obscure sport of Geelf (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfGeelf). We could make a context for each rule - (#geelf #club), (#geelf #sharing), (#geelf #hitting #ducks) and so on. And then create a subject for the effect of each rule. (#geelf #hitting #ducks $disqualification) for instance.
Say you feel disqualification is too severe a penalty for winging a duck. You put up an opinion in DoshMosh saying "In #geelf, #hitting #ducks should just be a $100-point-penalty, not a %disqualification". And then the various Geelf afficianadoes - point - could vote for or against this and other alternatives.
I might even reply saying I'd be willing to support your opinion so long as you agreed with "$disqualification from a #geelf game for #hitting #ducks #on-purpose". Voting theory being a very deep and subtle domain, we could rapidly achieve a set of compromise rules for Geelf that rival the sophistication of Calvinball (http://littlebobeep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Calvinball1.gif).
So I suggest that a governance procedure be layered on top of the DoshMosh system whenever it's to be used for a real-world decision. It's not clear to me that reps are required to create or enforce such a procedure ...
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
First, you're quite correct.
Obviously in a democracy there must be some limitation of franchise or else you get a situation like American Idol where people vote thousands of times an hour.
We've considered quite a few different limitation models for DoshMosh and put up the simplest one to play with in the alpha release. The notion is that each user can use a limited number of votes per day for free - currently 10. If they run out they can come back the next day and use another 10. A 24 hour delay for a reward is a game dynamic that has served Zynga very well so this seems reasonable on its face.
Now the text about paying for votes that you're referring to is on the "Subscribe" page in the app, and I believe you're right in saying it's a bit insane. The idea was to offer a kind of freemium service where, if someone uses up their daily allotment of free votes, and they don't want to wait 24 hours, they can get an extra bundle of votes in a monthly subscription.
Reflecting on your remarks, however, I agree this will throttle the system as a democratic mechanism. A freemium should be based on value add, not gated service, which has obviously disproved itself in the case of online newspapers. And anyway in alpha we're really not worried about monetization at all.
So we're going to kill subscription for now and just keep the 24-hour delay model and bonus votes. Might bump up the vote limit too - if you have a suggestion on that I'd be very interested.
Thanks for the feedback!
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
DoshMosh is new - it really hasn't been used in anger yet. I invite you to introduce a complex issue there, something of direct concern to you. I would be delighted to help you pursue an exploration both of your subject of interest and of its dynamics in DoshMosh. That way we refine it by seeing what pains arise from using it.
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
Liquid Democracy is a great way to enforce accountability in representative government, a very nice generalisation of the original Swiss canton system.It's great to see it used by a real party, and more power to them.
DoshMosh as a form of direct democracy uses negative feedback as its method of governance. Where Liquid Democracy enables members to delegate decisions to others, DoshMosh provides bonus votes to users when others vote for their opinions. This encourages alliance and outreach, and enables the negative feedback to achieve a concrete effect.
Simply, if a DoshMosh user's karma drops below zero, bonus votes are no longer awarded to them. This encourages users to put up opinions that will appeal to their audience and raise their karma, and to abandon opinions that cause their karma to drop.
Each subject in DoshMosh can be represented by its most popular opinion, providing something akin to the Liquid Democracy refinement of decisions. But DoshMosh has a semi-lattice information architecture in its social and semantic structure where Liquid Democracy uses tree structures. Semi-lattices enable a richer space of social relationships per Chris Alexander's famous observations in "A City Is Not A Tree" - http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/A%20City%20is%20not%20a%20Tree.pdf .
The Facebook open graph integration encourages the same semi-lattice style of relationship. So DoshMosh focuses on provision of a peer to peer democratic social network where Liquid Democracy better supports a hierarchy of political relationships.
That is by intent on both parts. Combining the two systems in some manner is an interesting idea. I'll give it some thought. Meanwhile please feel very welcome to try DoshMosh out, Austin - where the Pirate Party is a going concern, DoshMosh has only been on its feet for a week, and we're actively looking for folk like yourself to help it shake down.
A reply on Talk: Beth Noveck: Demand a more open-source government
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
This is why DoshMosh is a social network game rather than a website. On a website your decisions are only validated by a tiny audience, the people who happen to stop by. It's what wikizens used to call a walled garden. We need democracy on the open graph, with a billion participants, before we can influence the world.
Happily, we can integrate. DoshMosh offers a portlet, called a MoshPit, a line of script that you can use to integrate your content with our service. You can see a simple example at http://moshpit-demo.herokuapp.com/smh . Bringi your content into contention with all the other content on the open graph, and coordinate it with all the other world democracy sites. This is a way to expose your ideas to the people where they live rather than burying them in a website linked by just a few.
Come and join us - we need your thinking!
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
By enabling people to reply to each others' arguments while promoting their preferred subjects, DoshMosh enables the pros and cons of different choices to be considered from all sides, and enables users to add new $subjects to the debate as they please. If you prefer a different system to this I hope you will proceed to implement same - I think I should really only implement one democratic mechanism in this lifetime or else people will get confused about me ;-)
If IBIS integrates with Facebook I'd be very interested in comparing it with DoshMosh. Does it?
A reply on Conversation: An open, facebook-integrated instant global democracy
Reddit lets you vote up a submission on a topic until it hits a subreddit front page, but it doesn't tag subjects or compare subjects by category as DoshMosh does. Furthermore on Reddit only users and opinions can have karma where on DoshMosh subjects have karma per category.
So on Reddit you may vote on one of many pages about Citizen Kane. But after a while that page will slide down the rankings. You can't vote for the subject $Citizen-Kane as, say, a #black-and-white #movie. Or as an #Orson-Welles #script - which as a different context we score separately. And we can vote for $Orson-Welles as a #director as distinct from as an #American #Actor ... without the ability to distinguish subject and categories in an opinion, Reddit votes can never contribute to preferring one subject over another.
Which is as it should be - Reddit is a news aggregation site, not a democracy like DoshMosh.
Another significant difference is that Reddit doesn't implement social voting. When you vote on Reddit, your vote is invisible to people who vote the same way you do. Connecting people who vote the same way, and permitting people to filter out those who vote differently on their preferred subjects and categories enables DoshMosh to maintain a plurality of views, not just one. Think cantons and sub-cantons.
DoshMosh can link opinions to and from any external page to form an arbitrarily complex document out of subject and category tags. In Beta, DoshMosh will field an API to enable closed communities to do this, and provide an aspect-oriented view of external content too.
Now I see nothing a representative can do that DoshMosh can't. Obviously it lacks governance conventions to finalise or enforce outcomes. That's by intent - governance assumes franchise, and DoshMosh neither prefers nor enforces same.
Interested in your books, but to my way of thinking technology changes the world. Books are theoretical, perhaps beautiful, but lacking effect.