Horizontal cascades and vertical geo-locals

[Michael Allan]

Thanks guys, for the feedback.

Thomas von der Elbe wrote:
> If one has voted already it is probably good to see ones own vote-flow 
> right as the start-page (otherwise just the end-candidates).

OK.

> By "add the voting controls " you mean, that I can shift my vote to 
> another candidate right in the tree (without following the link to his 
> wiki and vote from there), right? This is very good too.

Yes.  You'll be able to browse anywhere in the tree, and change your
vote just by pressing 'Vote'.

> Yes, but I think the distributed voting controls are more important,
> because then the whole mashine will be functionable already and we could 
> start testing it.

OK.  I'll work on that next.

Is there anything else we need to distribute, though, other than the
voting links (Vote for Me)?  Do we really need sparkline graphs at
this stage?  If not, we could save time.  We could be ready as soon as
I finish the horizontal tree browser - roughly 7-10 days.

> I don´t think, that issue is important now, but ... How would it be, if 
> *every* voter automatically votes for his own draft and can additionally 
> delegate his vote to another draft? So that his vote counts for both 
> drafts then. Just like everybodys vote counts for his/her delegate and 
> further for their delegates too.
> For (iv) we would later need a filter-mechanism to filter out the votes 
> of non-residents.
> But point (i) and (iii) would be solved this way.

The code is telling me not to change the cycling rules at this point.
It can get hairy.  Maybe once it's running, and everyone sees how it
works, then we can weigh the pro's and con's of self-voting?

David Hilvert wrote:
> This can break on Firefox (Ubuntu) with 
> 
> browser.display.use_document_colors;false
> browser.display.use_system_colors;true
>
> (Probably depending on system colors; I'm using light green on dark green.)

On Firefox 3 (standard settings) and IE 8, it should look like this:
http://zelea.com/var/tmp-public/4-horz.png

I'm using background images and masking for the arrows.  We can look
at something more robust.  Meantime, maybe there's an easy fix on your
side - custom CSS or something.

> ...having some way to allow delegates to indicate areas of
> contention with their 'upstream' (short of a vote change) would be
> good.  A system like stet or co-ment could do this (independently of
> votorola, but integrated into the drafting system).
> 
> Given the scope of such a project, best might be to use an existing system or
> find a way to combine systems (e.g., combining a wiki with a comment mark-up
> similar to co-ment or stet, or developing wiki layers from an underlying system
> [e.g., git] supporting branching).  Others have worked on this sort of thing
> already.  (Maybe Wikimedia would be interested in providing funding?)
> 
> The nice thing about votorola is that it allows the drafting system to be
> fairly independent of the voting system.

Ideally, it will be completely independent.  We're only using
MediaWiki as a temporary default.  But even now, a drafter can put a
link on her position page that points to some other location.

I expect that collaborative drafting problems will be the main focus
of alpha trials.  We'll need the help of other tools, I agree.

> On further thought, could this be implemented as an amendment system ("I
> support this draft, but also have these proposed changes ...")?  This might be
> simplest, and would parallel existing legislative procedure.

That's actually how it works, in theory:

  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/theory.xht#candidate

  "Thus by continuing to vote for Juanita, even while proposing a
  somewhat different plan, Monika might be hoping that Juanita will
  eventually agree to amend her own plan."

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/