Similarity Metrics and Clustering and Merging of Positions

[David Bovill]

Hi, I'm new as well :)

2009/12/3 Thomas von der Elbe <ThomasvonderElbe at gmx.de>

>
> > What I'm currently missing here (maybe I just didn't see it) is any
> > discussion about the application of similarity metrics and clustering
> > algorithms when it comes to the problem of reducing a vast amount of
> > possible positions to a few that can be voted upon.
>
> What an interesting idea! Even though I dont see the need to reduce the
> amount of different positions in order to vote upon them.
>
> I picture Votorola working like this: Everybody can have his own
> position, but because they are structured in trees, the vast amount of
> them will be arranged according to affinity. This will be done by the
> users themselves: they look for the best place to vote by going from the
> trunk of the tree further out to the leaves. This way they would only
> have to choose a few times (at each bifurcation) between a low number of
> alternatives. A difference-engine will help here by showing only the
> differences.
>

I agree with Thomas here, while a "difference engine", search, statistical
relatedness approaches are of course useful tools, but less powerful and
relevant to deliberative democracy / communicative ascent than hand crafted
solutions to the same problem (such as folksonomy tagging) / facilitating
manual linking. Given the networked basis of the growth of cloned
propositions built into the system this is less of a problem with Votorola
than other online communities. Even in large social communities - I'm
thinking FaceBook / Flickr the combination of basic search, social
networking, and tagging appears to be more than adequate a foundation to
allow the community to organise effective group activities. Course there is
always space for improvement!

Another possible way to find your place to vote, would be through a
> classification-system, which shows clusters of positions suitable for
> you through tagging for example.
>

This is one of my main focuses of interest - using folksonomy tagging, and
structured debating semantics to enable the visualisation of complex
arguments and their inter-relatedness. For me this would be one of the main
areas that would need working on in terms of navigation / GUI as well (as
deliberative theory).

>
> But the application you describe here, could maybe be used for the same
> purpose: as a search-engine for the most similiar position to yours in
> the whole tree/forest (or even across different voting-engines).
>

It could also maybe be useful to mark out active contributors (similar tools
are sometimes used on wikis and open source projects to reward
contributions) - some sort of original contribution index?



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.reluk.ca/list/votorola/attachments/20091203/45bef737/attachment-0007.html>