Skype Conference

[Michael Allan]

Welcome Richard,

The prototype as it stands is technically functional for purposes of
consensus building.  Unfortunately, it's not user friendly yet.  But
if your experimental design could somehow compensate for that, maybe
by simplifying the use cases, providing good guidance or tolerant
users, then it might work for you *as is*.  We'd still have to
coordinate to develop whatever service points are missing (data feeds
and so forth) but I doubt those would be a problem.  We have to
develop them anyway.

Please share some details of your academic work, if you can.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/


Its me Mario wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I stumbled across votorola a few weeks ago and I've been listening in on the
> google group when time allows. I've been extremely busy so no time to get
> involved so far (plus not sure what I can bring to the table at this point)
> but this seems like a good time to poke my head in and say hello.
> 
> I'm studying voting-based interaction on the web towards a Sociology/Stats
> PhD at a UK University, but the reason I got into that initially was a
> strong interest in E-Democracy... I couldn't find any really interesting
> examples of e-democracy to study two years ago, so I've been studying mostly
> Social News sites until now.
> 
> I tried to make my own democratically run non-profit shop last year (still
> up at www.socapital.org) before realising that I really don't have the
> programming/web-dev skills to advance e-democracy platforms myself in any
> meaningful way.
> 
> My background is in experimental psychology and I've produced a journal
> article or two while I was doing that. Experimentation and analysis is what
> I think I could bring to the Votorola project, although I don't know whether
> that's on the current list of priorities...
> 
> At the point where there's some sort of prototype of the software up and
> running I could recruit participants and run experimental instances of it
> (provided I can play with some of the variables of how it works). Or, if you
> get an instance of the software up and running for public consumption and
> provide me with detailed data on how its being used I could analyse that to
> see what I can learn. The goal in both cases would be to produce some
> findings to publish in a journal article or present at conferences... so it
> could conceivably help the project both by increasing understanding and
> increasing awareness among academics.
> 
> Like I say I'm very busy these days, but I'll continue to follow the project
> and if you think of some way that I can help out then let me know!
> 
> Richard