Why vote mirroring?

[conseo]

Michael Allan wrote:
> conseo wrote:
> > schrieb Michael Allan:
> > > ... http://blog.hyperarchy.com/
> > 
> > ... You are right, that vote mirroring helps us to attract their
> > users in our open and free common place, but we should wait until
> > something serious happens there. People in e- dem might be
> > early-adopters, but they get frustrated quickly when nothing comes
> > out of their engagement or their decisions are simply ignored (which
> > is true for all of these political marketing platforms.) Even for
> > the fiscal debate only 67 people dragged and dropped the predefined
> > answers into place. Or am I missing something? ...
> > 
> > ... vote-mirroring only makes sense once they have a seriously
> > engaged voter base and we can offer them more functionality then
> > they get there. Atm. our functionality is still in the transition
> > towards the working Crossforum UI and the resource integration,
> > which is imo absolutely mandatory before reaching out for
> > users. Vote-mirroring will then do the work for us :-D (It is really
> > smart understanding of how e-dem is about to work and how it is
> > supposed to be open, where traditional business tries to lock its
> > users in).
> 
> You recommend waiting till the software is ready, but that doesn't
> address the two biggest risks we face as a development project:
> 
>   1. We are developing the wrong software.  We are unfamiliar with our
>      users.  We have no clear understanding of what practices they are
>      engaged in, or how our software can be of immediate utility.
> 
>   2. Online voting is about to take off.  It won't be Votorola that
>      succeeds or any project that is geared toward user freedom.
>      Instead it will be a monopoly that fences off its users and
>      exploits them for private gain.  Other projects will be sidelined
>      and abandoned in a general stampede to the winner.
> 
> These are the risks.  Thomas's idea of vote mirroring is the answer to
> both.  It tells us that our users are going to be candidates engaged
> in campaigning across multiple, competing vote-servers.  They'll be
> hoping to pull voters away and improve their standing in the polls.
> (Now we know what software to develop, and for what purpose.)

I don't oppose that. I am just saying that these risks are not as big as we 
might fear. But doing vote-mirroring without having anything serious to mirror 
slows us down, since we need to scrape useless data and scraping is a pretty 
individual process. We already have some unique features and vote-mirroring is 
one of the most prominent (besides resource managment and the difference-bridge 
itself, the bridge-footings, the difference feed, ...). None of the commercial 
projects are anything near these yet. They rather tried to implement some kind 
of "I like" ranking mechanism or some polished feedback interface for the 
local goverment. They simply extend traditional web 2.0 concepts to voting and 
this does not cut it as one can see from the results. They also draw little 
attention for further development, since they are closed source.

1. This might be the case, but vote mirroring will only help here if we do 
something right. Vote mirroring in itself might be already attractive, but 
with a non-finished product we still can't attract users. As long as one 
project takes off there is nothing to gain from vote mirroring. If several 
projects take off then they might come up with something similiar themselves 
quickly. We have to be attractive besides that. I am also not really sure if 
our honest user base are political candidates. They might be interested, but 
they (at least when they are organized in the current political systems) are 
not truely honest about emancipation. You have pointed out the grass-roots 
moment of Votorola in the discussion with the Gingers, but as you could 
experience these activists are mostly focused in getting more influence, not in 
being radically open themselves.

2. This is very unlikely to happen. It might take off in form of some feature 
in Facebook or Google+, but this has little to do with what we plan and 
already offer. If it takes off in this form or in the form of some venture 
capital based platform then it will bring us little, vote-mirroring or not, 
besides product ranking information. There have been quite some seriously 
founded projects and none of them has nearly succeeded (a few thousand 
permanent users at least [and even this would not be guaranteed longer term 
success]). A platform including economical emancipation cannot be financed by 
capital, since it would destroy the profit. Our resource management limits the 
involvement of money by dividing tasks properly for experts, we would have to 
focus on money itself to make serious business aka become a bank, which was 
one of my original ideas to make money: 
http://zelea.com/w/User:4consensus_WebDe/Budgeting_system
Projects like kickstarter.com already exist and are successful, so I simply 
don't see a niché here. 

A venture capitalist would have to accept to finance revolutionary emancipation 
(also towards himself) and serious outcome  for their voters to be attractive 
and I don't see that happen. Otherwise why should users invest their precious 
time in some decision making if it isn't meant to have honest results anyway? 
This is not a social network, which is meant to distract people from action 
and fill their frustration with cheap entertainment, but the ultimate tool of 
their personal realisation. 
I won't spend any time there and all early adopters of current e-dem projects 
have gone that way sooner or later. But it needs serious long-term engagement 
to really drive the concepts in the never-ending ways of collective 
emancipation. This is only possible for an open-source project and we both 
don't see success of another FOSS project as a problem.

> 
> By the same token, these practices and our efforts to further them
> will preclude the formation of a monopoly in voting services. (Now
> we'll have a fair chance to develop that software.) *
> 
>  * If anyone doubts that vote-mirroring and cross-server campaigning
>    can have this effect, please see my challenge to the experts:
>    http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/2011-July/024104.html

I don't see a direct flaw, don't get me wrong, but I see that we might waste 
our time as long as our web interface is not hammered out and we can't do the 
resource mangement reliably. You radically insist on the guidance of users, 
but we already have a pretty solid concept in form of Crossforum, the bridge 
footings the feed the vote map and all you and we have done in the last year. 
We need to bring that to the table to continue these exciting developments. 
And to do so they need to be in a "solid" prototype working state. 
To sum up: My main concern is that we slow ourselves down if we don't expose 
our current well reflected concepts first. Taken the above concepts together we 
can already deal with nearly any problem that can come up in a collective 
process in this society. Vote-mirroring has its place, but if no venture-
capital e-dem software truely takes off, and I fear it won't, then vote-
mirroring is not the main problem, but satisfying all the needs for serious 
social action. And no project will succeed until it can bind its users to it 
in this way. This is why resource management is crucial, it allows users to 
act without changing the laws and do so completely without the current 
political process in new political ways. It even makes sense for only a few 
dozens of people (like opensourceecology.org hopefully).

c

P.S.: I don't want to argue with you a lot over this, I am ok if you put your 
time in getting vote-mirroring worked out, but I can't let these arguments 
stand here without pointing out my own :-) I am also often worried that we 
might do something wrong and that this might be a waste of time, but seriously 
questioning my own arguments I think we have pretty good solutions at hand at 
the moment. I then fear that doubt might take too much of my time to get 
finally going.