[MG] Social mapping in crossforum theatre

[Michael Allan]

Thomas von der Elbe wrote:
> I understand your distinction between structural and dynamic. But
> then there is the zoom. I feel, that our current geographical map is
> also a structural, just very far zoomed out. The same applies to the
> issue based, tag-cloud-like map, doesnt it?

True, theatre maps are mostly structural.  But a geomap depicts
geo-structures - land forms, street layouts, and so forth - wheras a
social map depicts social structures.  In a geomap, the structures
aren't always large scale.  The geomap itself has zoom controls and
sometimes (I imagine) we need to zoom in very close to understand what
is happening.  Conseo has a use case that centers on a single bus
shelter, for example.  In cases like that, the detailed positioning of
the actors can be important.

Yet, in another sense I agree with you.  You and Alexander are both
suggesting a similar distinction.

Alexander Praetorius wrote:
> Although I cannot prove it, I have a strong feeling it might not be
> possible to use a single visualization from top to bottom. So in the
> end, the crossforum theater is at the top of a topdown perspective
> on the whole process and it's visualization has to stop at a
> "certain level". If someone decides he wants to dig deeper into the
> voting process that led to the results shown by the crossforum
> theater, he has to do it separately for all the different voting
> tools which were involved.

Yes.  Most structures (things we map) cut across all projects.  For
example, all projects share a common geography.  So a geomap is a
cross-project facility.  It extends umbrella-like across all possible
vote-servers and most other tools.  In that sense, it is always
"zoomed out", or at the "top", even when it is scoped down to a single
street corner.

Social maps are different.  Everyone agrees with Alexander here.  The
theatre app is going to require project-specific social maps -
project-specific views of the governance and consensus structures that
the project's own tools are brought to bear on.  That makes sense.

Ed Pastore wrote:
> Couldn't the visualization itself take the form of a plug-in
> architecture where people can add-in/swap-out new ways of viewing
> the theater to match their preferences? In other words, along the
> lines of a skin on a website. Look at the preferences dialog in
> Wikipedia as a model... two different people can have radically
> different experiences of the same underlying content; not just in
> terms of appearance, but also to some extent in terms of behavior.

That's it, I think.  We have an example of that kind of thing in our
latest geomap: http://metagovernment.tuxfamily.org/crossforum/#c=DumG

Choose your preferred geo-skin with the (+) control at top right.  No
matter what skin you choose, it covers the same underlying
geo-structures - the same geographic flesh and bones.  Just that
commonality is what makes it so interesting to compare the different
skins.  Each depicts the same thing and depicts it truly, yet none
depicts it completely.  For the complete picture of reality, we need
all of them together.

Alexander Praetorius wrote:
> Doing such a thing as a crossforum theater is very daring all by
> itself, because of the problem that led to this question. I still
> cannot grasp how it might be possible to unify the results of
> different approaches from different voting tools.

Thomas's vote mirroring is a possible mechanism for that [1].  I don't
know of any other.  You wouldn't think vote mirroring could work, but
apparently it does.  We coded a prototype that pulled votes from Jim
Gilliam's servers into our own.  We looked far enough into the details
that we're confident we can apply it more generally, maybe even
universally.  Crucially for that, it's a translation based mechanism.
(It's kind of fun to design the particular translations, too.)

If the tool-specific social maps are "skins" as Ed suggests, then all
that's needed to make it interesting to swap skins and compare the
results is the common flesh and bones underneath.  Somehow vote
mirroring promises that.  It promises to underpin a social-structural
reality that is not an artifact of any single tool or project, but
rather of all of them together.  Anyway, that seems to be the theory
that's suggested here.

Practically speaking, how can we approach this as a cross-project
effort?  A project might want a "social skin" of it's own for the
theatre app, but lack the resources to complete it.  Or it might face
some other barrier.  Speaking for myself, I could try to be helpful in
whatever way is needed.  (This stuff is fun to code, and I couldn't
easily get too much of it on my plate.)


[1] http://u.zelea.com/w/User:ThomasvonderElbe_GmxDe/Vote_mirroring

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org