Introduction

[conseo]

Dear list readers :-),

I haven't introduced myself in the last post. I am a German developer 
contributing to Votorola/Crossforum. I am responsible for the Difference-Feed 
and the Harvesters generating the data for it. I have joined Votorola last 
autumn after carefully examining different e-dem solutions like Adhocracy and 
LiquidFeedback as well as having a look at some others. Votorola has convinced 
me, because of its radical openess which is both reflected in the technical 
design as well as in the difference patching concept. No other solution allows 
you to always have your very own position. They only allow you to vote for 
certain positions, which are not really collectively drafted. Mutual 
understanding is extremely difficult and the radical openism Votorola proposes 
with text-drafting fits a radical democratical perspective on how to design 
tools for democracy and avoids social prejudices in the design of the tooling.
Yet Votorola is open-source and we are willing to merge our ideas and concepts 
with any other successful concepts or free software. This non-camp thinking 
open approach is imo a prerequisite for any e-dem tooling to succeed, since it 
is more than a web 2.0 platform or a potential business concept. If successful 
it will change the very ways of business itself, so it has to provide all the 
power to the voters and not cover some secret plan by the tool developers for 
financial success.

I have joined Votorola to extend it towards collective resource allocation as 
this changes the tooling from a rather political perspective on jurisdictional 
discourses to a very practical every day economical platform and allows to 
explore new ways of collective economy without a central powerful planning 
institution/management. Votorola's own openism and usage of free and very open 
tools like Semantic MediaWiki makes it very flexible to collectively organize 
resources and distribute them by voting for certain plans. As I have convinced 
both Mike and Thomas that resource management in a general sense is very 
attractive, Mike is now implementing resource allocation in the general voting 
mechanism and I am very excited about it.

c