Resource pledge and account definitions - fit with vote mirroring

[conseo]

Am Thursday, July 28, 2011 schrieb Michael Allan:
> c wrote:
> > I could push with a proposal to assign the price to me :-) Maybe
> > some more competition will come up then. Well, likely not, people
> > will think that it is a fake. But if somebody would take some money
> > then something real would happen in the e-dem world :-). Maybe if we
> > break the price into smaller pieces for smaller tasks and we then
> > draft which tasks that would be and how we award a winner. More like
> > a monthly honor to a contributor reflected in some real bucks. But
> > anyway, likely this is not the way to reach out for people
> > primarily.
> 
> Maybe we don't have to worry about reaching out to users anymore.
> Some of our competitors are well financed and well staffed in the
> marketing department.  For those that aren't, venture capital won't be
> hard to get.  It appears we're heading into an investment bubble in
> social media.  I think we should let the excess of money do all the
> work for us.  A correspondent pointed me to Hyperarchy, for example,
> which is looking for seed funding.  http://blog.hyperarchy.com/
> http://codeforamerica.org/2011/04/19/hyperarchy-open-decision-making-for-op
> en-organizations/

It looks more like an extension ranking mechanism for facebook like polls. 
What is your favourite food of summer? How should we name our new robot? 
besides polls like "How should we balance the fiscal budget?" is not very 
convincing for serious long-time political engagement. 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? Note: These users can very well be paid to join the 
platform. A part of them at least will be fake profiles to draw attention.

With the serious text drafting we have in mind, we can only attract 
"activists" who are engaged in issues over years and are willing to really 
change an issue and not the Facebook type of user who seeks distraction from 
daily frustration, as we concluded.  Best for us would still be to get venture 
capital ourselves, but this is also risky. Some public or non-profit funding 
would probably be best. But 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).

> 
> I think we should use Thomas's vote mirroring to image the votes from
> their site, and all other sites.  The votes will bring the candidates
> and the candidates will bring the users.  In this perspective, our
> competitors are reduced to resources for the candidates to consume and
> our job is to provide the tools for that.  (I'll post more about the
> underlying rationale for this separately.)
> 
> > > Based on that, it should be possible to hammer out a method of
> > > complex accounting for labour assignments, materials, and so
> > > forth.  (Have a look C when you're free, and tell me what you
> > > think.)
> > 
> > Yep that looks very flexible and I think it fits collectively
> > planning economical processes already in a scale to a few hundred
> > people at least. It definetly fits my perspective on how the tools
> > should allow assignment of resources to consent.
> 
> Right, you could use separate account names to absorb the complexity:
> http://zelea.com/w/Property:Account_name
> 
> But that won't scale.  We can fix that by defining a new counting
> method for the more complex stuff. *

Yep set algebra might be the way to go then and to my current light 
understanding of how to do that, it should be technical friendly to implement 
it.

> 
> > It is still a bit complicated though. I have had a look at that
> > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Creating_pages_with_preloaded_text
> > to provide an auto-generated pledge page. Copy and paste is not
> > difficult, but it can be confusing to newcomers where to paste stuff.
> > Ideally there still is semantic forms to avoid writing wiki markup.
> 
> Or provide a pledge UI in the theatre app.  The pollwiki UIs are only
> intended as working prototypes, and later as fallbacks.  See item 2:
> http://zelea.com/project/outcast/dep.xht

Sure this is also possible, esp. for voting and resource assignment. Still I 
think that using the web UI of MediaWiki has the advantage of targeting a 
large user base of MediaWiki users. Many activists already have some 
experience (esp. if they are interested in real world projects (-> resouce 
allocation) with MediaWiki. Integrating our work with extensions there might 
help to keep our storage more open then to write custom UI's for Crossforum. 
Likely both is possible in an open and compatible way anyway, so Crossforum is 
a good starting point as long as we don'T clutter MediaWiki.

c