[MG] Cascading agreement, money, communities and other resources in votespace

[Thomas von der Elbe]

To make a really obvious example of what becomes possible if we use the 
consensus-making tools not just for counting votes but also for counting 
any other ressources:

A community has no kindergarden but wants one. They start a poll and 
many different plans emerge of how it should be like, where exactly it 
should be located etc. Every plan expresses the amount of the different 
necessary resources for its realization, i.e. votes, money, land, 
labour, bricks, wood, ... And now all the people voting for a paricular 
plan can express what recources they are willing to contribute. And the 
count-engine counts them all up. So everyone can see, what is still 
missing and what not. If the count reaches 100% the plan can be 
executed, all the resources are there. Happy parents, happy children! :-)

On Mon, 06 Jun 2011 6:43, Michael Allan wrote:
> Thomas has concerns about (c), and I try to factor them out here:
>   (1) That we should pioneer the practice of extension manually, so to
>       speak, without tool supports.
>
>   (2) That tools might not be needed for this practice at all.
>
>   (3) That the practice is only useful during the early adoption phase
>       of the technology.  Once the first poll hits the news, nobody
>       will be worried about extension anymore.
>
>   (4) That it's wasteful to develop tools that are likely to be
>       outmoded so soon.
>
> I agree with (1) and disagree with the others.  But did I state these
> correctly, Thomas?

Yes you did. But something changed for me meanwhile. The problem, that 
currently existing communities will not necesarrily also be 
voting-communities, i.e. voting the same way. This will probably change 
quick and those communities will re-arange, split up, etc. Also, 
communities will structure themselves into many sub-communities, because 
voters will want to talk to their candidate alone (but in public) and 
not be disturbed by voters from other candidates. So the average 
sub-community-size will be 15 members or so.

Somehow I believe, there is an overall tendency towards a huge single 
forum for everybody with many sub-sub-sub communities for the simple 
reason, that it makes vote-shifts easier. If you are just a small group 
and you want to win other voters, you better go where they are talking 
already, so they dont need to bother for a new login etc if they 
consider joining you. Maybe I'm wrong here and OpenID has lowered this 
hurdle enough so there will be many forums. But still I am convinced 
that once a single poll has exploded in a population, there are no tools 
needed any more to support the growth of the next poll.

Therefore I still see no use for this kind of tool for the long-term, 
but more than I did before for the short term. (The only long-term use 
might be as a measurement for rapidly growing (not just in numbers but 
also communities) and therefore interesting polls. But this is very 
small use I guess.)

Thomas
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