[MG] Voting advice application

[conseo]

Am Friday 10 June 2011 schrieb Alex Keskitalo / D4C:

Hallo Alex!

> It's true, I DO use data as my argument, but only because in the finnish
> environment a specific type of data is abundant..
> 
> Practically everyone, meaning 90% of all candidates, 90% of all voters
> who "have internet", map their opinions against candidates (and each
> other) in more than one brand of "vaalikone", and this becomes an
> unofficial national passtime whenever elections are near, Every major TV
> channel and Newspaper company heavily market/promote their own brand of
> vaalikone, there where over 200 to choose from, like greenpeace, the
> church, internet communities, even the Zeitgeist movement had one. Its
> just something you do.

Ok, just to clarify my understanding of this. You point to the concept of 
using a finite amount of statements (sentences) to chose from to find candidates 
"near" you and to gather data about the public opinion from the side of the 
organisations. I think that this concept is interesting in a way that you can 
for example tag complex positions/texts with a certain statement/fragment and 
use that to quickly find related content. I have seen what you describe for 
German elections also already. But our concept is not only to clarify where 
you share the same plain positions with others, but we try to help consensus 
building where differences in positons happen. The data argument is imo really 
relevant to study the consensus and to write tools which help you to find 
candidates and new positions. But they still keep you as a voter not with your 
own position but rather at a set of public consent of opinions, which might 
look very differnt once they are applied to a specific social problem. At least 
I found myself vaguely represented by the options in these polls for German 
elections. The devil is in the not mentioned details imo (same for party 
programs). So you get what you expect and vice versa and as you pointed out 
something like a market for predefined popular opinions comes to existence. 
This does not necessarily lead to a more direct democracy, but maybe only to 
more populism (which btw. just happened in Finnland, right?). 
In my pov what we try to do is really bring all different people directly 
together and not only let them chose. The interesting stuff is not what we have 
vaguely in common, but the differences between us. This is where the true 
potential of Democracy lies as a social progress in learning why we differ and 
reflect the reasons in a consent (synthesis not compromise).
Vaalikone should fit in there, but we try to build tools to create a permanent 
"grass-root" consent which does not depend on a defined set of statements or 
some organisations. I am not tearing your down here, please don't 
missunderstand me, I am just trying to give you a picture what metagoverment 
(and esp. Votorola's) vision means to me. Do you understand what I mean? 
In which ways are you interested in combining your concept with our collective 
text-drafting? I see value in your concept and experiences. 

conseo




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