[MG] Cascading agreement, money, communities and other resources in votespace
Thomas von der Elbe
ThomasvonderElbe at gmx.de
Mon Jun 13 03:35:39 EDT 2011
On Sun, 12 Jun 2011 14:47, Ed Pastore wrote:
>
>> 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! :-)
>
> How does this account for the person who doesn't want a kindergarden
> near their house for whatever reason?
Well, votes are still a recource (like wood and bricks are in this case
too). So everything that applies to normal polls, where votes are the
only recource, applies here too. Whatever the meta-rule for those people
is has to be fullfilled. If someone doesn't want a specific plan of
kindergarden executed (for whatever reason) he will not vote for it. If
enogh people oppose it, it will not be build, even if they had 200% of
the other necesarry resources (other than votes).
Thomas
> This model seems to be centered around adhocracy-like building of
> projects by efforts of the willing, but I don't see where it allows
> for people who are actively opposed to the project in the first place.
> A kindergarden is a little hard to imagine someone opposing if they
> don't even have to pay for it, but how about building a dam, which
> will radically alter the flow of water downstream?
>
>
> On Jun 6, 2011, at 12:43 AM, Michael Allan wrote:
>
>> Ed and Thomas,
>>
>> Ed Pastore wrote:
>>> I'm trying to catch up on my backlog of reading, and the below looks
>>> both fascinating and baffling. I'm trying, but I've lost the thread
>>> of what's going on here. Could one of you try to bring this down to
>>> earth a little and explain where you are? I'd be happy to work on
>>> some documentation (or at least description) as a learning exercise,
>>> but I'm not able to do that from posts like the below.
>>
>> These are the main ideas as I see them.
>>
>> (a) Expose the resource needs, expectations and fulfilments of each
>> collective effort as a "message" to the larger public sphere.
>> Express that message in terms of the social space of the effort
>> itself (b).
>>
>> (b) Show the resources flowing together with the votes of the
>> participants in the same way that agreement flows into consensus.
>> Agreement is just a kind of resource.
>>
>> (c) Consider that extension within the larger public sphere is
>> another kind of resource that an effort needs. By "extension", I
>> mean participation that covers many separate communities. When a
>> collective effort needs, expects and is working toward extension,
>> then let it say so.
>>
>> (d) Let the periphery decide the resource needs. Trees and branches
>> of the collective forest are free to decide for themselves what
>> resources are required for the overall effort. (We floated this
>> idea yesterday in offline discussion, C, Thomas and me.)
>>
>> Our example concerns the problem of littering in the streets.
>> The leading candidate defines it as a legislative matter for the
>> city and is gathering votes for a bylaw (resource = agreement)
>> that will impose fines, or something like that. A delegate in a
>> higher branch disagrees and instead defines it as a local
>> community effort (resource = agreement + labour) with
>> participation restricted to the residents of the local
>> neighbourhood, but simulaneously expanded to include non-citizen
>> residents. The count engine will take care to ensure that the
>> labour pledges and non-citizen votes do not cascade past the
>> delegate and into the bylaw drafts below, while the local
>> citizens' votes do. (In practice, this particular delegate would
>> be better off as an end candidate, so this is a contrived
>> example.)
>>
>> We recognize that this freedom of delegates to redefine the issue
>> means that a single poll may sometimes come to house two issues
>> that really ought to be separate. The problem then becomes the
>> coordination of the move of one branch or tree to a separate
>> poll. Moving an individual position is easy, so the only problem
>> is the social coordination of the individuals. Therefore the
>> delegates will solve this.
>>
>> (e) Let the periphery decide what resource message to expose (a).
>> Clearly this is required when the resources are completely
>> redefined by the periphery, as in the example above. But here is
>> another example:
>>
>> One branch of the "street littering" tree is drafting a radically
>> different version of the bylaw. They only have a few votes but
>> they feel they have the capacity to grow among certain
>> communities in the city. So they identify inter-community
>> extension as a crucial resource (resources = extension +
>> agreement) and go to work at it. Naturally they expose this as
>> their public resource message. They need help in order to extend
>> to other communities, so they ask for it.
>>
>> Thomas von der Elbe wrote:
>>> Interesting! Yes I think it will work. But to show the number of
>>> active communities in the vote-space is additional to the other 4
>>> maps, right?
>>
>> I think the other 4 maps (graph/table maps) are now secondary. They
>> are likely still needed, but not front and center.
>>
>>>> Now to communities: As we've discovered, the crucial resource in
>>>> the beginning is not actually agreement or money, but rather the
>>>> talk itself. Unless the conversation can extend over a sufficient
>>>> number of communities - spread its wings and fly - it dies. So
>>>> the content we need to show is the number of active communities
>>>> over which each branch or tree of votespace has extended itself.
>>>> We want the first time viewer to realize, "Ah, I see! These
>>>> people are growing an extended conversation."
>>>
>>> But here too: the content of the drafts plus the votes plus the
>>> number of communities ... all together, right? Or do you picture it
>>> as seperate?
>>
>> The "2 second" message is focused on inter-community extension in this
>> case. Votespace is tailored accordingly. I figure we show only the
>> count of active communities (or whatever) and not the count of votes.
>>
>> I guess we'd provide a control for the user to switch resources. For
>> most of the forest in example (4), there would only be the one
>> resource, "agreement" as measured by votes. But some branches would
>> also allow "extension" to be selected as a resource, and others would
>> allow "labour". And so forth.
>>
>> 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?
>>
>> --
>> Michael Allan
>>
>> Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
>> http://zelea.com/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Start : a mailing list of the Metagovernment project
>> http://www.metagovernment.org/
>> Post to the list: Start at metagovernment.org
>> Manage subscription:
>> http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Start : a mailing list of the Metagovernment project
> http://www.metagovernment.org/
> Post to the list: Start at metagovernment.org
> Manage subscription:
> http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org
>
Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org
More information about the Votorola
mailing list