Votorola stable release (and papers about the field)

[Michael Allan]

Hi Peter,

Thank you for sharing these papers.  I post to the list in case others
are interested.

Peter Zbornik said:
> Votorola got good scores in the review in the attachment - except
> from the development side (not being ready yet).

  Andrea Cangialosi.  2011.  Delegative democracy: is the
  PiratenPartei liquid democracy proposal fit for Germany?
  http://www.scribd.com/doc/83203862

Cangialosi uses Thomas's comparison.  He adds, "The objectivity of
this comparison might be argued since the author is also involved in
Votorola's project [!]... I'll suggest considering also a deeper
technical analysis in the working paper [below]."

  David Horbank.  2011.  Liquid Democracy: Neue Formen direkter
  Demokratie im Internetzeitalter.
  http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~graebe/Texte/Horbank-11.pdf

I discovered a couple of other interesting papers in Cangialosi's
references.  I don't know how I missed these before:

  Bryan Ford.  2002.  Delegative democracy.
  http://www.brynosaurus.com/deleg/deleg.pdf

  James Green-Armytage.  2010.  Voluntary delegation as the basis for
  a future political system.
  http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/proxy2010.pdf

  (more: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/voting/)

Green-Armytage's history of the ideas is the best I ever saw.  I was
unaware of Miller's paper, for example.

  James Miller.  1969.  A Program for Direct and Proxy Voting in the
  Legislative Process.  Public Choice 7: 107-113.

> By the way (probably an other topic), one way to allow cycles in
> delegated votes and still being able to calculate the number of
> votes of each person is to use the page rank algorithm which google
> uses:
> http://chato.cl/papers/boldi_bonchi_castillo_vigna_2011_viscous_democracy_social_networks.pdf

Boldi et al. use something similar to Brin and Page's "dampening".
The vote loses strength as it goes from delegate to delegate.  We have
a different approach where the vote is stopped and "held" before it
can cycle: http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/theory.xht#cycle

We've been counting cycles for a while, but we never had a good way of
viewing them.  The latest code has a slight improvement.  I posted a
demo here: http://mail.zelea.com/list/votorola/2012-July/001392.html
The section about cycles refers to the "vote track" at the top of this
page: http://zelea.com/w/G/p/sandbox

You need Firefox, Chrome or something similar to see it.  Please let
me know if it doesn't work for you.

Very best,
-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/


Peter Zbornik said:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> thanks for the short overview.
> The German pirate party is using LiquidFeedback a lot:
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-pirate-party-seek-to-reinvent-politics-a-829451-2.htm<http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-pirate-party-seek-to-reinvent-politics-a-829451-2.html>
> There will be a beta-release of v 2.0 soon (end of June).
> More info on the pirate party and LiquidFeedback:
> http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid-democracy-works
> List of users of Liquid Democracy:
> http://liqd.net/en/schwerpunkte/anwendung/
> Votorola got good scores in the review in the attachment - except from the
> development side (not being ready yet).
> 
> By the way (probably an other topic), one way to allow cycles in delegated
> votes and still being able to calculate the number of votes of each person
> is to use the page rank algorithm which google uses:
> http://chato.cl/papers/boldi_bonchi_castillo_vigna_2011_viscous_democracy_social_networks.pdf
> .
> 
> I just subscribed to the votorola mailing list, so you can post this
> message there if you want.
> 
> Best regards
> Peter Zborník