Well, as I see it the details of a more general budget as in your example in ABC% where you turn C into X and Y is not really necessary. The detailed budget decisions will be taken by people who are interested in the detail budget. About shifting the vote continuously... That is an issue we have talked about in my party, <a href="http://www.aktivdemokrati.se">www.aktivdemokrati.se</a>. We came to the conclusion that the vote should be changeable until either when people themselves agree on when it should be decided OR through a certain time constant that depends on the number of votes cast for and against OR when the parliament votes for it (if our party is a small party within the parliament). <div>2008/2/27, Michael Allan <<a href="mailto:mike@zelea.com">mike@zelea.com</a>>:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Martin Gustavsson wrote: > -Maybe we misunderstand eachother. The "median" result is exactly the > middle result and NOT the mean result. Therefor it will be accepted as the > most democratic. Trust me! Otherwise I would agree with you. You're right, Martin. My understanding of statistics is at fault. A median cannot be skewed by extreme values in the way that a mean can. It's a good measure for the purpose you intend (budgetary decisions), almost as good as an actual consensus. (This is an interesting scenario, not considered before, so I'll answer at some length.) An open budgeting election can be done (e.g. in Votorola) in a similar fashion as an open policy, petition or legislative election. The open approach would have several advantages over the traditional alternative of a dumb, closed poll. In a closed poll, the electoral authority drafts the question; and people fill in the answers. Later, they are told the results. Open elections improve on this, as follows: In an open election, the question (or framework) of the election is a public *initiative*. An electoral authority might pose the initial question (just to get people started), but so might anyone else. Furthermore, voters are free to *rewrite* the question as the election proceeds. For example, consider an initial budget question that looks as follows (the voter being expected to answer by filling in the blanks): A ______ % B ______ % C ______ % As the election proceeds, we may discover answers that look like this: A ______ % B ______ % X ______ % Y ______ % Not everybody will have the expertise to re-frame a question in this way. But for those who *do* (call them budget drafters), re-framing the question is one way in which they can share their knowledge with the rest of us voters. Nor will everybody have the expertise to fill in the blanks. That can also be a job for our volunteer budget drafters. Other voters can then choose among these drafters, with their variant drafts, and select the one that seems most reasonable to them. Nor will everybody feel competent, even, for that choice. How many among us can make sensible budget decisions? For those who cannot, how can we participate effectively in the decision? Open elections solve this problem with a 'delegate cascade'. The following is extracted from the context of a legislative bill, but the reader will see how it applies equally to a budget document. <a href="http://zelea.com/project/votorola/a/design.xht#ca-culture-community">http://zelea.com/project/votorola/a/design.xht#ca-culture-community</a> ...consider an object of law: a legislative bill for tax reform. Most residents are not actually going to read a legislative bill. (Even professional legislators often read only a summary.) Nevertheless, almost every member of the community does have an interest in tax legislation. Consequently, they also have a motivation to vote. This poses no problem for the consensual medium, because it is a delegate cascade. A typical voter who lacks the time and expertise to read a legislative draft will nevertheless have time to cast a vote. She can do this in an informed manner, for example, by voting for a friend who is better informed than herself -- perhaps a friend who is a tax accountant -- and has similar interests to her own. By casting a vote on the basis of trusted and reliable information, such as this, she is making an informed decision. If she has doubts or questions, she can direct them to her chosen candidate. By engaging her friend in dialogue and weighing the answers, she can decide whether to leave her vote in place, or to shift it to another candidate. You see when discussion comes in: *during* the election, not before. This works because the election is a continuous, non-stop, never ending process... > - Yes, before every vote there is discussion trying to reach better > solutions and hopefully understanding and consensus and if this is not > possible at least we always reach consensus about how to vote. We have done > this so faar. It works good. Nevertheless, it is an improvement to have a continuous election, a continual discussion. People ought to be voting, asking questions, and shifting their votes accordingly, at their own convenience. It is easy for the electoral authority to calculate the results it needs according to its own timing (e.g. annually for the budget), but the election and the discussion ought to keep on going. (In other words, open elections are for communities. They run on community time, not political/administrative time.) > -Programming language? Java. External interfaces (such as Web user interfaces) can actually be coded in any language. But the core of the system is Java. System administrators will also use scripting languages in order to customize electoral services (elections and electoral register). The system will support a variety of common scripting languages. A script is how you could calculate a median. This would only have to be done if people failed to reach consensus. The budget drafts (expressing variant resource allocations, for which people vote) would have to be composed in a *structured* markup language. (Like XHTML. It's the latest standard, anyway, for all Web docs.) You could easily read and parse such documents with a script, and extract the values. The script could also read the vote counts from the election. It could then calculate the median result. The budget documents, scripts, etc., on which the calculation was based would be public (as are all electoral results) and open to independent verification. -- Michael Allan <a href="http://zelea.com/">http://zelea.com/</a> </div> -- Peace vision -> More democracy -> How? -> <a href="http://www.aktivdemokrati.se">www.aktivdemokrati.se</a>