[EM] democratic community, the web, implicit/explicit instant proxy

[Brian Olson]

I too have been thinking about the information problem present in large 
online blog/communities such as dailykos. Sometimes I daydream of having 
their database to play around with and extract information from. I guess 
that's the kind of nerd I am. I'm still hoping kos will let me use my 
implementation of election methods in perl ( 
http://bolson.org/voting/vote_util/perl/ ) to augment Scoop ( 
http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/ ) and at least run the site polls with 
Condorcet or similar.

And a meta note, I guess the "election methods" list isn't just for that 
little issue of "voting" and "elections" anymore. Sometimes we branch out 
into the whole field of the organization of democratic societies.

Problems:
 	Too much stuff
 	Too much mediocre stuff
 	Too much good stuff getting lost
 	Different users desire to see different content
 	Web user interface is often slow and limited

I want a solution which is much like an instant proxy system. I guess this 
puts me more in Abdul-Rahman Lomax's camp. The idea of setting up explicit 
little affinity groups or constituencies sounds awkward and baroque to me, 
and I don't think people would actually be involved enough to want to 
maintain such a structure.

I should probably re-read Lomax's formal definition of Delegable Proxy 
(DP) but my email isn't searchable at the moment. Based on the current 
discussion it sounds like I want something a lot like that, but extended 
to make it more automatic and even lower effort for a casual web community 
member.

The extension is to extract a fuzzy "implicit proxy" from users actions. 
Instead of having to remember someone out of the myriad of possibly 
bizarre user names, you go about your regular process of reading and 
moderating. Many sites allow any registered user to vote for or against 
any comment or user posted story. This would be recorded and if the system 
determines that you're regularly positively rating some user or users they 
would to some degree become your proxy. Given fuzzy, implicit 
probabilistic methods, it is appropriate to give an implicit proxy only 
part of their presumed constituent's vote. A non voter's vote might even 
be distributed fractionally over several of their possible proxies.

Setting an explicit proxy should also be allowed. It could override or be 
just some spots on your proxy list along with the implicit proxies. It 
might be worthwhile to be able to set your explicit proxies to start to 
decay after some number of months if you forget to update them. The system 
might be able to extract better, more current representatives for you.

Grouping can also be automatic based on people who like each other or like 
the same things.

Applied to the web community domain, this could help filter what you see. 
You'd see some mix of what you like, what your liked people like, what 
lots of people like, and unknown content. Mixing in unknown content is 
important. Everything should be looked at by someone (unless the title or 
intro is just so unappealing that no one wants to read more). When someone 
votes in favor of a comment or story it can rapidly promoted to people who 
are likely to agree, and more slowly to the wider community depending on 
promotion within the initial interest group.

Proxyhood affects site polls and moderation done by the proxy recipient. 
Poll and moderation votes operate by direct/instant proxy methods where if 
someone has not directly voted their vote is counted as going how their 
highest rated proxy voted.


So, in summary, I think what I want is:
 	Variable Share Instant Proxy with Direct option - Representatives 
get as much share as they have constituency. Anyone can vote directly on 
anything if they choose.
 	Implicit Proxy - Extracted from various user actions, up-rating 
comments, recommending diaries, etc.
 	Explicit Proxy, Explicit acclaim - when the user takes the time to 
say "I like this other user!" that should be overriding or heavily 
weighted.
 	Randomized Presentation - show a mix of directly desired, 
indirectly desired, popular acclaim and random content. Promote 
recommended content through the network of the recommender out to the 
wider community.

And yes, I may just get busy and code it myself, but writing a brand new 
wiki/blog/community infrastructure from the ground up (because PHP sucks 
and perl is cumbersome at large scale) will take a while.

Brian Olson
http://bolson.org/