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

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Brian,

I think you're in the ballpark of understanding the problem I'm trying
to solve.  More below...

On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 20:42 -0700, Brian Olson wrote:
> 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.

Cool, I'll have to check that out at some point (after I get around to
fixing the IRV bug that people have been complaining about in my stuff).

> 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.

I think what I'm proposing is for voting and elections, but the target
structure is not a typical government leader.

> 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

Those are problems for readers.  However, if you're a writer who isn't
yet one of the "cool kids", you've got those problems, plus:
*  Small incentive for people to read your stuff
*  Too much riding on SENSATIONAL headline
*  No motivation for readers to step outside their comfort zone if what
you present doesn't reinforce their world view.
*  No way of knowing where you really stand, and who you should lobby
next

The idea behind creating a deep hierarchy in a "play" environment like
an online community is to solve the "knowing where you really stand"
part.  My system, I think, gives you the ability to know where you
really stand, and who you need to lobby next.  It also provides
motivation for those being lobbied to hear you out.

To be clear, I'm not proposing proportional hierarchy for general public
elections.  It's too baroque, if nothing else.  Beyond that, I haven't
thought too much about the implications, but my gut tells me that
there's lots of reasons not to recommend it.


> 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.

The problem with people getting the flexibility to choose their leaders
is that there's no good way of maintaining filters between a popular
leader and the constituents.  In a high stakes arena (e.g. public
office), there's enough motivation to solve the problem, but in a
discussion forum, there isn't.

A methodically built hierarchy makes sure that a popular leader still
ultimately has influence proportional to popularity, while at the same
time maintaining only a small group of people that must get special
attention.


> 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.

I definitely want something that the casual community member can be
comfortable with.  

I'd like to somehow approximate (and perhaps improve on) the real-world
phenomena of striking up a conversation with the person next to you on
the plane.  In this system, if you are new to the site, you probably get
put next to a small set of random people.  You may hate this, so you
vote your way out of that situation.

In my first iteration, you were on the hook to "vote" (submit a ranked
or rated list).  However, you make an interesting point about casual
users.  

> 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.

That's a really, really interesting idea.

> 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.

Yeah, whatever system would need to be bolted onto the side of some
existing system, I think, in order to be viable.

Rob