[EM] Idea Proposal: Listening Democracy

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 12:16 AM 4/23/2010, Michael Allan wrote:

>Duane Johnson wrote:
> > This sounds quite interesting, Abd ul-Rahman.  Where can I learn
> > about your FA/DP idea? ...  (I know about delegable proxy, but
> > haven't heard about FA/DP specifically).
>
>DP may have other applications, too, aside from FA.

That's right. But FAs are a safe application. Delegable proxy has 
very little experience behind it. The FA application, because it 
doesn't concentrate power but only uses DP for extended 
communication, for estimating consensus based on a sample population 
(those who actually participate in some discussion or poll), is 
fail-safe. Once people are familiar with how it works, and once 
possible bugs have been identified and addressed, I'd expect to start 
to see applications outside the FA context.

About a century ago, a proposal was made in a major western U.S. city 
to have a city council where each member exercised, in the council, 
the number of votes they got in the election. That's true 
proportional representation.... so the ideas are very old.