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/ ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info