Hello I was the author of those comments, not too harsh hopefully.
On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 07:43:36PM +0200, Frederic Lehobey wrote: > Thanks for these links. First time I hear about leparlement.org. It's a one man project, a hobby, GPL and made with Ruby on Rails. The goal is a forum/mailingList/chat/news system, where every post is also a poll and potentially a vote. My original goal is a collaborative writing system (it was called VeniVidiVoti and was made with java/JBoss/cocoon/PostgreSQL, started in 2000). > > - voting method is "Condorcet", which is often considered slightly too > > complex for most people > > It is correct the current voting method is Condorcet (and this choice > is not random) but other voting methods might be implemented > too. Patches are welcome. :-) It's mostly a question of difficulties, Condorcet is difficult to code, complex to grasp, tricky to develop a good GUI for. It's a great method none the less. Personally I prefer approval voting for a start, which will be almost easy to expand to range voting. > > - special powers to some administrators whose role is to organise polls > > Not really. The only special power is on classification (needed for > the future delegation). But everyone can raise questions and provide > answers. This is the "special powers". Without it the whole system will just become larger and larger and less and less usable (yes, you know that already). > > - technology is a very good one, but sadly it is not used much in the > > world and will have troubles finding programmers > > It somewhat true. But works like Augustin's one might open us to the > much larger world of PHP / Drupal programmers. Actually, the server > has a public API so every kind of client might connect. I wonder if integration in an existing and large CMS won't be too big a load on your development... The forums to polls integration does seem tricky, same with identities. > > - no possibility to use the whole system as a forum where every > > question/answer is just one more post > > Yes. The system is intended on purpose (let's do one thing but do it > well) as a voting tool, not as the place where the debate takes > place. The debate might occur on many other already existing places > (Drupal, forum, wikis, and so on...). Yet question/answers *will* be used directly for debate. You *will* have to remove or move those that do. But it's none the less great to focus on simplicity. > > - few considerations for security > > ... for the moment! Because precisely we do not want to deal with this > in an approximative way ... Programmers, algorithms, languages, OS, networks, configurations, administrators, users, even hardware, are a liability. There is one solution that _could_ bring *trust*: total and complete transparency. To the point of real time *reproducibility*. To the point where a *P2P* system of servers can be set up by any number of willing individuals. Then *PGP signatures* to ensure the relationship between a vote and a persona. *Electoral lists* (of PGP public keys) to calculate results. http://leparlement.org/security (rather slow if you participate, I choose the wrong algorithm for a hierarchy, the nested tree set. Am going to change or optimize it...). > > But, they have a group of intelligent people involved in a cool social > > idea/ideal. > > Thanks. :-) We do share the same ambitions. > > 2. Special powers. > > I am all for special grouping of users. For example you might want to > > differate between users above and below 18 years of age (or another > > arbitrary age). And you might wish to group users into geographical areas as > > is common in politics today. The techology should make possible such uses. > > How it is used in practice should be decided by users. > > Same as above. Beyond the technical points, philosophically, I > somewhat disagree with this point of view. But it does not prevent it > from being implemented in the software. *Electoral lists*: to determine the legitimacy of one's participation in a decision. But is that "special powers"? > > 4. Security. > > This is important indeed. But not only the demexp-server is responsible for > > the security. We have the physical server etc to worry about too. The > > security issue is not something that can be finished from the start, but > > something that will be an ongoing issue. > > I completely agree. Consider it as a Graal (after several years and > many thousands of users): a distributed server. But it will be for > demexp 4.0 or above... :-) Use your server as a mailing list, subscribe your servers to some others, and then, tadam, you automatically have it! :) BTW, here is a pointer to lomax's Delegable Proxy and Free Associations. Personally I always called this DP feature "transitive delegations", but anyway, this is just the same thing, which you do also plan to use (unless I'm mistaken) => http://www.beyondpolitics.org > Experimentally, > Frédéric Lehobey Sincerely. echarp - "Parlement":http://leparlement.org/fr _______________________________________________ Demexp-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/demexp-dev
