I'm seeking collaborators for a Knight News Challenge proposal. This year's challenge is, "How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact?" https://www.newschallenge.org/
Below is a rough draft of the proposal. My own contribution to this would be to bring in Votorola as a technical provider for the mirroring network. We'd need at least one other such provider, plus some organizational support (in part because there's financing if we win). The submission deadline is March 18. Please let me know if you can help. My contact details are at: http://zelea.com/ PROJECT TITLE Free-range voting MAIN IMAGE http://zelea.com/project/outcast/vomir.png DESCRIPTION This is a proposal to apply the technology of vote mirroring in order to forestall a monopoly in the provision of online voting services. Online voting and its innovations are important to the field of participatory democracy. You might think that opening up the source code of a voting facility would be sufficient to ensure that the facility itself stays free and open, but that is not true. Voting is prone to network effects. It's like a telephone service in this regard. If I plug my telephone into a different network than everyone else is using, then it isn't going to work. Having a copy of the source code won't help. Unless something is done to tame the broader network effects, then online voters (like telephone customers before them) will become locked into the services of a dominant provider. The solution proposed here is vote mirroring. Votes cast at facility A are mirrored at facilities B, C, and so forth. This involves copying each vote and translating it from the format of the source facility (A) to that of the mirroring facility (B, C, etc.). Voting methods may differ hugely and the translation may therefore entail a degree of information loss, making for an imperfect image. Such imperfections cannot invalidate the overall technique, however, because a best effort at an image is always a better reflection of reality than no image at all. The upshot is that each facility now gets all the votes and can show the truest possible picture of the overall results. It no longer matters where I cast my own vote, because it shows up everywhere regardless. So I can range freely across all the available facilities and settle on whichever best suits my personal needs and preferences. Never again can I be trapped by a particular provider. We are [names of signatory providers and other supporting organizations]. Together we plan to build a lightweight mirroring network to loosely interconnect our various voting facilities. We'll begin with voting forms that are fully public; those are the simplest to handle and they allow for unrestricted technical freedom among providers. We'll work out the problems and gain experience with the technology. An immediate benefit will be to reduce the expectation of network effects that has long poisoned relations among technical providers and hampered their development work. Small projects will no longer be forced to devote scarce resources to attempts at tipping an unstable balance in their own favour. Instead, we may expect an improvement in the professional climate of the field and an increase in its attractiveness to talent, and other resources. WHAT IS YOUR PROJECT? (1 sentence max) To apply the technology of vote mirroring in order to forestall the formation of a monopoly in the provision of online voting services, improve the professional climate in the field of participatory democracy, and heighten its appeal as a career prospect for talented people. LINKS http://zelea.com/w/User:ThomasvonderElbe_GmxDe/Vote_mirroring http://zelea.com/w/User_talk:ThomasvonderElbe_GmxDe/Vote_mirroring http://zelea.com/w/User:Mike-ZeleaCom/Vote_mirroring_as_a_counter-monopoly_measure ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Vote mirroring is the invention of Thomas von der Elbe. See: http://mail.zelea.com/list/votorola/2009-December/000215.html The latest copy of this draft is at: http://metagovernment.org/wiki/User:Michael_Allan/Knight -- Michael Allan Toronto, +1 416-699-9528 http://zelea.com/
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