On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 2:19 AM, Mitar <mitar@tnode.com> wrote:

Hi!

One of topics we discussed at Thursday's meeting was also the
establishment of non-profit organization. In Slovenia we are also
thinking about that but we discussed also the issues which arise on
meetings because not all members attend the meetings and then quorum is
hard to achieve. This is especially problematic for communities build
around virtual communities. But still, we want as horizontally organized
organization as possible. So I prepared what voting schema which builds
around the idea of proxy voting, where you can delegate to one or more
people your vote in the case that you don't vote. The idea is that
organization specifies that voting is done in such a way.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zblrsqaazkbyytw/Voting%202.pdf

Interesting. I appreciate the ideas you've put on the table.

I'm happy to start discussing and working on this.

I think there are some problems with your approach. You list some of them yourself.

The biggest issues for me are:

1. Way too difficult to understand (as you point out).

2. Delegation of voting allows budding politicians to gather power by collecting delegated votes. In a large system a handful of these people would likely end up controlling everything. This could possibly be controlled if certain limits were placed on how much delegating can happen (but what happens if you delegate to someone who delegates to someone who...etc. maybe at some point you say "no, you have to vote. too many people depend on you!")

3. Does not take into account other types of voting such as "everyone selects all the choices they are ok with".

4. Citations or references to existing research. There are people who dedicate their careers to studying this kind of stuff. I'm sure there are people who would read this and have the same reaction as you would if someone showed you a non-programmer's first, untested, program. (i am not one of them).

4. No simulations. How can you know your program works if you haven't run it?

I realize that what you pitched is more of an initial concept than a completed voting system design and that some of these issues are only issues because you haven't gotten around to solving them yet. I'd like to find someone who is actively researching these types of systems and see if they can point us at a review or some existing work, so that we can at least learn what is out there and how people approach testing / simulating these sorts of things.

Anyone know anyone like that?

My next step is to develop a simple app to be used inside the
organization. If you are interested, we might do it together.

Hm. I guess that's one way to test your system :-)

(There are some similar ideas tested around the world, for example in
Pirate parties in Europe. But I haven't find their systems to have all
the properties I want.)

Do you have some links to those systems?

Marc