Maybe you don’t want the general public writing laws, but…

Posted on October 3rd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Politics, Product Design.

There are several types of policy making:

  1. Creating proposals
  2. Proposing amendments
  3. Up or down votes

I know some people who are working on a constitution. If you let everyone go all over phase 1, the process will never end. But if you let the minority control the whole process, well, then, you have an oligarchy. And we’ve learned that lesson already.

However, what if you compromise? If you let everyone in on phase 3, but not the others, then you get at least some approval, but you moderate the populism and the paralysis.

Parliamentary procedure is underrated. When we hear about direct democracy, the pundits don’t usually separate out these parts. But there’s good reason to dissect the procedure when talking about democracy. It’s common sense not to be all or nothing.

0 comments.

Idea: Treat comments like articles

Posted on September 8th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Ideas.

QDB already does this, but quotes aren’t comments. So we could make a new one.

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Idea No. 2: stockdebates.com

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Politics, Product Design.

Issue: central thesis, points, responses, evidence links

Summary as the standard view (sentence-long synopsis); points can be added, admins can refactor, users can merge/vote on best version/edit points.

How do we decide which points are central theses? Merging/separations

[Originally recorded a long long time ago]

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Patterns to the rescue again.

Posted on June 22nd, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Politics, Product Design, UI Design.

Reddit linked to an interesting article in the Economist:

Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder

The

most interesting thing I discovered about it though, was not the article’s basic conceit

- that Americans are being subdivided into different cultures, but how it was discussed. Naturally on Slashdot, Reddit, MetaFilter, and others, you have certain standards of discussion. I generally find Reddit to be the most politically confrontational.

You could

argue

that it’s the community–

the people in it

that decide whether a website will be a meeting of parliament or a Hello Kitty fan club. But I think there are other things to look at.

Interestingly:

I was also recently looking at a Yahoo! blog on patterns for designing a reputation system. Basically, a pattern is a recognizable formula that a lot of sites use. For example, both Digg and Reddit use a “points” system. Users can award each other points when they like each other’s posts.

The most interesting thing,

however,

was taking Yahoo!’s reputation systems and using them to

reverse engineer sites like Reddit,

Digg, Slashdot, etc. and see the results.

From http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=points:

(Emphasis Theirs.)

Problem Summary

In some communities, participants want a tangible measurement of their accomplishments for personal satisfaction and to make comparisons with other competitors.

EXAMPLE:

Use When

Use this pattern when the community is highly competitive, and the activities that users engage in are competitive in nature (e.g., player-vs-player contests, or coaching a fantasy football team).

Points are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, such as fantasy sports or games.

The competition isn’t just because the people on Site X

are jerks

  • political extremists
  • or sexually frustrated

The design of the site is built to promote competition.

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