Comment Repose the topic as Collaborative Problem-Solving (Score 2) 308
Begin with the recognition that modern democracies face a new kind of needle in the haystack problem.
Say the world needs a new needle... In response, swarms of people begin throwing ideas into a pile. Unfortunately, most of those ideas turn out to be so poorly conceived or expressed that they're no better than hay. And, good or not, many are essentially similar. The result is a giant haystack.
The challenge is to encourage the best needle inventors (and their constructive critics) to collaborate in forging truly brilliant new needles, while everyone participates in picking hay off the pile while holding high their favorite needles. (This assumes that haymakers will prove vigilant at identifying other peoples' hay, if not their own.)
My suggestion for a solution is an interactively crowd-sourced social moderation mechanism.
1) The mechanism's content entry interface would force novelty, ensuring that a minimal number of needle and hay duplications are added to the pile. It would display the extent to which a proposed entry matches a predecessor, blocking any piling on of outright duplicates.
2) Needle vs. hay sorting would be applied as soon as an item is added to the pile. Anyone can help sort, but no one can add an item until he or she has already sorted an assigned allotment of preceding entries. The design would inculcate systemic behaviors that favor amplification of signal before noise.
3) The tool would provide visualizations of the sorted results that illustrate coalescence of preferences. This part of the solution is already in operation as a ranked choice voting service at various sites I've built on the Web, on Facebook, and as a mobile-optimized html interface. (Running examples include WeVote.net, Mayor2011.com, and AmericanQuorum.com)
The system seeks to provide the fairest possible method for vetting options in multi-candidate elections, and can be used to solve the needle haystack problem I've just described. I call this solution coalescent bubbling. This approach to interactive crowd-sourcing offers utility far beyond improving the quality of political discourse in the US and elsewhere. It would be appropriate for reality show contests, corporate self-governance mechanisms, peer to peer educational environments, and more.
The shortcomings of the current implementations at the links cited above are many. Most notably, the ranked-preference system now in place only allows participants to settle on a consensus, and does not yet offer tools by which they can collaboratively reflect in forging one. The haystack metaphor invites questions about the challenges of booby traps and deceptive lures being added to the pile. And this short comment makes no clear connection between the operation of the mechanism and the question of how to ensure political legitimacy and how to provide enforcement of results.
Nevertheless, despite the many open and unresolved issues, I believe that pursuit of a solution along these lines is warranted.
Say the world needs a new needle... In response, swarms of people begin throwing ideas into a pile. Unfortunately, most of those ideas turn out to be so poorly conceived or expressed that they're no better than hay. And, good or not, many are essentially similar. The result is a giant haystack.
The challenge is to encourage the best needle inventors (and their constructive critics) to collaborate in forging truly brilliant new needles, while everyone participates in picking hay off the pile while holding high their favorite needles. (This assumes that haymakers will prove vigilant at identifying other peoples' hay, if not their own.)
My suggestion for a solution is an interactively crowd-sourced social moderation mechanism.
1) The mechanism's content entry interface would force novelty, ensuring that a minimal number of needle and hay duplications are added to the pile. It would display the extent to which a proposed entry matches a predecessor, blocking any piling on of outright duplicates.
2) Needle vs. hay sorting would be applied as soon as an item is added to the pile. Anyone can help sort, but no one can add an item until he or she has already sorted an assigned allotment of preceding entries. The design would inculcate systemic behaviors that favor amplification of signal before noise.
3) The tool would provide visualizations of the sorted results that illustrate coalescence of preferences. This part of the solution is already in operation as a ranked choice voting service at various sites I've built on the Web, on Facebook, and as a mobile-optimized html interface. (Running examples include WeVote.net, Mayor2011.com, and AmericanQuorum.com)
The system seeks to provide the fairest possible method for vetting options in multi-candidate elections, and can be used to solve the needle haystack problem I've just described. I call this solution coalescent bubbling. This approach to interactive crowd-sourcing offers utility far beyond improving the quality of political discourse in the US and elsewhere. It would be appropriate for reality show contests, corporate self-governance mechanisms, peer to peer educational environments, and more.
The shortcomings of the current implementations at the links cited above are many. Most notably, the ranked-preference system now in place only allows participants to settle on a consensus, and does not yet offer tools by which they can collaboratively reflect in forging one. The haystack metaphor invites questions about the challenges of booby traps and deceptive lures being added to the pile. And this short comment makes no clear connection between the operation of the mechanism and the question of how to ensure political legitimacy and how to provide enforcement of results.
Nevertheless, despite the many open and unresolved issues, I believe that pursuit of a solution along these lines is warranted.
