Hello James,
I am Thomas from Germany. Sorry if my English is a bit strange. I am
also a member of the Votorola-Project. I like very much, that you are
doing theoretical work on this subject. As far as I'm aware, this is
quite needed.
In your paper you write about the one benefit of delegated voting, which
has to do with division of labor. For example: I delegate my vote
concerning all environmental issues to Greenpeace and they do the work
for me. I.e. they become and stay experts in this field and they place
my vote for me.
Now this would already be a huge advantage (and it is partly implemented
in Votorola already).
But there is another great benefit, which not many people seem to know
of, yet. And which is a core principle in Votorola. Maybe it is what you
were pointing to here?
Imagine, for example, that under my proposal, a lot of the people who
held a lot of proxies would often get together with each other, and
have discussions, debates, etc., with the aim of actually
understanding each other's points of view in depth even when they were
opposed, and working toward compromise or common ground.
What I mean is: Vote delegation can also be used as a method for
enabeling large-scale discourse. For example: I delegate my 10.000
received votes to Greenpeace not because I am an non-expert who wants
them to do the work for me, but because I am an expert myself who wants
to work together with them. Because of the votes behind me I have
something to negotiate with. And since their position in a particular
poll is very similiar to mine, they would only need to make a few minor
changes and I could agree to them, i.e. delegate my votes to them.
Together the two of us would be the winning team. ;-)
This form of delegation is all about communication, negotiation,
discourse, ... and the result is basically a collaborative writing of
laws, plans etc. The amount and form of collaboration is structured by
the weight of the votes. The use-case of this "communicative delegation"
is probably more inside single polls than across many.
But what is most fascinating to me: it seems to give the system an
implicite tendency towards consensus, because it rewards synthesis with
a competitor since this gives you (and your former competitor) more
influence over the other competitors ... .
A picture is often better than thousend words:
http://u.zelea.com/w/User:ThomasvonderElbe_GmxDe/Communicative_Delegation
I'm very curious about your opinion.
And one short note: You write about "deleting" the votes after a certain
time to avoid having e.g. 40-year old votes.
There is also the idea of having votes "rust", i.e. they loose weight
over time until they are completely gone. Another aspect: Since all
votes will have a timestamp, they can be filtered by age. As well as by
age of the voters (if they give this information) or by their gender,
nationality, ... .
Greetings,
Thomas von der Elbe
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