WeightedConsensusVoting

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WeightedConsensusVoting is a voting procedure for wikis; it's an attempt to DevolvePower, and may be a possible solution to CommunityMayNotScale.

Each member of the community is given a voting weight on their home page. It uses a CommunitySolution to assign voting weight -- the voting weight page is freely editable like any other. In practice, giving someone a weight is like awarding a BarnStar -- voting weight is given by someone else for successful BarnRaising. Before the voting weight may be used, it must be ratified by community consensus, e.g., by waiting until other versions have expired from KeptPages or through TeaTime's AuthorizedCopy concept.

Votes may be changed (you can vote on a given issue as often as you like), but voting (and ratification of voting rights) is indelible and irreversible. When you vote, you specify a weight and a yes/no/wait answer, with the restriction that the weight can't be more than your given voting weight. In the TeaTime context, the subject of a vote is a approval of a specific edit in a particular TeaRoom?, and the results are tabulated and executed by the TechnologySolution; in the Meatball context, the subject and the tabulation would be by CommunitySolution, but tabulated and executed if necessary by an administrator.

In view of VotingIsEvil, the proper spirit of WeightedConsensusVoting is to vote only when necessary, and only as weightily as necessary. In particular, the minimum-weight vote is a zero-weight vote, which anyone who has been ratified into the community can override (with another zero-weight vote if desired), but with which outsiders and newcomers may not interfere, and this option should be given serious consideration once the decision to vote at all is made. By varying the weight of the vote, there is a sliding scale between zero-weight voting and majority voting, allowing the application of the principle of minimum force.

CategoryUncommonWikiTechnology

Discussion

NathanielThurston -- Mon Aug 31 08:24:34 2009

It might be feasible to use WeightedConsensusVoting on the BanList, as an alternative to CitizenArrest

FridemarPache -- Mon Aug 31 13:27:45 2009

Thank you Nathaniel for your subtle and complex contribution on WeightedConsensusVoting. Allow you and the invisible other copy right holder of the introductory text (in case the unsigned intro stems not from you) participants and me to expand it to its deserved complexity into a ConceptMap, bilinked from here, together bilinking to the native wikis of different communities, such as CommunityWiki, TeaTime and so on? I would be especially happy, if you too could or would co-act as a friendly expander, bilinking to your mind child TeaTime. If I understand Sunir's intention right, Meatball has as his goal to build a useful description, as a guide in DocumentMode for community leaders and activists, in return to barnraising the barns of the involved signing contributors. In the spirit of ViewPoint, I suggest to allow each ConceptMap builder to use each other's ConceptMap as material for derived works, under CreativeCommons, giving AuthorCredit attribution and Share Alike rights.

NathanielThurston -- Mon Aug 31 18:37:18 2009

Fridemar, go ahead if you like. To the best of my knowledge, I am the sole author of this page; and in any case, ideas cannot be copyrighted (only their expression in words), so you're always free to copy those.

Nathaniel, thank you, hoping to collaborate with you and many others not only in Meatball but also in the wider space of public ConceptMaps.