InstaGov

Overview

InstaGov is software to enable groups of people, of any size, to handle relatively large numbers of collaboratively-entered decisions in a rational and accurate way.

InstaGov will probably first be written as a plug-in for MediaWiki; it may later be available in other formats. It is entirely open source, so others are free to adapt it to their own uses or add their own features.

Pages

• /schema: database design
• /concepts

Purpose

The philosophy behind its primary purpose (collaborative governance) is discussed in great detail on Issuepedia, but there will probably be other uses for it as well.

InstaGov has two primary functions:

• vote tallying: collecting votes from each member and presenting aggregated data showing overall sentiment towards each issue
• issue management:
  • aggregating individual rankings to determine which issues should be propagated to more people and which should be allowed to die out
  • organizing issues into a hierarchical topic system to allow users to filter in or out areas in which they have no interest
  • enabling rational discussion of complex issues within a large group of people

Components

• Neural Voting manages questions and possible answers, and records and aggregates individual ratings of each answer
• Debate Mapper organizes and documents debate on complex issues

Development Phases

Phases in which functionality can be added:

Phase I

• create question
  • don't allow posting of question identical to existing one
    • detect similarity, though, and confirm that new question is desired
      • ask if redirect answer should be created, perhaps?
• create answer(s)
  • support for redirect to rephrased question
    • somehow prevent redirection loops?
• vote on answer(s)
• view results for specific question

Phase II

• list all questions (may arise naturally in Phase I)
• show your status for each (created, voted)
• show general stats for each (current favored answer, summed rating)
• show issues needing your vote

Phase III: Proxies

• create proxy (weighted sum of other voters)
• assign proxy to specific question
• view your own proxy status (who is using you, and by what weights?)
• ongoing question - should there be options for:
  • private (anonymous) proxy - nobody can see who they are using
  • secret proxy - existence of your proxy weighting is totally concealed

Phase IV: Categories

• create category (general or personal)
• vote question into general category
• rate question within personal category
• assign proxy results to category

Notes

• /obsolete stuff