Indablog

YouTube, The US State Dept and some other groups have been sponsoring a contest called the “Democracy Video Challenge.” I like the concept, which has surfaced some excellent content from around the world. But it’s unfortunate that their voting procedures are more about democracy theater than democracy itself.

In any case, the community manager is pretty active on Facebook, and just posed a question as a status update… “Democracy is…compromise? Would you be willing to work together with someone you disagree with if it meant making progress on a problem in your country?”

My response:

Politics is about managed conflict (and democracy is a potential vehicle for its management), so willingness to collaborate via compromise should be the default position. But the question as posed is pretty vague. Some interests are less amenable to compromise than others. Thus, as Clausewitz taught, war is the conduct of politics through other means.

No Comments »
Filed under: Uncategorized

ICANN’s Rod Beckstrom linked to this article by Janna Quitney Anderson, motivating this response from a well-known I* critic:

The problem with things like this is they obscure the fact the internet is a collective of private networks, there’s no public component. If the UN would like a network to abide by a certain 10 principles its certainly welcome to build a network like that. But no matter how feelgood I don’t see the utility of what they’re proposing, and and its toothless. Besides I still remember John Perry Barlow’s “declaration of independqance of cyberspace”

My followup:

But Richard, Like members of any durable community, the founders of the Internet shared a collection of charter myths, and those myths gave rise to a more or less explicit set of driving norms. Chief among them were Interoperability, Scalability, Connectivity, Accessibility, Layering, and the End-to-End Principle.

Those norms helped socialize newcomers, and were widely embraced because they were inherently attractive.

Even though these norms still convey a technical flavor, it’s clear enough that they intersect well with the broader human values of inclusivity, responsibility, and free expression…. See More

I don’t have much of a problem with “things like this” because of my view that openly stated norms and conventions can, and indeed often do, function as public components of a community… even if they’re not formalized by a state-backed legal authority.

Even so, it’s an open question as to how legitimate it would be to undertake a full-fledged restatement of the community’s norms as commandments… not just cherished values. In Ph.D.-speak, this gets at the difference between assertive rules and directive rules. Is there a mechanism by which members of the community can fairly and fully articulate a consensus view of how the behavior of all members should be bound?

(Shameless plug alert: I’ve been trying to build one.)

The article is also here.

No Comments »
Filed under: Uncategorized

Posted a comment as a response to

My reaction:

The Internet has lots of life left in it. There’s much more growth to come. Apparent transitions or phases reflect distinct elements that were evident in the founding dreams of hypermedia.

Web 1.0 = Hyper-linking (realized as URLs and HTML links that enable websurfing).

Web 2.0 = Hyper-mixing (realized as AJAX, XML, KML, JSON, etc. plus prolific UGC, all helping to enable mashups) .

Web 3.0 = Hyper-sourcing (realized as interlocking social graphs and planned semantic formats that will enable trustworthy signaling).

What factors might explain the graph? There are big problems in the economy, but mostly I think there’s some creative destruction going on. And it’s not over yet.

No Comments »
Filed under: Musings

Overall, the response by the candidates to the 10Questions experiment was shameful. Only Mike Huckabee, to his everlasting credit, responded right away. Beyond that, only Edwards, Gravel, and Obama (via clips form campaign questions) answered by the deadline. No others responded, despite 3 reminders (!) on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times! If that isn’t a slap in the face to one of the noblest experiments yet tried in American democracy, I don’t know what is. So be it. If 10Questions didn’t catch on, with all the resources they had, then the near silence that greeted the Indaba/ChoiceRanker experiment is that much easier to understand. I still think that 10Questions was on the right track. I’ll reserve my critique for another blog entry. For now, this one will serve as a link for ballots that I’m creating which will allow voters to rank the various 10Questions answers. For any one interested who reads this… If you want to respond, you’ll need to create a distinct user_ID here, even if you’ve already got one at ChoiceRanker.com. The sites may look pretty much the same, but they’re not completely integrated.

No Comments »
Filed under: Development Chronicles, Indaba Polls, Instant Runoff Voting, Musings

This week’s turnout set a new record. A wave of Ron Paul supporters showed up only minutes after the poll opened, well before I had released any announcements. There was another surge of voting after I posted a “polls are open” diary on on RedState. RedState’s owners would probably be very reluctant to admit it, but their site refers more supporters for Ron Paul than for anyone else.

The Republican poll also saw a relatively healthy turnout for Mike Huckabee. His 44 votes may seem small in light of the Ron Paul swarm, but it was by far the strongest showing for a Republican other than Paul since the Tuesday Tracker series began. Only John Edwards has done better on the Democratic side.

Democratic turnout was boosted by activity surrounding the debate held in Philadelphia that evening. Early balloting had Chris Dodd in front, but Edwards advanced steadily throughout the day, taking the lead and then improving his margin. A few referrals from a pro-Edwards website pushed him just past the 50% margin in the first round of voting, precluding the need for a runoff on the Democratic side. Barack Obama kept advancing as well, finally squeezing by Dodd in the plurality vote, but not depth, replicating last week’s finish.

This was the first time without a runoff on the Democratic side. So, the bottom line is that, on ChoiceRanker’s biggest day ever, there was no opportunity to showcase the virtues of its instant runoff display technology.

The results in the tables below have been reorganized to provide a more sensible indication of relative depth. The tables now include candidates who received no 1st place votes.

Once again, Tom Tancredo was the most popular 2nd choice for Paul voters, followed by Alan Keyes. Duncan Hunter was the most popular 2nd choice for Huckabee voters.

DEM poll details are here

GOP poll details are here

No Comments »
Filed under: Indaba Polls

Dodd’s advance to 2nd place in depth in the DEM Tuesday Tracker echoes the results of the most recent DailyKos frontpage poll. GOP participation has fallen off drastically, probably because RedState, where the poll is announced, has tied itself into knots over the prominence of Ron Paul supporters there, and an admin wiped out the TT announcement during a general sweep against pro-Paul diaries. Someone later acknowledged that it was a mistake, but it’s questionable whether RS is worth any more effort.

DEM details

GOP Details

No Comments »
Filed under: Indaba Polls

The Democratic poll details are here.

The Republican poll details are here

Note that Thompson and McCai aren’t on the list because they received no 1st place votes.

No Comments »
Filed under: Indaba Polls

This week’s Tracker produced largest turnout so far, probably because the Republican debate in Michigan kept Ron Paul supporters on a high level of alert throughout the evening. Paul voters crushed their opposition, most of whom have made barely any effort to show up for the last couple of weeks.

The turnout on the DEM side was fairly typical, producing another win for John Edwards. But the heavy turnout of Paul supporters makes it possible to say something useful about that community.

For starters (and consistent with previous results), just over 32 percent (144 of 448) of Paul voters offered no second choice, indicating that an exceptionally high proportion of them are not likely to be “team players” within the GOP.

Furthermore, (and also consistent with recent results), among the Paul voters who did cast a 2nd choice, 132 favored Tom Tancredo, 65 favored Mike Huckabee, and 20 favored Alan Keyes. Giuliani was their least favored option by far.

It’s noteworthy that Tancredo received no 1st place votes at all in this poll, but took 2nd place in the election’s Depth score solely because of help from Paul supporters. As I wrote previously, Ron Paul has coat tails.

(Tancredo doesn’t appear in the chart at the bottom of the page because my initial design included only candidates who received at least one 1st place vote. I’ll find a way to offer better consistency between the analysis presented here and the graphics presented on the election page as I propagate the new adjusted Depth calculation into the realtime results.)

Finally, 37 Paul voters also participated in the Presidential Priorities poll, offering the 1st rank choices listed in the following table (keeping in mind, that with greater levels of participation, it would be preferable to present the results as a funciton of Depth).

I’ve added “Sound Money” as an option in the priority poll since Paul has been mentioning it often during his speeches and debate performances.

Herer a re summary results for each poll. Full details are available at the associated link.

Democrats

Republicans

No Comments »
Filed under: Development Chronicles, Indaba Polls

I sent out email announcements for the Tuesday Tracker for the last couple of weeks, prompting many participants to return. But the response from DailyKos has dropped off, and the usual Ron Paul swarms haven’t been materializing. This week, instead of posting diaries across the political blogosphere right at noon, I’ll try late afternoon or early evening.

I’m not doing much actual development these days. I’ve been putting time into promoting the site, getting some political writing off my chest (here and here), spending a long weekend at a friend’s wedding in West Virginia, and even doing some real-world work.

There has been one small behind the scenes advance, however… I’ve created a better metric to express Depth. For now it’s only available in the sproc I use to generate these results, but it will eventually support graphing of depth score changes over time. The new score divides each candidate’s current version of the depth score by the sum of all the depth scores in that poll. Since the adjusted scores will always sum up to 1, it will be easier to track changes week by week.

Once again, the Democrats run Edwards/Obama/Kucinich. It was a Ron Paul week for the Republicans.

Democrats

Republicans

No Comments »
Filed under: Development Chronicles, Indaba Polls

Results remain fairly consistent with previous polls. Once again, John Edwards took the Democratic poll in every dimension. A relatively low turnout in the Republican poll permitted a 10th round IRV victory for Fred Thompson. Ron Paul started out leading with 1st rank votes, and also took the lead in overall depth. Round after round, however, supporters of defeated candidates refused almost unanimously to transfer their votes to Paul, giving the victory to Thompson. This election showcases the impact of the IRV system. (Also, my depth calculation uses a modified Condorcet that emphasizes the impact of 1st rank votes. Thompson probably would have led in depth under a traditional Condorcet algorithm.)

There was a significant attempt at ballot stuffing this week. The same IP address was connected with nearly sixty ballots over a short period of time, indicating use of a technical ploy. Nearly all of those ballots favored Dennis Kucinich on the Democratic side and Paul on the Republican side. I disqualified the ballots, and contacted an individual at an email address associated with one of the ballots, inviting that person to provide credible evidence that the votes were acutally submitted by distinct individuals. I’ll requalify the ballots if that evidence comes through.

There was also an incessent but wildly ineffective attempt at ballot stuffing by a couple of Mitt Romney supporters who never figured out that the system was simply updating their official ballot.

Democratic Candidates Poll

Republican Candidates Poll

No Comments »
Filed under: Indaba Polls