User:Quickwik/E-consensus

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E-consensus represents the mathematical concept of consensus within emerging electronic forums which allow thousands or even millions of people to collaborate. In such systems it becomes necessary to deliniate actual tabulations for consensus. Such systems present a historically unprecedented capability for voting collaboration and represent a phase transition in human communication and the human cooperation quotient.

Simply put, "Let ideas compete and people cooperate".

Principles of e-consensus

The random voter expresses low consensus.
The informed voter expresses nonrandom voting.
Voters who have an interest are likely to have some expertice.
Voters who have expertice are likely to have some interest.
Voters who agree on similar issues form a collalition.
Voters who vote on similar issues form a community.
Every thing can be listed
Every list can be voted on

Critical issues

How to manage mass contributions in a meaningfull way.
How to quantify the importance of any given addition to a collective document.
What informational threshold is needed for action.
How such detailes are modulated between differing topics.
How dificult topics are divided into segments to form consensus.

The document

The e-consensus paradigm views the "e-document" as a "battleground of ideas" for wisdom and ignorance to forge a common decision of what is to be said and how. The means by which this occurs reaches at the root of political principle and collective intelligence. By managing contributions, voting and connected principles the purpose is overcome traditional informational dynamics, resource pitfalls, power singularities and proceedural bottlenecks to generate policies and practices which reflect higher consensus and which include and accomidate rather than exclude and damage.

Information theory

E-Consensus is predicated on information theory as the foundation for ideal decision making and recognizes the potential prevailance of incorrect principles, uninformed publics and both wise and unwise colalitions over areas of common interest.

The principels of E-Consensus are intended to employ knowledge focusing to find the maximum consensus and generate cohearant documentation of the process. An example of knowledge focusing is found in Recommendation systems where large numbers of seperate movie reviews from many individuals are compiled on the basis of similarity to form highly accurate predictions of movies people will enjoy. The regularity of review data is predicted to hold similarities to voting populations in which a profile of consensus can be generated. Such a system is intended to expand the Condorcet method to a series of arguments relating to a topic with the aim of resolving intransitivity and extracting higher consistancy than single issue referendums.

The golden suggestion

The concept of the golden suggestion is simply that one cannot predict where the most useful idea will arise. It may be a school child's, an expert's or or even that of a rival political faction. Hence, it is desirable for an information system to protect and nurture any "sugestion" so that can be developed and grow toward acceptance and bear fruit. However many systems of collective intelligence strongly filter input or have a tendancy to let ideas wither before they are integrated into a full understanding. A path must exist for any sugestion to make it into acceptance as it is vetted through the fourm.

A stock exchange of ideas

E-Consensus is based on leting ideas and issues, decisions and priorities "float" on their own merrit. This begs several questions as to how questions are posed to an open voting public. It is therefore necessary to structure the dialogue within some series of branching contexts with supporting "principle based" referendums. Principles form a kind of "idea coalition" which guides the decision process and helps to maintain consistancy. See also Forked Pages [1] and Version History [2]

Limited resources

Decision making in limited resources poses still more opportunity. Many decisions involve Units of measure which establish how much can be achieved with a given resource, i.e. how many man-hours of employment might be generated with a given policy or how many human life-years may be saved with a given research program. An open contribution system allows many more people to contribute and formulate approximations for policies.

Human resources

The functioning of open partipation systems places demand on public time. This is balanced with the mass availability of public participation. E-Consensus must structure it's interface to accomidate ease of use even as it would be expected to grow in complexity. To acheive this a means of notifying, prioritizing and segmenting tasks is needed. Electronic media poses wholly new opertunities for this.

In traditional decision making systems Representitives are chosen and committies formed. An open participation system sugests expantion of these with an organic unfolding of topics, rather than comitties, which are proposed and must rise in interest. This places a strong emphasis on inclusion of ideas in the decision process.

It is an open question weather representitives need be chosen or weather it may be rational to formulate consensus on the basis of voteing patterns within or among proposed topics. This is not well studied.

Portioning

In a very broad system of participation it is likely that only those with an interest would vote or have any expertice. It is not dificult to imagine expencive programs which would gather many more financially interested than technically adroit partisans. A broad system of contributions and structured argument sugests the potential to portion many competing concepts into an ideal, or more logically consistant, mix of theory and need.

Tyranny of majorities and minorities

One of the central problems of knowledge management and collective intelligence is that both experts and majorities may be right or wrong. This may occur in complicated or technical subjects or areas of principle. A critical aspect of E-consensus is to define a democratic processes which is resiliant to abuse by both minorities and majorities.

In order to preserve consistancy and rationality, E-Consensus must naturally favor or incorperate weight to "principle" over mass will. Partitioning political power by Constutional law offers a precident for "devide and conquer" approach to ignorance in which ideas become weighted in the over all decision process.

The theory is as follows:

most people can agree that "equality" is a desirable principle even though people favor "some" inequality that benefits themselves.
Thus principle can be connected to issue such that principles are protected against conflict by popular vote.

This ocurres because the sets of constituencies for each point are divided by their varying adhearance to principles. The approach limits is used in constutional democracy to breakup potential abuses of majority sentiment and extend both decision "consistancy" and protections more broadly.

Elect Ideas

E-Consensus therefore poses the curious suggestion:

Elect Ideas and Hire People.

No system in history has ever enacted such a protocol. Thus E-Consensus becomes a new form of human organization — hopefully one which exhibits higher Cooperation Quotient.