Crowdsourcing projects
There are lots of new crowdsourcing projects popping up everywhere nowadays, and I wanted to talk about a couple of them.
First I want to talk about a voting system called Votavox. The idea here is to have a massive database which stores the responses of various questions in order to act as a lobbyist for the people. The questions, or rather statements, can be generated by the users, but are encouraged to be relatively non-partisan (or at least stated in a way that isn’t difficult to disagree with), actionable, and tagged with a person who could actually make the action.
For example, if the #Occupy Wall Street website wanted to start using Votavox, they could create a voting item in the direction of, “Mayor Bloomberg should take down the barricades around Zucotti Park and allow free access.” Then everyone who comes to the nycga.net website could vote for this, and the results could be sent to Mayor Bloomberg.
It could be seen as an online petition. It is more convincing when people go to the trouble of registering, so Bloomberg would get to see how many people from different walks of life think this or that. It would also be even more robust if the voting item got placement on the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as well. That’s the idea, though, to get people’s votes on statements and to send the result directly to a decision maker.
I met with the guy who started it a couple of days ago and I think it’s a cool idea. However, there are some important issues to suss out.
Namely, what’s the business model behind Votavox? One simple answer would be that the data is sold for people to mine. Unfortunately there are lots of unattractive things about this, verging on privacy issues and also the nuisance of having advertisers know all about your inner thoughts. I doubt that #OWS folk would be all that happy about their data being sold to mega advertisers.
On the other hand, servers and databases aren’t free, and maintaining and upgrading the Votavox software isn’t free either. Any ideas for this worthy project would be appreciated.
Next I wanted to talk about an applied mathematician named Lee Worden. Some of his past work has purportedly ‘challenged conventional wisdom on the possibilities of cooperation in situations where only competitive interactions have been assumed’, which is intriguing (maybe someone has a reference for that?). Right now he is interested in studying the mathematics of direct democracy, which is a cool and natural urge. In his words:
A few years ago I started telling friends that I would like to be an applied mathematician for the public, somehow. Unlike pure mathematicians, who work at a remove from everyday concerns and are something like composers, answering to nobody but the Muse, applied mathematicians live more of a have-gun-will-travel life, working for clients, solving the clients’ problems, and developing new theory along the way. The clients are often corporations and the military. Does this affect what we study, what we learn, and what we don’t learn? Of course it does! I decided I should work for the public, and address the public’s problems – but how?
I didn’t realize, when I started this experiment in crowd-funded research, that that’s just what it is: I actually get to work for regular people, on problems that relate to our collective future!
And here’s a video explanation of his #OWS work and a plea for funding. Some of his questions are really good and touch on stuff I’ve already experienced inside the #OWS working group Alternative Banking group, like whether, when we split into smaller groups, we should group people by similarity of opinion or whether we should make sure a range of opinions are represented. On the one hand, if you do group by similarity, the conversations go faster and seem more efficient, but on the other the chances of the end results being adopted by the larger group go way down.
mathbabe 
Diversity is a plus
Recent analyses of the second world war have started to note that the success of the team at Bletchley Park was, in part, a function of its diversity. It contained people from all social classes. It included men and women, gay people (most famously, Alan Turing) as well as heterosexuals. It included mathematicians, linguists, telephone engineers, chess players, gardeners and crossword puzzle enthusiasts. Consequently, it was fizzing with ideas, and it repeatedly changed the world.
Some of the Nazi research groups included individual geniuses (notably their rocket research group led by Werner von Braun). However, none of them produced as many innovations as quickly as the British code breakers.
http://www.goworldtravel.com/ex/aspx/articleGuid.9749d97a-dc51-40a4-850f-f27c6a72d5cd/xe/article.htm
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“On the one hand, if you do group by similarity, the conversations go faster and seem more efficient, but on the other the chances of the end results being adopted by the larger group go way down.”
Take advantage of expertise from all fields, and recognize your own limits. There has been a lot of scientific research on how the human mind (conscious and subconscious) operates by psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, etc… We need to understand the tool we are working with (our own human cognition) as much as possible in order to work around its weaknesses and biases. E.g. group think, escalation of extreme behavior by groups of those of like mind, and a plethora of cognitive dissonances and biases.
A true evolution of thought and system is going to require avoiding all the mistakes in thinking and acting that past generations have made due to flawed thinking. There must be some sharp people available to lend their depth of knowledge in these areas.
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The Votavox system is interesting. Reykjavik actually put something very similar to that in place after the new mayor was voted in last year.
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really? can you give me a reference for that?
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Thanks! Regarding `possibilities of cooperation’, presently the best references are my “greenhouse world” paper and my dissertation, particularly chapter 5: http://leeworden.net/lw/publications
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Votavox is interesting and the funding issues you mention are very valid for many web projects out there. Many creators of websites would ideally like to provide a public good – but the irony is that if the service actually becomes popular, they are forced to look for some means of monetarization, which entails many conflicts of interest. I think it is important to look for alternative models for funding if we want some of the new emergent web services to work as a “public service” and not as “business”.
In this regard, I think services such as Amazon DevPay that make it possible to charge the user directly for the server resources and bandwidth they consume are promising. For each individual user this would amount to just a couple of cents per month for most websites. Contrary to subscription models, users would not have to commit to using the website for any amount of time, but would only be charged for resources they actually use. And, contrary to Flattr-type funding, the website’s costs are guaranteed to be covered. Finally, by adding a small surcharge to the server costs, the people behind the project could be financed.
Of course there are a lot of issues with this approach: First of all, DevPay is intended for b2b use. A different service for consumers would be required. Second, a large number of websites would need to use this service for it to actually work. Third, the calculation of costs would have to be made very transparent for this approach to be credible. Finally, this type of funding might be inappropriate for services such as Votavox, as only oppinions of people willing to pay for this service would show up on the website. Nonetheless, I think experiments in this vein are called for. Does anybody know of a DevPay-like service targeted at end-users?
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