Who's Interested in Open Voting?

Michael Allan spends his time developing Votorola, beating up on competing projects, constructing a theory of open voting, and discussing the ideas behind it.

(Please add your name, if you are interested in open voting...)

Connections and Related Ideas

Dotmocracy is a voting system with a human design. It has a natural human interface that is embeddable in everyday contexts. We could use it at ChangeCamp (it was suggested) "in order to recognize popular ideas and document session outputs". The results are expressed graphically by the accumulation of dots, so there's immediate feedback.

Peer-to-peer voting (one method of open voting) is also embeddable in social contexts. If someone expresses an idea, you can immediately agree to it by casting a vote with a handheld computer, phone or media player. You cast it directly for the person who expresses the idea - that's the P2P aspect - and a local server takes care of "cascading" the votes together, and displaying the current results.  If you change your mind, at some point, you can shift your vote.

Dotmocracy is for consensus building in the small: "What kind of pizza should we order?"  Open voting is for consensus building in the large: "Who should be our Mayor?  What should be our bylaws, plans and policies?"

Electoral reform is concerned with altering the structure of government, and of its voting facilities. The idea is that government is broken and needs fixing. However, this requires the cooperation of government, and it may also require the support of the major political parties.

By contrast, open voting is concerned with altering the structure of the public sphere, particularly by adding a voting facility to it. The idea is that the public sphere is too weak and needs strengthening. This can be accomplished without the aid of government, and without the support of the major political parties. It may therefore offer an alternative approach to would-be electoral reformers.

The #SocialAPI is concerned with locally situated networks, and so is open voting. You can think of open voting as the "last mile of democracy", extending politics out to the communities and individuals at the periphery. Votorola (for example) is communityware that serves a local city or region. Its voter lists are backed by a neighbourhood trust network that is grounded in physical streets and homes.

Like the #SocialAPI, there's a strong DIY attitude.  The code is open source. The servers and networks are installed and administered by the local communities they serve. And there's an API too. All the data are public, and the servers are designed to interface with external networks and applications.

(Please add more connections to open voting...)

(Or suggest other ideas for bootstrapping this as a session...)