Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!arisia!cdp!madavis
From: madavis@cdp.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Democratic Newsgroup ?
Message-ID: <206000007@cdp>
Date: 6 Apr 89 17:55:00 GMT
References: <206000001@cdp>
Lines: 57
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:206000001:cdp:206000007:000:2396
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!madavis    Apr  6 09:55:00 1989



In response to my article <206000001@cdp>, pavel@dgp.toronto.edu
<3003> says:

>What?	You expect democracy to work on this net?

Yes I do.  Direct, non-representative democracy will work in any large
group.	Affinity for direct democracy lies dormant in our hearts just
as the ability to walk upright was dormant in our ancestors' bodies
until someone tried it and fell and tried it and fell and tried it
again and again.

We humans need a new form of decision-making.  Now, our earth is
suffering from our bad decisions.  As a species, we waste too much on
military equipment, on fission (and cleaning up after fission), on
highways instead of public transportation, and on and on.  Our
decision-makers listen to lobbyists who are paid to represent special
interests.  It is not a fair game for the Sierra Club and other groups
who lobby for the "special interest" of what is good for us.  They are
funded by donations, not profits.  They can only fight fire after
fire.  If this old system goes on and on, it can only end in bad news.

For the sake of the earth, let's try decision-making on-line.

The big difficulty in designing a legitimate experiment in on-line
voting is finding questions to vote on that are interesting enough to
gather participation.  The Usenet's particular problem of maintaining
a joke conference is ideal for a first experiment in on-line
democracy.  I have heard that 20,000 or 50,000 people per day look for
jokes in rec.humor.funny.  From that group, there would be enough
participation to make rec.humor.dem work.

>Someone is sure to can the joke well before it reaches a significant
>portion of the net.

There would be one vote per person; no "someone" could can a joke.

>It is far too easy to offend a small group of net folks who will
>probably raise a sufficient uproar to stop the joke.

A joke would only be stopped if there were plenty of other jokes that
people liked better.  The only uproar any group could raise in the
decision-making system would be "--" times the size of the group.

In my mailbox came the criticism:

>A nice sounding idea, but totally impractical because it would
>require installation of new software to record the opinions on every
>site on the net.

Yes, it would require new software.  My guess is that it would be
an enhancement of !rn.

Is it technically possible? feasible?

Marilyn Davis   arisia.xerox.com!cdp!madavis