Campaigns

Campaigns are an essential feature. See Simple model for expressing opinions for the current scheme

Campaigns are meant to be run only by organisations, not individuals; Individual opinions can be expressed by writing Reviews and by voting on campaigns.

Campaigns can be calls for boycott or endorsement. They can be targeted at individual products product groups, brands, companies, corporations, future products advertisements, supply chains, industries or areas. Areas can be provinces or countries.

Some preliminary ideas on Campaigns

Anyone can start a campaign on any campaignable issue, thus becoming a Campaign Manager
You may subscribe only to one of the campaigns targeted at the same thing
Campaigners can be virtual or real entities (cybercampaigns and realworld campaigns should be treated a little differently, real have more "weight" then virtual)
Subscribing to a campaign gives a person one vote when meeting is called to make decisions (split, merger, opinion change, nullifying) of the campaign
Campaigns can be merged and split just like traditional incorporated bodies.
Campaigns set a score for themselves. This is basically just an number. Positive means it's an endorsement and negative means its a boycott.

Score

One idea is to use a seven step system for scores as follows:

-3 Boycott
-2 Strong Avoid
-1 Avoid
0 Neutral
1 Support
2 Strong Support
3 Endorse

Another is a "star" system with five steps and all numbers positive 1-2 below average 3 average 4-5 above average

Campaign Management

Basically there are three models to Campaign Mangement of which only Wiki Management is taken into account in Simple model for expressing opinions. The other two may be introduced later to counter sock puppet and other wiki attacks

Wiki Management

Highly volatile
Requires dedicated attention from campaign "managers"

Central management

The Campaign Manager makes all decisions regarding the campaign and the subscribers get notified of changes and have a possibility to withdraw their vote if the deem the change unacceptable
Quick response times

Democratic management

When someone wants to change something they have to submit the proposed change, which then gets voted upon either untill a certain percentage of subscribers have voted or for a certain period of time.
Propably sluggish response times and low voting participation

Cascading Campaign

Campaigns can be made to cascade. For example a campaign on a product group may cascade to the products belonging to the group or a campaign on a country may cascade to companies outside the country if they are a part of a corporation in the country targeted by the campaign

Who decides on Cascading

The question on should the use of this option to cascade a campaign be made by the campaigner or the consumer is yet unresolved.

Duration of Campaigns

Campaigns have an activation date, an deactivation date and optionally an expiration date

By default the the activation date is the date that the campaign is registered and the deactivation and expiration date are not set.

It is possible to start building a campaign before it becomes active. A typical case of this would be for example special campaign days or weeks like Buy Nothing day where the campaign exists propably indefinatelly, but is active for only one day.

so i propose the following terminology to distinguish what state a campaign is in:

Inactive Campaign - registered, but not activated: can be activated or nullified by campaign management or by set activation date or expiration date
Active Campaign - registered and activated: can be inactivated or nullified by campaign management or by set expiration date
Archived Campaign - nullified by campaign management or expired: Cannot be activated again

Question: Campaigns - How do the voting systems work now that WikiVotes have been introduced. Previously there were two distinct vote types Direct Votes and Indirect Votes, but since the introduction of Campaign management by Wiki and the included idea of Opinion Wiki accepting and handling votes this scheme is a little broken