The Consumerium Exchange
The Consumerium Exchange is where people can voice their opinion on which disputed article or campaign is closest to the truth at or over a certain period of time (to some time horizon, e.g. as stated in a Consumerium Contract).
The purpose of The Consumerium Exchange is to provide a weighting or combined measurement for different opinions, which determines the default opinion shown to the consumer on each issue.
Each consumer can override the view of a given resource, process, company, interest group or industry with her/his own preferences automatically or manually. One important preference is the slider to set how much weight direct and indirect votes get. Enabling automatic exclusion of votes based on preferences should also be possible.
Distribution of power
Every person gets two votes on each issue:
- An Indirect Vote.
- A Direct Vote.
Where issue is a disputed article or a campaign.
The dual voting (direct+indirect) system provides improved reliability and flexibility for The Consumerium Exchange at the same time. Due to the dual voting system the exchange is less susceptible to distortion. It is propably better left unknown how people value these different votes on each issue or in general because it provides the intrigue and safety of not-knowing
Counter measures against multivoting and vote buying should be meticulously evaluated. One such measure is to simply bet on the integrity of a given item with a Consumerium Contract. Since it costs money to bet, the multivoting and vote buying gets expensive. This is the only way known to work at present. We are seeking alternatives.
Social network weighting
Registered members are able to set scores (with comments) on each other extended-FOAF style (Friend Of A Friend/Foe). For instance one may track only foes, using only negative scores. This would be by far the best way to proceed - since groupthink sets in when any group confuses social capital with instruction.
Such direct social network support would provide more strongly differentiated views on the issues if FOAF-aggregation is enabled in the preferences of the consumer.
Of course the consumer has to decide on a few organisations (minimum being one) s/he chooses to trust the most and the value of other participants is then relative to what organisations are saying about each other. It is not necessary to trust anyone completely - one might for instance trust Greenpeace the most but only to a "0.7" level. All other organisations could then be trusted to some number proportional to them, but less than 0.7.
One could ask well why not full campaigns on other campaigners?
- The anwser being no, not campaigns, because it would lead to all sorts of conceptual unclarities, problems with infinite recursion and besides if party A has an view on party B that view is a private matter of Party A, not party C
See also:
- The Talk Page for Discussion on this facility which outlines the bet issue in some great depth.