Voting
Voting refers to any system of making multiple choice collectively - it is typically used in elections to form a government which must make binding decisions that affect everyone, or elect a board (or sometimes even the management) of an enterprise.
In democratic elections the voting is closed and the vote counting is open.
Consumerium has the opposite system where voting is open though anonymized for consumer comfort and security and vote counting is up-to-personal and closed which is possible because there is no requirement to reach a consensus like there is when electing elected representatives of the people in democratic elections or writing an encyclopedia.
Everybody will be able to see what everybody voted but not know which votes were cast by whom. This way we can protect the voters privacy while maintaining resilience to information warfare. It would enrich the Consumium social media game experience to be able to share sub-sets of your votes with your friends or even publish some sets of your votes for all to see. Forming teams and factions that draw and aggregate from team/faction members' votes sub-sets seems a likely feature.
What one can vote?
Direct votes are:
| +2 | Recommends Company X | ||||
| +1 | Supports Company X | ||||
| +1 | Tries to support Company X | ||||
| 0 | is neutral about or | 00 (+1 and -1) | Levers [must find better word] or | 0000 (+2 and -2) | Levers heavily |
| -1 | Tries to avoid Company X | ||||
| -1 </td | Avoids Company X | ||||
| -2 | Boycotts Company X |
| All 0's move/lever the result towards | 50% positive. |
What things can you vote on?
Everybody may vote on any thing (it should be somehow related to production, trading or shopping), or but only the following will be tallied Companies, Brands, Products, Product groups, Category:Countries and Areas. If Votes overlap or conflict, the first or last vote encountered will be counted. This is yet to be decided.
The trick is in the counting
So by closed and tuneable counting we mean that you can ( if you wish to ) have a personalized vote counting result because no consensus outcome is required.
The most simple way to achieve a vote counting result that is customized is to use automatic amplification, a one-check-box-solution, which is to say that the people who voted similar to you get more voting power ( say +30% ) ( amplification ) and those who voted conflicting with your votes get less ( dampening ) ( say -30% )
With the open voting, tuneable counting we are making sure that we have the highest resiliency to information warfare . Every time a skewing effort ( usually by paid trolls ) is detected proper counter measures ( parametrization of the vote counting ) can be formulated and distributed. The loss in this set-up is exposure to consumption pattern profiling for those who vote ( then again this happens in twitter and facebook too if you talk / like about your consumption habits ).
As in all highly-political wikis we expect a paid trolls vs. unpaid trolls situation. We are also optimist and hope that a healthy dynamic equilibrium(s) will form. :D :D
Voting result for Company X
Vote average on -2≤x≤2 scale normalized to 100%:
| Result Scale 1 |
| 0 ≤ x <40% positive on Company X (Red) | 40 ≤ x ≤ 60% (Yellow) | 60 < x ≤ 100% |
What's the ratio of 0's compared to all votes (percentage)
Other possible words to refer to this metric. These include:
- Levering towards 50% positive (bad. reference to leverage)
- Middlage/Middling (middlage is propably better, pronounced french way)
- Quasi-disputedness (maybe, maybe not)
- Neutralifying (maybe, maybe not)
- It's trollage again! All your 2 cows immediemente!
This metric is an Average (scale may have to be adjusted later when we can get info on what levels voting 0's settle into)
| 60 ≤ x ≤ 100% of votes are 0's | Notice the range here is 40% wide |
| 45 ≤ x < 60% of votes are 0's | |
| 30 ≤ x < 45% of votes are 0's | |
| 15 ≤ x < 30% of votes are 0's | |
| 0 ≤ x < 15% of votes are 0's |
When will voting be implemented ?
Not from the start of the implementation phase surely ( one would be able to guess who is who ). A few thousand users sounds adequate time to implement the voting and vote counting system. Running w:one-way hash function of a voter id and representing that in a w:Base 36 encoding seems to have serious vulnerabilities though it provides some sort of anonymization. Does the set of voter's votes need to have permanent id?