Votorola
Votorola is communityware for building consensus and reaching decisions. Installed in your home town, it functions as a primary electoral system, one in which the candidates are chosen by open, cross-party consensus. The backbone of the system is a peer-to-peer voting mechanism that allows for recursive delegation, unrestricted nomination, and continuous vote shifting. Its voter lists are authenticated by a neighborhood trust network. An interface to collaborative writing sites (upcoming beta) will extend the voting to legislation, plans, and policies.
| Licenses | MIT/X |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | OS Independent |
Recent releases
- 04 Jul 2009 09:20
Changes: The pollserver was coupled with a wiki. Voters may use the wiki to draft legislative proposals and other position statements, while they use the pollserver to vote them up. A link to the help page was added to the top of all pages in the Web interface. Minor bugs in the command line, Web, and mail interfaces were corrected.
- 10 May 2009 13:55
Changes: Administrative setup of local sites was simplified. The system manual was redacted. User docs were integrated into the Web interface. Page customization was moved to client scripts. Examples of configuration are now bundled with each release. Man pages were moved into the manual proper. Input piping was added to the 'voter' command shell. The 'volist' and 'vocount' compilers were improved. Issue categorization was added to polls. Limitations on the number of polls were removed. A test mode was added to the pollserver, allowing for unauthenticated access during tests and demonstrations.
- 04 Jan 2009 16:44
Changes: The underlying theory of the system design was documented. Details of the peer-to-peer voting mechanism were defined. Its functional interfaces with society were explained, including its role as a primary electoral system; its effect on the delegation of executive power; and its interplay with collaborative media in the drafting of consensus norms, such as laws, plans, and policies.
- 06 Sep 2008 20:32
Changes: Divisional schemes were introduced, enabling the administrator to define different methods of dividing a region into electoral districts, such as municipal versus federal. Navigation was overhauled in the Web interface. Short-cuts were added for navigating directly to specific elections and voters. A help page was added for posting user instructions. Configuration hooks were introduced to enable the customizing of page content and styling.
- 14 Jul 2008 08:22
Changes: Doubt signaling was implemented as an adjunct to the trust network, serving to indicate suspicious voter registrations. Controls and views of the overall trust network were added to the Web interface. A cache was added to relieve the load on remote geocoding services. Constraints on the length of user input were tightened, closing several security holes. A theory outline was drafted, predicting the rough fit of Votorola in society.
