Meta-Tool

[Thomas von der Elbe]

In the field of e-democracy the geatest concern for me was the 
possibility of many tools competing with each other for users. This way 
the whole just emerging movement would have been split and weakened.
Thats why I´m very happy, that here in Germany 4-5 different projects 
agreed on sharing the same registration-facility. Last weekend we met at 
the invitation of Liquid-Democracy-e.V. The other participating projects 
were Adhocracy, LiquidFeedback and Crabgrass/Echologic.

Now with a shared registration the different engines can still compete 
for the best solution, but not at the cost of the whole e-dem-movement. 
Also many additional possibilities arise.
The most exciting for me is something like a portal for e-dem-users. For 
the user it would:

1. be the entrance to the e-dem-world (registration)
2. give an overview over all the issues being discussed/voted across all 
the different engines
3. show all the engines, in which a particular issues is being 
discussed/voted
4. show the current proposals and voting results in that poll (for each 
engine and also totalized (multiple votes revised))
5. provide a delegation tool for abstract vote-delegation (e.g. delegate 
all tax-related issues to Mrs.X and all enviromental issues to Mr.Y)
6. be the entrance to a particular engine of choice (for single users 
and for delegates (in case the particular engine supports delegation))

It would be like a network of engines connected through this meta-tool. 
But they could also connect among each other through a 
vote-mirroring-facility. Through auto-casting all the votes from one 
engine could be mirrored in all the other engines. So that the user of 
each engine sees where else the same issue is being discussed/voted and 
with what results.

Mike drew two pictures of the auto-casting-tool for me:
http://t.zelea.com/wiki/User:ThomasvonderElbe_GmxDe/Vote_mirroring

Further possibilities that come to mind are things like: delegates of 
one engine (and not just abstract delegates) voting in another engine. 
They would be like bridges between two engines. This of course depends 
very much on the specifics of the voting procedures. But some engines 
look compatible to Votorola in at least one direction.

I find this all very exciting. :-)

Greetings,
Thomas