June 7, 2010

A Vague idea About a Tactical Voting System

Now, this post does not provide anything to anybody, except that it just describes, what's on my mind at the start of June 2010.

Namely, I really started to wonder, how to communicate, GET THINGS DONE together with others in a more effective way.

The background is that I'm part of a subgroup of the Estonian green party, and in a funny way one of the, so to speak, representatives, of the group in a way that I got thrown out of the green party with other, much more prominent, members of the group, and then, our party membership was restored due to a high demand within the party.

Well, anyway, what's on my mind is that smart and otherwise people that I want to cooperate with, tend to do two things that I really don't like.

First, they do things that are led from emotions.

Second, they don't consider different solutions, contemplate about them systematically, compare the pluses and minuses of different solutions.

They do ask for comments and are willing to cooperate, in general try to do things together with other members of the group, but the discussion is seriously hindered due to the lack of systematization. To me it seems that what they do is that they ask for comments and then try to pick something up from the comments according to their own best judgment, and merge that somehow into the existing text. The result is that the text is a huge mixture, which is systematized, but full of issues that don't work, but something that people emotionally voted for or tonally agree with. One can say that the result is a systematic emotional, polite, expression, but not something that can be used to get things done or clear things up.

I suspect that it has something to do with the structure of communication in general. Like, may be it has something to do with a fact that the structure of the communication is a graph, where if one person says something and something relates with it for some other person, then that other person says/writes his/her ideas about the related issue and so it goes. To me it seems that it is a very effective way to get the raw material, if done in a very small group, i.e. not more than 10 people, preferably with at most 5 people, but from there onward, I think that one should try to think of something.

May be the solution is that one of the people notes down ideas subject to evaluation and then the group adds statements about the ideas to evaluate and each of the group members can evaluate each of the statements by giving it 4 values: statement doesn't hold, statement supports the claim, statement is neutral, statement is against the claim.

It can be simulated in a spreadsheet by calculating the mark to a single statement given by a single person by HOLDS*MARK, where the HOLDS is in set {0,1} and the MARK is in set {-1,0,1}. The default value for HOLDS is 1 and the default value for the MARK is 0. The votes would be counted by finding a geometrical mean of the holds values and multiplying the sum of all MARK values with the geometrical mean. This would be done with every statement about the claim and the claim's sum of points would be the sum of the statements' points.

OK, I understand that the last section was not clear enough, I don't write technical documentation that way, but I don't want to spend too much time on this article. At least I self know, what algorithm I had on my mind. I think that it would actually take a bunch of mathematical formula anyway to explain it clearly and that's quite unpleasant to do in HTML, but even if different people interpret my last section differently, I'm sure that they can fantasize somewhat to the "right direction". :-) After all, it is a non-serious, soap opera blog.