Google bods reform DEMOCRACY in coconut or vitamin water quandry Google has developed an internal utopian voting system for its office events, which its creator hopes to make an official product. So far 11,000 internal staff have cast some 75,000 votes on Google office events like Halloween contests and building names. Some 4,200 staff voted in a Mircokitchen food event in which vote …
Voting is a presentation of preference, which is personal data. If the process can be used outside Google by an entity that doesn't make its living from profiling its users, maybe*, but not in any association with Google.
* 'maybe' because electronic voting is a complex issue and not all of it is technical. If you want to know more about why it's so hard, look at Dr Rebecca Mercuri's work.
When it's being used for deciding what drinks to have in the office kitchen, your paranoia is perhaps unjustified
Thin end of the wedge? 10 years ago nobody would have dreamt to put their personal life online, now our kids don't know how to live without it so they can be driven to suicide by w*nkers on the other side of the planet.
It pays to think through consequences. Corruption of the mind is never a big bang affair, that would create resistance. It happens slowly, bit by bit.
Electronic voting is only difficult if we keep the type of votes we now use. If we replace the prevailing type of votes with a more tangible type of vote, then a lot of the difficulty goes away. Most of the problems with electronic voting are not so much a problem with casting the vote, it is problems with fraud. If the votes are tangible and your voting history is auditable, then it is relatively easy to deal with. As a bonus, you end up with something very similar to this "liquid" system, where it is possible to assign votes to recognized experts and you eventually do end up with a very fluid meritocracy that retains sufficient structure to be functional and effective.
We designed a system to do all this back in '98. The initial design is intended to be used by private organizations and political parties. We are not sure that it will scale to general elections, but it shouldn't really need to.
Citation please ?
I do agree that this affirmation appears to be, at first glance, a reasonable one, but is it actually true ?
The wikipedia article makes no mention of meritocratic influence on this Liquid Democracy thing.
This looks a lot like something we developed about 15 years ago. I agree that if this is done right then it does inexorably lead to a meritocracy, which would be a huge improvement over the current cesspool of politics that we now enjoy - where the most ruthless untrustworthy schemers usually succeed.
See Article 11 at http://www.vila.ca/VILA/Bylaws.aspx
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