E-consensus
E-consensus is a theory of unified principles for consensus within the new capabilities of emerging electronic forums, such as Wikipedia, which allow thousands or even millions of people to collaborate. Such systems present a historically unprecedented capability for voting collaboration and represent a phase transition in human communication and the human cooperation quotient.Simply put, "Let ideas compete and people cooperate".
Principles of e-consensus
Critical issues
The document
The e-consensus paradigm views the "e-document" as a "battleground of ideas" for wisdom and ignorance to forge a common decision of what is to be said and how. The means by which this occurs reaches at the root of political principle and collective intelligence. By managing contributions, voting and connected principles the purpose is overcome traditional informational dynamics, resource pitfalls, power singularities and proceedural bottlenecks to generate policies and practices which reflect higher consensus and which include and accomidate rather than exclude and damage.
Information theory
E-Consensus is predicated on information theory as the foundation for ideal decision making and recognizes the potential prevailance of incorrect principles, uninformed publics and both wise and unwise colalitions over areas of common interest.
The principels of E-Consensus are intended to employ knowledge focusing to find the maximum consensus and generate cohearant documentation of the process. An example of knowledge focusing is found in Recommendation systems where large numbers of seperate movie reviews from many individuals are compiled on the basis of similarity to form highly accurate predictions of movies people will enjoy. The regularity of review data is predicted to hold similarities to voting populations in which a profile of consensus can be generated. Such a system is intended to expand the Condorcet method to a series of arguments relating to a topic with the aim of extracting higher consistancy than single issue referendums.
The concept of the golden suggestion is simply that one cannot predict where the most useful idea will arise. It may be a school child's, an expert's or or even that of a rival political faction. Hence, it is desirable for an information system to protect and nurture any "sugestion" so that can be developed and grow toward acceptance and bear fruit. However many systems of collective intelligence strongly filter input or have a tendancy to let ideas wither before they are fully integrated into a full understanding. A path must exist for any sugestion to make it into acceptance as it is vetted through the fourm.
E-Consensus is based on leting ideas and issues, decisions and priorities "float" on their own merrit. This begs several questions as to how questions are posed to an open voting public. It is therefore necessary to structure the dialogue within some series of branching contexts with supporting "principle based" referendums. Principles form a kind of "idea colalition" which guides the decision process and helps to maintain consistancy. See also Forked Pages [1] and Version History [1]
An interesting phenominon: In the show "Who Wants To Be A millionaire" it seems the audience, when asked, is always right. It is not clear if the votes are only those who beleived they knew or those who wanted to vote. It remains an open question how to best leverage open participation for decision making, particualrly in areas where persons are more affected by the outcome. It is also unclear weather personal involvment should be considered bias at all --rather the interaction of voting variation over issues and principles is intended to balance toward a more cohearant consensus.
Decision making in limited resources poses still more opertunity.
Many decisions involve Units of measure which predicate how much can be acheived with a given resource --how many man-hours of employment might be acheived with a given policy or how many human livfe years may be saved with a given research program. Open contribution system allows many more people to contribute and formulate aproximations for policies.
The functioning of open partipation systems places demand on public time. This is balanced with the mass availability of public participation. E-Consensus however should structure it's interface to accomidate ease of use even as it would be expected to grow in complexity. To acheive this a means of notifying, prioritizing and segmenting tasks is needed. Electronic media poses wholly new opertunities for this.
In traditional decision making systems Representitives are chosen and committies formed. An open participation system sugests expantion of these and an organic unfolding of subjects rather than comitties which are proposed and must rise in interest. This places a strong emphasis on inclusion of ideas in the decision process.
It is an open question weather representitives need to be chosen by vote or weather it may be rational to asign them on the basis of consensus of their vote within a given topic. This is not well studied.
In a very broad system of participation it is likely that only those with an interest would vote or have any expertice. It is not dificult to imagine expencive programs which would gather many more financially interested than technically adroit partisans. A broad system of contributions and structured argument sugests the potential to portion many competing concepts into an ideal mix of theory and need.
One of the central problems of knowledge management and collective intelligence is that both experts and majorities may be right or wrong. This may occur in complicated or technical subjects or areas of principle. How can we define core principles of democratic processes when either minorities or majorities can be "right"?
E-Consensus must naturally favor "principle" over mass will. Partitioning political power by Constutional law offers a precident for "devide and conquer" approach to ignorance.
The theory is as follows:
The golden suggestion
A stock exchange of ideas
The audience always right?
Limited resources
Human resources
Portioning
Tyranny of majorities and minorities
E-Consensus therefore suggests we:
No system in history has ever enacted such a protocol. Thus E-Consensus becomes a new form of human organization — hopefully one which exhibits higher Cooperation Quotient.See also
Consensus, consensus decision making, collective intelligence, knowledge management, list of cognitive biases, groupthink, deliberative democracy, recomendation system