It could just be made as a new motion but that introduces clutter and its possible to accidentally withdraw a motion

It would be nice if there were a drafts function so anything happens you don't lose your progress on the motion.

It would be great to create documentation for statistical quorum. So, explanation with diagrams. Showing what exactly are the intervals we are computing for credibility and confidence (also that it is clearer why they can be different), what is the hypothesis we are solving.

@mkanwal, can you make this into the document? LaTeX or something?

Depends: meteor-useraccounts/core#587

There is currently no way to follow a motion you are interested in so you have to manually check it every so often

Currently motions auto second or should it stay like this?

Some managers are very likely to use their manager account password for everything and if they sign into coucil site their manager accout could be compromised

duplicate, sorry

Vote tracker for each user that tells them the % of motions they have voted on.

We will eventually make a bylaw change to automatically issue uncooperative fines to people who do not vote in 25+% of all motions.

Could we have it so that these points could also be formatted?

(At the very least, I would like to be able to put line breaks by pressing 'Enter' and have that formatting retained after submitting the point)

Lots of improvements to be made to the graph:

• confidence interval
• axes labels
• presentation of stats
• better visibility (boldness)
  ...

For our Sandstorm integration. Currently user can open in-app links into a tab and escape Sandstorm chrome. This makes it really bad UI. App should do something about it.

Currently the issue is that they cannot really know where to redirect to back.

sandstorm-io/sandstorm#1848

It would be nice to have the abiliity to see if you've read all of a thread before you click on it.

Shows all votes that user has participated in (their vote + motion result)

Comments just endlessly go down the page. Make the comments scrolling instead so that they don't extend the page by 5x the length.

I was thinking about bias people have for remembering negative cases. For example, remembering situations when a majority decision was made which is very against their position. But maybe still this is a very rare case and it should not be taken as very important. On the other hand, somebody could be constantly silenced and that might be unseen.

For voting based decision making, one thing could be just displaying stats how often was user on which side of the decision, in majority or minority. Moreover, stats could be made for the whole community. To show if some people are always in minority. Does somebody always gets their decision? This might not be necessary bad, but publicly exposing data might help guide conversations and help participants self-moderate themselves.

One thing would be also to ask participants some time (month, two) after a decision was made to evaluate it again and see if it was really so bad or good as the initially thought. This could also be displayed back to them (and community) visually.

One more thing could also be that instead of asking users to vote with one number based on their position, they would vote with an interval. So for example, where would they stand ideally (so they move slider to there) and until where they would compromise (and they create an interval to there). For example, somebody could prefer that something does not pass, but could also survive if it passes, so the interval could be from -1 to 0. This could give more information to the decision making process in how much more work is needed to get to somewhere where people would agree upon. It could be a nice way also to move between voting and consensus based decision making. So one is where you want to be, and another point of the interval is where you are willing to be. One thing to think about is if those willingness should be public or not. But just internal to the system it might be harder to game. On the other hand, "gaming" is maybe exactly what is needed: somebody observing that a slight change in some text or something would get people to agree (although just barely) on the decision.

In consensus based decision making, we seek that participants are willing to accept the decision (not necessary that they are happy with it). We could measure how much they had to stretch. This could be a good metric both for them and for the group as a whole. Is one person stretching all the time. Maybe then community is not really suitable for that particular person. How much do people have to stretch on average. Is maybe a community too divergent? Is maybe mission/goals unclear and not everyone share a same vision? It could help guide the conversations and communities to understand if somebody is stretching less than average or more than average.

When a user does not vote themselves, their vote can be computed based on their delegates.

Democracy in general has an issue dealing with issues impacting minority groups. Tyranny of majority can often occur. Because of this often such issues are delegated to courts.

But maybe we could do something about this. So that if discussion is labeled/marked as something impacting minority group we would use some other statistics to compute the result and not simply average. Maybe by using some Bayes inference where prior is different because of the low probability that a voting member is a member of a minority group.

Maybe automatically expand a link with a preview/embed of it, like it happens on Facebook? Maybe just in the discussion, if somebody shares just a link?

Related to #32, but if somebody just copies an URL into the text edit area, it should be converted to a link automatically.

The best word I found was "meetings". So time-related groups. One discussion can be in multiple meetings. But only if the discussion has not yet been closed (#14).

A meeting can also be closed (#105) and no discussion can be added to the meeting afterwards. At the same time also all discussions under the meeting can be closed (only closed if the same discussion is not also under some other open meeting).

Are the same people all the time among groups who win in decisions? Or is this fairly distributed, that everyone wins and loses sometimes approximately equally?

This is part of ideas what to visualize to the the community as a whole to show them where might be potential issues.

Related: #45

Not sure if fair distribution of "wins" is what is good, though.

Which disables all modifications to the discussion and related entities.

is there a way to converge them or differentiate them better so it's more clear how to use these different features?

sandstorm-io/sandstorm#1926

I know we initially wanted to create discussion independent of names, and just based on content.
And I know we wanted to have voting based on your opinion only, not to be biased based on current vote.

But it's killing me... I just keep opening the graph/username anyway to see. We should just have these auto-displayed.

Currently it is possible to define only predefined roles for users to select in Sandstorm. See: sandstorm-io/sandstorm#1851

As we currently do not have that feature anyway in the app, this is not such big problem, but in the future it would mean that Sandstorm users would be limited in creating their own roles.

Managers are also members, we should allow easy way for them to switch between accounts.

We should keep in mind that manager accounts are potentially shared between multiple members.

Now that we are using statistical quorum we can also do more complicated statistics. For example, we could ask people to self-identify in various groups (for example, people of color) and then we could require that each of those groups reach quorum as well. In this way we could be assured that not only one group of people had their way.

Maybe this would not be a default but an option when opening a vote. Or something which would be triggered/linked to a tag on the discussion.

I think you should add phases to each of the decision making process. In particular, to represent an efficient version of what happens at city councils. The other decision making tools allow voting on decisions and discussion about it, but they don't build into further collaboration on those decisions.

Such that, you can do the following:

-Vote on an idea (initial)
-Vote on components of the idea to be implemented by specialized committees (implementation)
-Vote on the legal wording of the implementation (legalizing)
-Allowing the final legal wording to be budgeted in terms of costs and benefits
-Vote by everybody on final version

Hi @mitar! I'm happy to help out with designing an a set of icons for your app. Since you haven't yet decided on a name, maybe it would help for you to list about 10 words that describe your app/logo to help me come up with some concepts. Here are some words that phildini chose for ContactOtter.

If you already have a concept in mind, that's great too. :)

Could be introduce some measure of how polarized is community on a motion? So we could with that require not just quorum, but also that result should not be too polarizing? I can imagine that for some decisions, votes would be distributed normally, but for some other they would be like two spikes, for and against.

The normal distribution is one which is maybe OK, and then the question is only that the average support is over 0. But if distribution is with two spikes, even if average is over 0, it might not be good for community to make such a decision.

I have no idea if this is a good thing to require, but maybe it is. Maybe it would require authors of motions to try to frame them in a way to include even minorities, not just satisfy the majority.

@mkanwal, I am correct to assume that in current quorum we look only at average votes and not really how votes are distributed? So that votes which are only -1 and 1 and have the same average than same number of votes of only 0, would have the same quorum requirement by our current formula?

We should add cloyne.cloaca so people can bring up anonymous discussions and make anonymous comments

with additional statistical tests too.

discuss!

ideas:

• groupthink
• granola
• decide-together
• work-together
• good-faith-collaboration
• decision procedure
• decision process
• decision-maker
• decision-hacker

We could be also display a histogram of votes next to each decision, so that community can see that maybe the is a small (minority) group of people are very against the idea.

This could allow community to better understand type of support or opposition for the motion and decide better how to proceed.

It would be way more clear for lengthy discussions if we could directly reply to individual comments instead of contributing to a single thread.

With a log would be nice

Maybe week / month / semester. otherwise I feel like it will get crouded and confusing

Something more like this, where the labels are visible

what's the approach to comment-based discussions? will threads be implemented or no?

Crazy idea, display how much they read next to their name. Not how much they post, vote, or link, but how much they spend reading what others are saying.

The main dashboard (list of discussions) should have stats for items that are still open, results for items that are closed, dates, labels (e.g. mural, use of space, House Acct, etc.), and a way to show whether or not you voted for all motions in that discussion (that way people can see what new stuff they should look at, or if a new motion comes up in an old discussion they will be able to tell).

makes the process for a motion a bit more like a loop, and allows for correcting mistakes that might have been made. otherwise, the user has to make a new motion.

Currently you can just edit a comment but there is no record of the edit