Submitted by dele_ted in konsent

Phase 2 (solution suggestions, voting on the best solutions) is the weak link at the moment, as some have pointed out. We also discussed it on GitHub, and surreal linked this pretty neat text. I got to reading, and have gotten an idea for some changes that would make Konsent more about discussion and concensus and less about individualistic voting. Here's my suggestion; new ideas are more than welcome:

We could add a new phase between what's currently phase 2 and phase 1. This would be a simple discussion phase, similar to discussion on Raddle. Nested comments, perhaps votes, you get the idea. After a set amount of time, or after enough community members have agreed that discussion is finished, the issue will move to what is now phase 2 and would become phase 3, and things would proceed as usual. The discussion from phase 2 would be archived and accessible from phase 3.

I think this would give a balance between concensus and direct democracy, and thanks to the veto feature, minorities would still be respected. I also think this approach would reduce the amount of vetoes put in place drastically, because people can listen to each other and discuss the issue at hand before going straight to attempting to solve it.

I know i write some long walls of text at times, so here's a TL;DR for the lazy.

TL;DR

We need to change phase 2. I suggest that we add a discussion phase inbetween the current phase one and two. This approach would enable everyone to hear each other out, which would hopefully mean less vetoes.

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Fossidarity wrote

I feel that some sort of discussion is good because it would make it harder to create 100 alt accounts and just spam the vote buttons. A problem I foresee is that it might create fierce discussions where the result will be that even more people will veto the solution.

I think this is an incredibly difficult problem because you want to filter out bad actors (especially on the internet) but you also want to give minorities and people with unpopular opinions a voice.

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dele_ted OP wrote (edited )

We've come to an agreement on Github, it goes like this:

During phase two, everyone who either

  • a: voted on the issue

  • b: created their account before the issue opened

will be able to add links pointing to external discussion. This could be a Raddle thread (we'll create a seperate forum for that) or anything else really. Discussion will then run at the same time as solutions are bring proposed.

This is a good solution because it makes sure that Konsent doesn't get too bulky and difficult to maintain (we're only three devs at the moment), it'll give more freedom to the users, it's simple to implement, it doesn't leave Konsent responsible for sensitive data, it doesn't require pricier servers; the list could go on.

We're trying to find a balance point between direct democracy and consensus decision making, and i think this is exactly where we want to be. Combined with the right to veto, it'll probably work pretty well.

This system will be a part of version 0.3a. We're wrapping up and preparing to release 0.2a right now, you can follow along on GitHub if you're interested, links in sidebar.

TL;DR

During phase two, everyone is free to add "meta-discussion" links pointing to external discussion forums. Discussion will happen here alongside the solution proposal phase.

About alt-accounts

We've discussed some different solutions. We're probably just going to make voting onymous for now, and see if it becomes a real problem.

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