ConsensusPolling

The current state of the art in ConsensusPolling is happening at AboutUs.org. Please see: http://www.aboutus.org/Portal:ConsensusPolls

BeyondYes helps big ol' groups go from "Mess to Yes!" Voting often divides communities into winners and losers. In contrast, BeyondYes helps the entire community converge on a creative solution that has deep support and wide buy-in.

Rather than a menu of candidates to choose from, the entire process is controlled by an evolving YES/NOT YET acceptance meter. The acceptance meter reflects the suitability of a single community-owned community-developed collaborative solution. All participants are free to change their status at any time. A YES status says "I believe the current articulation of our solution is good enough." A NOT YET status says "I have concerns that haven't been adequately addressed by the current solution." Only when the YES number passes some high, pre-specified threshold (e.g., 90%) can the solution proposed be considered to reflect the will of the community.

It Works!

The omidyar.net online community was given $25,000 to give away to "make the world a better place." Four months and 10,000 forum posts later, the community was polarized and divided. ConsensusPolling was born out of this "mess" as a means to *prove omidyar.net community was done. Working together over 4 days, 92.4% of 66 people agreed on a method for allocating half of the funds. Since then ConsensusPolling has been used successfully in a half dozen other instances.

It Can Scale

ConsensusPolling has the potential to scale from 2 people to 200,000,000 active participants. This project is about tweaking the model as we bootstrap to ever larger groups of participants.

The Model (in Summary)

ConsensusPolling consists of four main parts:

1. DynamicPlan … An evolving plan that the group is working on together.
2. StaticContract … What it means to succeed, the StaticContract never changes. It is the document that describes exactly what levels of participation and consensus must the DynamicPlan satisfy in order to say "Hurray! We're done!".
3. YesMeter … An acceptance meter where people give their status on the DynamicPlan. Whose staus is now NOT YET and whose is YES? Participants can change their status at any time.
4. ForumForConcerns … A venue where members with status YES listen to the concerns of those with status NOT YET.

StateDiagram

Perhaps rather than saying simplified/withoutX we should start from the simple one and add resets and cloture to the following ones?

State Diagram has been revised. Thoughts?

I love it!

The cloture branch of the graph feels like overkill to me for a beginner learning about our process. What do you think about a simplified graph without that branch that's more generally used and then the full graph included in a FAQ or somewhere else when dealing with the question of what happens when people stall?

I have Inkscape. What do I need to do to edit this myself?

http://www.communitywiki.org/en/OddmuseToInkscape

Background

is not DeliberativePolling

• http://smartocracy.orgDynamicPlan
• Wikipedia Consensus decision-making
  • [1]
  • Wikipedia Collecitve intelligence
• Similar to FundableDotOrg? and PledgeBank?. One key difference being that with ConsensusPolling the "pledged action" can evolve via CollectiveIntelligence whereas with the other two it is pre-specified and cannot change.
• Also similar to MeatBall:BarnRaising.
• This kind of unanimous (or near-unanimous) consensus is also found in MeatBallCollectiveIntelligence?, and mulleprever in MeatBall:VetoTopic.

Check out Carass "You can negotiate anything"

Best practices

• Allow companies to host it themselves … offer a set it up package for them

Look at outcome funding and how it propagated.

Demonstrate early success … in the domain that you care about.

Foundations:

• Meyer Memorial Trust
• Dell
• Omidyar

http://www.tidescenter.org/becomingaproject.cfm

Who what when grid. Who has pledged to do what by when?

First Monday published a paper called "Openness in communication" by Jon Hoem [2], which extends a model of information patterns by Bordewijk and van Kaam; I was struck how consensus polling seems to push from the upper-left to the bottom-right ("information centre" -→ "collective") of its extended model, maybe of interest.

Goals of the Org

Moved to http://beyondyes.com/Beyond_YES_Goals

Business model

Moved to http://beyondyes.com/Business_model

feedback

Ted had a long conversation wtih MichaelHerman? yesterday. Lots of questions came up.

• How did you pick 160 for the final ICANN TLD threshold? How did you pick 10 to start with? How did you pick 90% as a threshold? How did you pick the 5 stages?
• Michael mapped the 5 stages to Gabrielle Roth's 5 Rythms dance something something: flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness - cool!
• Michael seems to share Norbert's issue about 3-state logic, though he didn't state it as such. His feeling is that being "in the room" is important data, even if not yet voting. This makes me think we have to be much more careful about our language at a minumum. "Voting" is the wrong word, I think. Also, "yes" and "no" may also be the wrong words. In the ICANN case, there are people listed as ???. Why is that? Is that our 3-state logic coming in the side door? For me "yes" means "I'm satisfied with the document as it is and am ready to move on OR I trust those that are actively working on this and whatever they decide is okay with me." "No" means: "I'm not ready (yet) to say this document works for me. Maybe I haven't had time to read it. Maybe I've read it and don't understand it. Maybe there are parts (or the whole) that I object to. Maybe I believe the acceptance threshold is too low and that we need more support before we move forward. I may or may not be able to articulate why I'm not ready yet, but I'm definitely not ready yet."
• I didn't fully understand this yesterday wtih Michael and didn't want to complicate things with him by bringing it up, but it seems the thresholds for future stages are negotiable in earlier stages. Is that right? Is that why you wanted the future thresholds on the stage 1 page, as if in play? Logically this seems absolutely correct, that each stage's document sets the conditions for the next stage. In practice, this just seems so heavy, so I'm glad we took it out. Michael wondered if there couldn't be some self-correction built in, some kind of feedback loop, some secret-sauce, black-box sort of thing that we develop that wouldn't be readily apparent to everyone. I like the idea of feedback. Not so much the black box. Would love to hear your thoughts on this stuff. --Ted
• Michael says name: Critical Mass b/c that's what we deliver - deep and broad gives porn site feeling
• Ted's friend JohnStoner? suggests hotlinks from the NOT YET to their entry in the forum for concerns

Other Places to Check Out

• http://www.aboutus.org/ConsensusPolling
• Consensus building institute in Cambridge Mass
• http://beyondvoting.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page in NYC
• http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=1022 talks about a deep decision-making process called "Council" (face to face)

reference

• http://beyondyes.com/ToDos
• NowPlaying … polls that are in progress
• HistoryOf … Document all the consensus polls that we know of
• http://sivinkit.net/archives/002078.html
• http://chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/?p=995
• http://eutopedia.homeip.net/eutopedia/index.php/Food_for_Discussion
• http://joechip.net/brian/2006/11/01/getting-better-all-the-time/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus_polling
• http://www.us.debian.org/vote/
• http://zimki.com James Duncan's Company