Not checking for voting? WTF?

OK, this is really pissing me off.  Not because Obama won or because McCain lost – both are strong candidates and that is a different story.  But I had two of my friends tell me that they were able to vote without any verification of their identities!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Why do we have a democracy if the voting process is not being maintained?!?!?!?

I think there should be a move by the government to bring voting online…  or offline with a requirement for use of your passport.

Sorting of Votes

Now that we are getting a few more votes, I am able to start playing around with the sorting algorithms.

So, when adjusting the algorithm, I am going with the following:

• never touch the content – i.e. the algorithm should be content independent.  If there is a  bias in the results, blame (and fix) the algorithm
• take how people vote, factor in how young is the vote (time stops being a factor after a short while), add some randomness to keep things interesting…

Radio: KFBK

Was interviewed on KFB (www.kfbk.com) at 7:30 EST.  The radio station is supposed to be a big thing in Sacramento: 150K listeners at any point in time.  I think I may have stumbled over myself…  fun times though

Press Release: www.WhyWeVote.org –A Step Towards an Educated Voter (Helping smart voters make educated/informed choices)

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Released the following press release.  Let’s see if anyone picks up.

www.WhyWeVote.org has opened its doors to the public two days before the election, allowing engaged voters to state whom they would vote for and why.  Its creator, Nikita Bernstein, came to US from the former USSR in 1991 at the age of 12 with his family.  Fully aware of the sacrifices made by his parents, he finds it frustrating to be an engaged citizen yet to be an undecided voter with only days remaining before the election.  With the political dialogue presented to the public mostly catering to emotional angles, he feels that the campaigns are more about sound bites and stirring emotions than informing voters.  Moreover, the voters themselves seem to divide themselves into two categories: those who understand the issues poorly, yet have ample time to be active,  And those who understand some issues very well, yet have little time and exposure to educate those around them, and, as a result, get drowned out by the sheer volume of rhetoric coming from all sides.

As a last resort, he decided that if he is unable to find good resources to help him make his decision, he will create one.  So he sat down, and, in 2 days, released www.WhyWeVote.org, a site that allows people to:

· State the candidate they will vote for

· Explain why they will vote for that candidate

· Reference the information that influenced them most

· Rate other people’s votes as interesting, well-cited, etc.

While still evolving, the site is active and is a major step in the right direction to shift politics from emotion-driven to issue-driven.  Most people do not have the time or knowledge to understand what the right decisions are.  However, they can read and understand good analyses, agree on conclusions, and support the strategies that reflect the society they wish to live in.

Winston Churchill once said “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” This is because politicians have traditionally been in the damning position of having to choose between what is correct politically vs. socio-economically.  Sites like this seek to change that and, as a result, we may see a major shift in how American politics are conducted over the next several years.

Watch for more to come.

Sorting and Rating Comments

OK!  So, 2:23 AM and we got the first version of our sorting algorithm.  I’ve spent a long time thinking about bias and how we want our system to behave…  Came to the following conclusions:

• Anonymity: Information should be evaluated on the merit of information and information only.  Hence the system is anonymous.  This should prevent people who like posting garbage simply to get to the top from doing so.
• Bias: bias is not when a system present one-sided information.  Bias is when you can’t get any other information if youa re looking for it.  I don’t care whether people support Obama or McCain – both have strong points to them and there are reasons to vote both.  Recently I had a Vote “Everything” with content “www.barakobama.com”.  Now, come on, you could at least put it into the link section.  So this is not a very informative post, so it should end up lower on the queue.
• Volatility: I want to make sure that the algorithm is difficult to figure out so that gaming of the system is minimized.  Thus I introduced some randomness.  This will also allow information that is not initially recognized to get on the radar.

Right now the algorithm is fairly simple.  However, I’ll be fine-tuning it to try to make sure that it favors good, well-sourced, reliable information.  I can already see some of the problems that will arise, but it will be interesting to jump off that bridge when we get there.

Please post your votes and vote.  I am very curious how this will turn out…  if it turns out…

Update: Evolution of tagging and Anonymity

OK, I completely changed the architecture of tagging dropping the issue table. This is not something you will see on the surface, but it will affect the future development for the better.

Had some very interesting discussions on where this may grow.  One interesting point that came up was the fact that I am forcing information to be anonymous.  Why do I do that?  Because  I am a fim believer that information should be evaluated on basis of information rather than who submitted it.  Once we start having problems with people submitting explicit lies, then we will see how to deal with this, but, in the meantime, it is important to state explicitly that we want to try to avoid any sorts of labels for information.  We also want to try to minimize the effect of the mob…  Digg has been an excellent example: several overactive individuals completely ruin the environment for everybody else (irrespective of whether you are left or right, just so long as you are reaonable).

Redesign! Reason? WTF is that?

OK, having looked at it with a fresh pair of eyes (after getting some sleep… two all-nighters does things to your brain).  Anyway, looking at the site, I felt saddened and ashamed…  It’s as if I didn’t do marketing ever – broke every rule.  It was convoluted, it was difficult to understand…  in fact it still is, but significantly less so.

So what did I do:

• Started using the word “Vote” rather than “Reason”.
• Changed the front page to the page with all the votes
• Since people want to have multiple issues, let them do it.  Now issues end up broken up as if they were tags, so searching is manageable.
• call to action on the front page
• uhm…  there is more, but need to go grab a bite to eat

Realized today the value of anonymousness on the site…  I think this could have an interesting effect.  Now if only I could get people to browse the site and identify votes they want to reference…  bah…

Query Fixed

Query builder was fixed.

Bug: Query Builder doesn’t work

working on it.

Why WhyWeVote!

First of all, to answer the question “Why?”

Because when we vote, we should know why we vote.  And we should be able to quickly identify pros and cons for every candidate rather than relying on BS political campaigns that play on emotions rather anything resembling analysis.

And now for the longer answer: