[pp.int.general] LQFB: status quo in Germany // was: liquid feedback papers and/or data?

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

Hello Aloa:

Thanks for the point of view. The problem I see is, discussion is a very
difficult thing to scale up to thousands. Even 100 highly active people
can make following a discussion a nightmare.

And discussion can happen in multiple places at the same time: in a
mailinglist like this, in facebook, in twitter, in regular local
meetings, in a conference, in a bar. But voting, that usually happens in
one very specific settings (be it offline or online).

One can of course provide a discussion method coupled with the votin
system. What I have seen in my experience is that sometimes when you tie
together multiple tools together, you only need one to be bad to make
the whole system fail. This is why I usually prefer to have them first
separated, then maybe we can try to join two successful methods, one for
voting and another for discussion. Maybe I'm wrong and too conservative
here, that's just what I feel right.

Lets take an example: in Spain we have a smaller pirate group than the
german pirates, as you know. We are a confederation of local political
parties. When there's something to be discussed, we usually try to
"divide and conquer": we can have some discussion in the common mailing
list, but we usually move the discussion to the local groups, which are
smaller and more manageable, and then finally hold a vote. The vote is
common for everyone and using agora voting. See? We don't couple
discussion and voting at all. And it's a way to scale discussion. We're
still learning though, the confederation was born recently, and we will
make changes (and mistakes). And if we know each other experiences, we
can mitigate the errors.

Anyway, let's have a mumble meeting among technical people trying to
work on these problems, shall we? I'm also interested that people with
experience in these systems attend, specially in Germany. But I really
want to have as many technical people willing to work as possible,
because otherwise it's not going to go anywhere =)

Regards,
Eduardo