Initiatives.tech is a website hosted at eHosts.com for the purpose of demonstrating my “Ideas” plugin for WordPress.

The site tries to demonstrate what can be done to resolve governmental issues by proposing actual solutions that resolve an already recognized issue or some aspect of it.   Each and every proposal is presented to all of the persons interested in resolving such issues and each interested person is allowed to rate any or all of the submitted  proposals using a system of one to five stars.

The system is essentially free of moderation in that everyone is a moderator.  It is demonstrated that lists of alternative solutions can be presented without heavy handed content moderation because the interlopers and destroyers of truth will see their distracting garbage moved to the bottom of the bird bird cage by rational people as those people rate the garbage at half a star (the kiss of death).  Likewise, those ideas that are popular among the rational participants will rise to the top because many will rate them as highly desirable (a 4 or 5 star rating).

Participants will discover that they can fully support their own ideas or the ideas of others with which they agree completely by asserting 5 stars.  But they can also be supportive of the ideas from others by awarding  3  or 4 stars.  The system thus creates consensus around a few extremely desirable ideas such that a reasonable prioritization for action can emerge.

The Ideas plugin is open source and free and WILL BE placed into the WordPress repository for review and use in any WordPress powered website.  At present (Feb 3, 2017) it is more or less at an “alpha” stage of development seeking criticism and suggested improvement.

This demonstration uses a list of amendments to the United States Constitution taken from those proposed by the 114th congress.  People are invited to rate each such amendment on its merit.  The results are non binding and the site is not guaranteed to  be safe from calamity (loss of data).  But those functions which guard against hacking and spamming and purposeful destruction are not dependent upon the plugin.  They are dependent upon the ability of the organization or person(s) installing and using the free WordPress software and the associated plugins that address those particular matters.

For now (2/03/1017) anyone can rate any of the amendments as many times as they see fit.  The IP address of the individual is used as an identity and each IP address gets one vote for each amendment which the owner of that IP address can change at any time.  If you vote from your desktop (reasonably private IP) then your ratings will persist from one session to another.   If you vote using your hand held device over public WIFI facilities then your opinions are tromped on by the next person using that public WIFI facility.  We need to remember that this is a demo site and not the resulting actual consensus building site.  Even so, the next plugin to be added will be one that enables social media as the primary means of voting access.  The aim of that stage of development is to allow people to vote from anywhere while preserving their actual ballots in a way that does not require the voters to open an account on the actual tabulating system (a hassle).  In parallel with that stage, improved search and navigation will be undertaken.

What needs to happen at this point is the development of policy concerning how various new ideas are to be added to the list(s) and prioritized in such a way that exposes the new ideas  to the light of day long enough for them to be rated by a significant number of people.  By way of explanation, if policy is not developed or incorrectly developed, then older entries will have gathered positive ratings to the extent that new ideas will never be seen.  It becomes immediately apparent that reliance solely on the established ratings for determining the exposure of ideas may not be workable in the raw.

The ideas will be categorized to aid in navigation and search.

The idea of “groups” and “aging” would seem to be the next step.  It might be reasonable to require that ideas that appear on this list must be submitted by groups as opposed to individuals.

More later.  I need to get back to work.