The following page documents one of the Suggested Modules.

Feature Name: Proposals to Policies

Suggested By: JenniferForUnity

Justification:

Most organizations have "policies" that they change from time to time. In some sense, all that people high in an organization do is suggest changes to policies, talk about it, and then use some some of decision aggregating algorithm to decide which suggestions to adopt.

The goal of this feature is to give communities a concrete target for their expression of opinions to be about. Ideally (depending on programmer interest and feasibility) the policy proposals could be voted on using normal Polls, Ranked Pair Polling, or whatever else we can come up with.

Implementation Plan:

(This is a very rough draft, please edit it!)

The basic plan would be to use diff and patch style tools to allow edits to a document to be displayed as policy proposals. The interface would show the patch results and the diff and let people express their opinion by some mechanism or another.

The obvious first draft target would be simple polls that Drupal already has, but if other mechanisms could be supported as well that would be quite neat.

Another possible "sophistication" would be to use the collision detection algorithms of diff and patch tools to identify independently suggested "incompatible proposals" and offer them as competing options (A, B, or noneOfTheAbove). There's the potential of an exponential explosion with this feature (imagine all possible combinations of proposals passing or not) which implies that Ranked Pair Polling is potentially very useful (for selecting the best of a large number of options).

Comments

@Jennifer: looking both at this proposal and at your website, maybe you would be interested in having a look at the Democratic Experience project (also at http://www.demexp.org/ ) It may be an overkill for what you are suggesting, but I thought you may be interested.

The demexp project is precisely one where people are voting on policy matters, in order to have an "official policy document from the demexp community". Feel free to delete this comment if you feel it is not relevant. Augustin 4th oct 2006.

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About 10 years ago I implemented a "composite draft" policy-development process that we used on the Austin Community College Board of Trustees to develop and revise most of the college's policies (http://www.austincc.edu/board/policyrole.php#development ). This had to operate under open-meetings-law constraints, but I have often thought of moving it to the web, for which it would be very suited.

Policy development has alternating waves of innovation (in which additional alternatives are generated) and consolidation (in which the set of alternatives is winnowed). Making it work requires consensus-building communication mechanisms that provide feedback on group opinion but do not force a hasty decision.

I am confident that I could get a good prototype up this weekend.

Hunter Ellinger

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