Metascore
From Metagovernment - Government of, by, and for all the people
Metascore is the name of the software which will run the Metagovernment and potentially any other community wishing to govern itself theough open source governance. It is still in the early planning stage.
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Goals
Metascore will try to make discussion within and among large communities viable and effective. The most important information should be disseminated and irrelevant or redundant information should be less visible.
What metascore cannot directly overcome, is social conflict among the participating communities. Metascore makes the basic assumption that the participating parties are on some level willing to cooperate with each other and work towards common solutions. It then actively promotes ideas which promote solutions (synthesis) and demotes ideas which perpetuate conflict.
Here is an example, although it should be noted, that the Metagovernment project claims no affiliations with any political group.
If we were to imagine Metascore used in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, it would be foolish to think that the software alone could solve anything. The main issue here is of social nature. But we can hope to achieve greater transparency among the two communities. With this transparency and more effective communication, we could hope that mediators emerge and bridge the divide among the communities. We can actively promote those mediations through the use of the scoring system, particularly the concept of the synthesis score. Once people see that the majority of the opposing community is willing to work towards a solution and that extremists are only a minority, consensus will be more likely to emerge, and people will see that they will have to work together to overcome their struggle.
Scoring system
Metascore uses a scoring system to evaluate resolutions and perhaps also users. See the scoring system page for details on how it will work (currently in dispute).
General architecture
Distribution model
The distribution and instantiation model for Metascore has not yet been determined. However Metascore is run, it needs to be done in such a way that it cannot be subverted (hacked, overtaken, corrupted, etc.) by a single person or group of people. Some suggestions for how this could be done include:
- Completely distributed - It is conceivable that every citizen could run their own copy of Metascore, and each copy would somehow check itself against every other.
- Community-distributed - Each community would run its own instance of Metascore. Each community then would determine how it wants to administer its instance. Communities would need to share information with each other, providing some flow of ideas and users between communities.
- Centralized, with distributed components - If there is only one instance of Metascore, then it needs to be administered in a way that avoids the possibility of tampering. One possible approach would be to have the single instance of Metascore be run on a distributed cluster of computers, such that there are (for example) twenty different groups of administrators, each running a node of the server cluster. Each node would checksum against the others such that one group of admins could not subvert the entire cluster.
Prototypes
See PrototypeA for a detailed prototype of Manuel's vision for Metascore. See also repositories for repositories of both Manuel's and Aur's visions for Metascore.
Models
Other systems may provide good examples for development of Metascore.
Proposed detail
At a high level of abstraction (without caring about technical details), Metascore will probably be composed of several interacting entities, each taking care of a certain set of related tasks. See: Resolution 1
Repositories
There are several repositories of designs for Metascore.
License
Metascore is currently listed on SourceForge as being under Affero General Public License.
External links
- Metascore home page - Mostly a placeholder
- Metascore on SourceForge
