voterunner

Voterunner combines public delegated voting with real-time communication inspired by etherpad. While this concept is not perfect for every situation it is beautiful in its simplicity.

How to use it

One goal of voterunner is to experiment with this concept in practice. Since I really just wrote it the following section is more or less fiction.

Your group needs to make a decision, but doing this on a mailinglist would definitely get messy. So instead you create a discussion on voterunner simply by typing https://voterunner.example.com/#your-topic into the address bar of your browser.

You are lazy, right? So of course you want the group to make the right decision but you don't want to do the whole discussion thing yourself. So you will delegate your vote.

Now you can concentrate on convincing those who have not already delegated their votes to support you. You may also try to steer the one you support in the right direction.

To achieve this you work on your arguments. Try to address counter arguments and be as precise as possible. Remember that you are a node in a graph so you don't need to repeat everything your supporters already said. Just make your own point very clear.

But maybe you even have an innovative idea. In that case you may revoke the delegation. Now you compete directly with other ideas. Maybe you can convince others, but maybe you should delegate your vote again in order to agree on a compromise.

Once everyone agrees on a single proposal you not only have a decision but also a record of all the little arguments that lead you there.

Limitations

This uses a very simple via backend which comes with a set of limitations:

• No protection against manipulation (but users can verify their own votes)
• No protection against data loss
• No builtin authentication
• All data will be deleted after 2 weeks of inactivity

Development

You will need to install sassc and browserify. Once these requirements are met, you can simply run make to build all files.