Write-ups

Decision-making procedures in online social networks should reflect participants' political influence within the network.

Direct-democracy voting in large online communities may not be the best choice. The degree of commitment of different participants in online communities and collaboration systems varies greatly. In a community in which there are a few core members with long-term commitments to the project, and many other members joining and leaving the project rapidly, egalitarian democracy is neither expected nor appropriate. Thus, the decision-making mechanism is often meritocratic.

In this work, we propose a middle-ground between direct democracy (citizens vote on every issue) and representative democracy (citizens elect representatives that decide on their behalf on every issue). Our proposal, a type of delegative democracy, allows them to express their opinion directly or to delegate their power on a proxy.

Proxy delegation can be transitive: a proxy can delegate in another proxy. However, as our vote travels farther away through a delegation chain, we would like to introduce some reluctance in the way the power is transferred to other people we may not know directly. In that sense, we include a dampening factor (like PageRank does) to reduce the amount of power delegated through long chains. Technically, our system of viscous democracy is a system of transitive proxy voting with exponential damping.

Details appear in the virtual extension of the June 2011 issue of Communications of ACM: Viscous Democracy for Social Networks, by Paolo Boldi, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo and Sebastiano Vigna.

These are the slides from our paper [pdf] on creating teams automatically. It was presented last week by Aris Gionis at CIKM'10 in Toronto, Canada.

This research is about creating and assigning teams on-the-fly as a stream of tasks arrives. It is particularly useful for "horizontal" organizations where there is not a single control point deciding who gets to do what. The algorithm we present tries to balance effectiveness (allocating the rights teams to each task) and fairness (dividing evenly the workload among people, even if they have different skills).

Aris Anagnostopoulos, Carlos Castillo, Aristides Gionis, Luca Becchetti, Stefano Leonardi: "Power in Unity: Forming Teams in Large-Scale Community Systems" [pdf]. Proc. of CIKM 2010, pp. 599-608.Toronto, Canada. ACM Press.

(Versión en castellano en Ecosofia.org).

The struggle between species on Earth is, for now, settled. In the quest for evolving new and better ways of surviving and replicating, we have found a powerful and general adaptation. Our brains are able of creating technology to manipulate matter, energy, and information, at a scale far beyond our physical limitations as primates. This adaptation puts us well above the other animals on Earth.

We are a remarkable species that over a few hundred thousand years has been consolidating its position as the dominant species. We have become formidable predators, and while there are still many ways in which the rest of the terrestrial biota can kill us, we are able of sterilizing vast areas of the planet, leaving only the flora and fauna that fits our interests.

But the key to our success, our brain, is not only a tool of survival and replication. Our brain can do many other things that are well beyond the interest of our genes for multiplying themselves. A human can decide, against its reproductive drive, to take contraceptives. A human can decide, against energy efficiency considerations, to spend a great deal of his life creating music, poetry, dance.

A human being may also decide to switch sides. Obviously a human can not stop being a human. But he can decide to advocate for non-human interests, for the interests of the other beings in our ecosphere. He can decide that he does not want its own species to continue growing and dominating the other species in the way they it has been doing it.

Talent follows a normal distribution, but responsibilities follow an exponential distribution.

Spinoza wrote in 1667: "...I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them". Spinoza was a key figure in the development of the naturalistic view of the world, that rules out the supernatural, so his advice is to be taken seriously. You might be right...yet don't need to be rude.

This courtesy has not been given to atheists by organized religions. When Catholicism was strong in Europe, those who dared to say such heresies as "the Earth revolves around the Sun", where burned or thrown in jail. Even today, in countries where organized religions are still strong, such as the United States or Iran, there are laws against atheism. In Texas, a Christian stronghold, a (rarely used) law says that people an official may be "excluded from holding office" if she/he does not "acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being". In Iran, an Islamic Republic, irreligious people have technically no right to live.