Monday, March 30, 2009

Collabrative voting and amending resolutions

On Saturday I was at the WI 3rd district GOP caucus.  The resolutions seemed like they took longer than they needed to.  The county caucus was similar.  Does anyone have any ideas for improving the process?
  • Show any changes from floor and main arguments on a projector so everyone can see info being discussed.  This would stop people from asking for the ammendment to be re-read and could reduce people re-stating the same points.
  • Use some type of wiki website where changes can be easily voted on.  It could have an on-going "straw poll" so it is easy to determine how long discussion should take place.  The voting could take place on the website so that it is faster and people don't have to feel self-conscience for voting differently.  It might be hard to integrate this effectively with people not on the website.
  • SMS messages for voting with a website that calculates and displays the results.  This could also be used for straw polls on the current topic.  When registering for the caucus interested people could include their phone number so they system knows which messages to accept.

We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment | News Blog - CNET News

We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment | News Blog - CNET News: "'As Google gets faster, people search more, and as it gets slower, people search less,' she said.
The same effect happened with Google Maps. When the company trimmed the 120KB page size down by about 30 percent, the company started getting about 30 percent more map requests. 'It was almost proportional. If you make a product faster, you get that back in terms of increased usage,' she said."