xrepublic Link to heading

XRepublic - Virtual Parliament Link to heading

Abstract

The XRepublic is the description and implementation of a computer mediated deliberation process. It is conceived as a system which can fundamentally change the way that people share ideas for the purposes of collaborative decision making. This includes but is not restricted to democratic voting & policy making, logical problem solving in expert domains, brainstorming and intelligence gathering.

The XRepublic can be thought of as a virtual parliament and it is from that perspective, using the terminology and technology of web-based online conferencing, that it was originally conceived. It is designed from the ground up to take advantage of Internet technology in order to make the kinds of deliberative processes currently found in governments, universities, intelligence organizations and other deliberative bodies available to a distributed group of people connected by networked computers.

XR provides a series of computer mediated spaces as well as a variety of tools which allow its participants to craft findings of fact, arguments pro & con, opinion polls, votes, and other artifacts associated with the construction of multi-authored, negotiated, subjective statements.

It is primarily designed as a communications medium and deliberative forum which captures statements from human participants in realtime. It then encourages participants to judge that information at their leisure and allows motivated individuals or interest groups to structure the information judged most useful. XRepublic facilitates through a variety of polling, categorization and voting methods, collective judgements to be passed on said structured information in the form of resolutions. These resolutions are then, with their supporting arguments and artifacts, kept on record for future reference, and for related and derivative works.