Specifications

A VeniVidiVoti Library is a web site where a community can democratically write texts of (m)any type(s): constitution, book of laws, novel, newspaper, petition, specifications, rules, poem...

The principles are the most democratic possible, directly linking the power of a library to the number and quality of persons collaborating to it.

It is in fact a political system combining the best of two worlds: representative democracy and participative democracy. In the first a person can delegate her voice on certain elements to another person, removing thus the need to be involved in everything. But representation alone favors the divorce between representatives and those they represent. Only the possibility of direct participation, a possibility difficult to offer in the physical world, assures a community that it is its voice which is truly expressed.

The two worlds are combined in one tool, described here in a few points.

A community is constituted by the persons present in a library, she determines the conditions for members inclusion and exclusion.

For exemple it can be required that every person be present one and only once, inhabit a particular place, be of a certain age, be member of an association, do not propose spam or advertising, do not attack other participants... or on the contrary everything can be permitted, signal being separated from noise through community choices.

By default, a person and what she does are anonymous, she can decide to be public or anonymous, but her public acts remain so.

A library requires maintenance, material, a physical access and an address, the entity controling those aspects is the administrator. No rule apply to him except the number and quality of participants in -his- library.

There are three possible acts in a VVV Library:

• every one can propose texts' elements,
• each one can choose among those elements,
• any one can delegate his choices.

The choices for one element are assembled into an acceptation level. It is a number calcultated using the number of votes agreeing minus those disagreeing, divided by the number of active persons (a person is active if she has at least one active act in the library).

The two acts "to propose" and "to choose" correspond to the foundations of participative democracy. The third act, "to delegate", is the foundation of representative democracy. It allows every person to delegate her choices to others and to represent others' choices. A delegation can be overriden with sub-delegations and choices.

Acts can be modified at any time, except for what has been proposed publicly, and be rendered inactives after a community chosen period.

A text is organised as a tree of elements of different types:

Each element type correspond to a particular functionnality. A library contain texts, texts are organised in chapters, and articles constitute the written content.

Preference elements offer choices among sets of values:

• a list of persons;
• a list of values, like "Yes/No", "86/7/23/6/2";
• an ordered list of values, like 1 to 100%, or 1 to 3 days, the result being the value at the center of the chosen values' set.

Texts, chapters, articles and preferences are ordered elements. In case of conflict on a position, the element with the highest level of acceptation has the priority.

Preference elements can influence their parent element comportment. Action elements can modify their parent element (description, position, associated values). They are installed or triggered when their agreement level reaches above their parent's.

Links are simple name/URL associations.

Messages are the lowest level elements, which means that they can be associated to any element type, including another message, thus setting up discussions.

To insure the perennity of a library, it is strongly suggested that its texts be placed under a free license (see www.fsf.org) or in the public domain.

We have seen who, how and what, but we don't know why. It is up to each community to define what she wants to express, here is a tool allowing her to speak.