FundScience Blog

Notes on my presentation to the Occupy Oakland Research Working Group, March 11, 2012:
http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Presentat...

It seems like a good time to make an all-in-one-place list of things that aren't accounted for in the first wave of modeling I did:

• In those models, individuals' preferences are fixed and can't change in the process of deliberating with one another;
• the focus on proposals, rather than a broader range of approaches to deliberation, is limiting;
• there's a need to think about when strategy is important, that is, when conflict between people's individual interests and the good of the group may color the timing or content of their proposals, or what they're willing to accept at various times in the process, or otherwise complicate the deliberation;
• there are interesting and relevant questions about what to do when a group is too big for a simple all-to-all process, though there's plenty to do without adding that complication;
• the individuals need a language for describing classes of proposals that are good or bad, so they can talk in general terms before narrowing down to absolutely specific proposals;
• a group's process of deliberating about a particular issue is always embedded in the larger context of the group's business and the communities it overlaps with. People may choose to give way on one issue in order to maintain goodwill for the group's long-term health, or so they'll have influence on another issue they care more about; or they may have "external" needs that come into play in the deliberation, such as a strong need to feel heard whether it helps the group reach a decision efficiently or not.
• I am interested in making connections to Scott Page's research on the value of groups with diverse problem solving strategies, as in strategies for exploring the search space, which is a different thing from having different preferences, as we're considering here.
• How does a formal process interact with existing structural inequalities? Many groups have strategies to counterbalance a dynamic in which some people, for instance people of certain races and genders, tend to have relatively more or less sense of entitlement or personal safety speaking for their preferences in a group than others.

Some of these list items overlap with each other.

There are some folks I'd like to have conversations with about the structural inequalities question. I'm thinking of the language question and the issues vs. proposals question as sort of methodological, whereas the changing preferences question is more philosophical and/or empirical, as is the issue of structural inequality. Those four questions are the ones I'm most inclined to pursue right away, though I'm keeping an eye on the strategy question, and half-expecting it to rear up on its own in the models, whether I invite it or not. I think in the short term I can pursue the methodological ones independently of the philosophical ones, and vice versa.

I think that if I leave out changing preferences and strategy, the project is a constraint satisfaction problem, in which the constraints are not all known to any one person at the outset because each individual has access to one piece of the full set of constraints, and the problem is one of designing a good process for discovering a satisfactory solution. I can pursue the questions of language and issues within that frame, and review existing techniques for constraint satisfaction problems.

Simultaneously I want to try to understand the more philosophical/empirical questions better and see how they might change the framework.

Just how do people's preferences change when they deliberate together? One approach to this might be the perspective of Marshall Rosenberg's work on what's sometimes called Nonviolent Communication, other times Compassionate Communication: the fundamental idea there is that people often come into conflict over strategies they want to pursue to address their needs, and by shifting focus to the basic needs themselves, they can find more strategies available that avoid conflict. This may or may not overlap with political scientists' research in the subject of deliberation, which includes studies on the exact question of how preferences change as a result of deliberative communication.

On structural inequality and process, I'm aware of specific strategies that groups adopt, such as "step up, step back," and progressive stacks. I know a little about the idea of microaggressions, and probably more than that, but it would be good to take a direct look into existing work on race, gender and other factors in deliberative processes.

It seems like a good time to make an all-in-one-place list of things that aren't accounted for in the first wave of modeling I did:

• In those models, individuals' preferences are fixed and can't change in the process of deliberating with one another;
• the focus on proposals, rather than a broader range of approaches to deliberation, is limiting;
• there's a need to think about when strategy is important, that is, when conflict between people's individual interests and the good of the group may color the timing or content of their proposals, or what they're willing to accept at various times in the process, or otherwise complicate the deliberation;
• there are interesting and relevant questions about what to do when a group is too big for a simple all-to-all process, though there's plenty to do without adding that complication;
• the individuals need a language for describing classes of proposals that are good or bad, so they can talk in general terms before narrowing down to absolutely specific proposals;
• a group's process of deliberating about a particular issue is always embedded in the larger context of the group's business and the communities it overlaps with. People may choose to give way on one issue in order to maintain goodwill for the group's long-term health, or so they'll have influence on another issue they care more about; or they may have "external" needs that come into play in the deliberation, such as a strong need to feel heard whether it helps the group reach a decision efficiently or not.
• I am interested in making connections to Scott Page's research on the value of groups with diverse problem solving strategies, as in strategies for exploring the search space, which is a different thing from having different preferences, as we're considering here.
• How does a formal process interact with existing structural inequalities? Many groups have strategies to counterbalance a dynamic in which some people, for instance people of certain races and genders, tend to have relatively more or less sense of entitlement or personal safety speaking for their preferences in a group than others.

Some of these list items overlap with each other.

There are some folks I'd like to have conversations with about the structural inequalities question. I'm thinking of the language question and the issues vs. proposals question as sort of methodological, whereas the changing preferences question is more philosophical and/or empirical, as is the issue of structural inequality. Those four questions are the ones I'm most inclined to pursue right away, though I'm keeping an eye on the strategy question, and half-expecting it to rear up on its own in the models, whether I invite it or not. I think in the short term I can pursue the methodological ones independently of the philosophical ones, and vice versa.

I think that if I leave out changing preferences and strategy, the project is a constraint satisfaction problem, in which the constraints are not all known to any one person at the outset because each individual has access to one piece of the full set of constraints, and the problem is one of designing a good process for discovering a satisfactory solution. I can pursue the questions of language and issues within that frame, and review existing techniques for constraint satisfaction problems.

Simultaneously I want to try to understand the more philosophical/empirical questions better and see how they might change the framework.

Just how do people's preferences change when they deliberate together? One approach to this might be the perspective of Marshall Rosenberg's work on what's sometimes called Nonviolent Communication, other times Compassionate Communication: the fundamental idea there is that people often come into conflict over strategies they want to pursue to address their needs, and by shifting focus to the basic needs themselves, they can find more strategies available that avoid conflict. This may or may not overlap with political scientists' research in the subject of deliberation, which includes studies on the exact question of how preferences change as a result of deliberative communication.

On structural inequality and process, I'm aware of specific strategies that groups adopt, such as "step up, step back," and progressive stacks. I know a little about the idea of microaggressions, and probably more than that, but it would be good to take a direct look into existing work on race, gender and other factors in deliberative processes.

Some attention for my Reinventing Civilization piece! Here it is, reposted by the P2P Foundation's blog: http://delicious.com/url/21adbca2143953eadb5c2d8e9910db64.

And Peter Taylor has made a map of the essay, as a way of thinking about disparate outcomes in the influence of the counterculture (c. 1970) on science-and-society connections (in his words): http://pjt111.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/problems-in-making-sense-of-the-i....

Last I heard, the book was coming out sometime soon and there might be author appearances, but no specifics yet.

This looks great!

In order to distinguish whether or not a particular idea was a pattern, we asked ourselves questions like:

• Does this describe a feature that shows up over and over again in group processes that fulfill the purpose for which they were called?
• Does it happen across many different methods?
• Can it take a variety of forms?
• Does it show up at more than one scale (for example: balancing the emphasis on process and on content happens both within one session at a conference and within the conference as a whole).
• Does it describe an action that can be consciously undertaken by convenors and/or participants?
• Does my gut respond to this with a sense of recognition?

Because of space limitations, each card aims only to name the essential What and Why of that particular element. In order to actually use the patterns, you’ll need to come up with the How. A lot of Hows are supplied on our website, where you will find a growing pool of information about the patterns represented in this deck. Some cards have plenty of resources already on the website, while others remain to be fleshed out. Over fifty people were involved in the creation of this card deck, and we’d be delighted for you to join the circle by helping explain how to apply the patterns—see more on this below. . . .

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/project-of-the-day-the-group-pattern-langu...

The simulations I ran in July 2011 were based on the idea of dealing with a series of proposals:

• proposal → friendly amendment → amended proposal → friendly amendment → ... → ultimately consense or give up.

I think this may have been loosely inspired by my notes from Butler and Rothstein's book on formal consensus process, including this diagram:
 
This diagram begins with a proposal, and ends with a decision whether to adopt the proposal. [In the July modeling I chose to simplify all this pretty drastically by not developing a way to model "concerns" except by having model agents say "I don't like the proposal as it is, let's change it to this similar one." See below for more on "concerns."]

I've also had the experience of being in various groups that use some version of formal consensus in which there's a boilerplate agenda something very much like "Introductions; working group reportbacks; possible special presentation; proposals; announcements and closing." That is, the only collective decision making takes the form of receiving a proposal and deciding what to do with it. In my experience in various groups, and I don't know how widespread this is, you're not allowed to make counterproposals while a proposal is on the table, or any other suggestions except in the form of concerns or friendly amendments. A decision has to be reached whether to block, postpone, or adopt the proposal (with or without amendments) before other things, including other proposals, can be discussed.

There is a fundamental asymmetry hidden in this: people are always allowed to bring proposals (room on the agenda permitting), while blocking is strongly discouraged. This means that a proposal that's not necessarily an improvement over the status quo for most people can still be adopted, and if there are several courses of action that are all acceptable enough to avoid being blocked, the first one proposed is likely to be adopted even if others are significantly better. [I have had citations about this in the past, but am having trouble finding them.]

Also, on a more positive note, in thinking about the general idea of looking for a good solution to a problem - i.e. a mutually acceptable location in the space of possible proposals for a given problem domain - I came to find this idea limiting. Wouldn't it be better in some circumstances to say, "Let's take a certain amount of time to talk about a certain issue, and see whether there's anything we'd like to do about it"? We could start by trying to clarify what we know about the issue, make sure we agree that there's a problem to be addressed, lay out multiple possible proposals and find out what people think about them, and then see whether an answer has emerged, or whether there's a need to pick out particular proposals and discuss them.

This seems more like what Tom Atlee describes here, and it's more like this diagram from Peter Gelderloos's book:
 
Like I wrote in my plan for March, I want to reconceive the simulation model so that it can include things like brainstorming and comparing multiple proposals, not just considering a single proposal at a time. Maybe I'll try asking what's the simplest possible extension of the model that can include brainstorming, to see how far it gets me. I'm curious whether that will reveal that brainstorming is at one end of a certain spectrum (I don't know what spectrum, yet), with taking one proposal at a time at the other end, and if so it'll be interesting to see what lies in between the two ends of that spectrum.

Modeling issues involved in this

In the July models, when I was only considering what to do with a model, I had the issue of how to formalize what a concern is. In my model, proposals were just anonymous points in a big space, and you could really just say how much you do or don't like one of them, and propose another one in its place: there's no way to say what you don't like about it. That requires some kind of language for talking about the proposal, or another way to look at it might be a way of naming sets of proposals and not just single points in the space. For instance, when I say, "I don't want to get the onion, mushroom and tomato pizza because I don't want onion", I'm saying that all the possible pizzas that include onion are, uh, off the table - which helps the process along quite a lot because it rules out a big chunk of the search space.

In the Gelderloos diagram something analogous is happening earlier in the cycle: first there's a cycle involving brainstorming that produces an "idea", then there's a cycle about "how [the] idea will take shape", which produces a "proposal" that has general support, and then there's a cycle involving concerns and friendly amendments that ends with consensus or failure to reach consensus. It might be safe to say these "proposals" are single points in the search space. They come at the end of a narrowing-down process, and the earlier phases deal with something more general: it seems like an "idea" is a lot like "let's get onions on our pizza", i.e. it corresponds to a whole region of the search space - all the different combinations that include onions - very much like concerns, or their counterparts, the "pros" of "pros and cons". This could be described as working with subsets of the search space, or, probably more usefully, characteristics of proposals that are wanted or unwanted. [As an aside, Gelderloos's three-phase diagram could probably be generalized to a simpler idea of narrowing down without discrete phases, starting with broad brush strokes (is group support behind a particular idea or approach) and then narrowing in more and more until there's an actual concrete plan for what to do. This might be worth exploring.]

It seems like I really need a clear way to handle this subset issue. Other issues have been emerging as well, which I might write up separately: what difference does it make that people don't change their point of view from listening to each other; what difference does it make that people don't consider "the good of the group" as well as their own desires, for instance wanting to come to agreement quickly or to avoid conflict; and are people likely to use strategy to get more desirable outcomes for themselves, not just something they're willing to accept.

Reposted from http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Dynamics_....

This month I've cleared my calendar to do the work I promised on my "Mathematics of Direct Democracy" research project. This is an initial update, to offer some orientation and outline how I'm planning to start.

I've created a chronological guide to the research so far, on my public wiki: http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/worden/index.php/Consensus_Dynamics_.... The preliminary rounds of modeling that I've done are there, along with various notes and meditations, including "the Pizza Exercise", "the distributed computing metaphor", and "questions about the progressive stack".

Right now I think my starting goals for this month are these:

• Fill out the literature review. I want to feel confident that I know what the state of the art is (that's kind of a big project, because it spans multiple disciplines, including math, computer science, and political science). Also, ideally, when it's time to write up for publication, I'd like to have enough notes on the existing literature that I don't have to go back out to gather citations.
• After the preliminary modeling I did, I think I want to focus less on the idea of people making proposals and deciding what to do with them. Actually, I'm coming to wonder if that's a mistake that some actual organizations are making. I'm interested in opening up the focus to what happens when everyone agrees on a problem domain, but hasn't necessarily narrowed down the discussion about what to do about it. I want to try to flesh out that idea, and write notes about it as soon as this week.
• If that goes well, I hope to go from there to opening up the model framework, to allow for possibilities that aren't considering one proposal at a time (such as brainstorming, or weighing multiple candidate proposals).
• It would be great to have something like a working paper or draft manuscript by the end of the month. Blog posts and notes on the wiki pages are great, but in my experience it's not easy to turn them into manuscripts, so I'd like to be oriented toward manuscript production in some way as well.
• As promised to some, I'll print up postcards and posters later in the month. Maybe I'll generate some good images during the month. I've already got the Pizza Cube (in the pizza exercise notes), and I have one or two other things in mind.
• I'm going to attend an unconference on horizontal organizing in San Francisco in the middle of the month: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Represent_Yourself. I've signed up to present this project at the "5 minutes of fame" event that kicks it off.

I'll write updates maybe once a week, in my lab notebook feed: http://leeworden.net/lw/notebook. I am very open to feedback, questions, suggestions, and participation.

Following up my previous notebook post, I have the average transitivity vs. time for 100 of the same powerlaw graphs as before, but now using the fully stochastic process:

In the other process, transitivity increases to a small amount and then declines back to zero. In this one it increases steadily from zero (no clustering in the network) to one (complete clustering).

This figure is on the wiki with everything else. I ran this one offline, but I hope to have all the code running in the usual reproducible way on the wiki soon.

Here's the first batch job for the Laplacian paper: average transitivity vs. time for 1000 powerlaw graphs of 100 vertices:

It's an interesting curve - it confirms what I thought I was seeing: that it rises quickly to a fairly small number and then drops off again. This is for the edge sampling process, which I don't find all that promising. I'm looking forward to getting averages from the fully stochastic process.