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Spokenvote.org is a Web-based social consensus tool for groups of any size, from a local school board to an entire nation’s people, that radically enhances the group’s ability to reach consensus via an intuitive democratic process. Deeply inspired by Wikipedia, Spokenvote is an open-source, non-profit “spark” project that we hope will set off a cascade of change all the way through national politics.
The central idea behind Spokenvote is to spontaneously capture people’s opinions and ideas as they naturally come up and then harness the power of crowds to turn those diverse views, opinions, and revelations into clear statements of consensus connected to large groups. Such a pivotal step is made possible by helping users organically adjust their own semantics (the way they phrased a vote), and as they make those adjustments, progress toward reaching a majority opinion together.
- Fast and easy user entry of ideas to capture constructive input from a group of any size
- Intelligent prompting to guide users toward agreement and adoption of positions by discovering where commonalities already exist
- Simple and elegant reporting back to the group to see where consensus stands at a glance
- Integration with Facebook and G+ to pull credentials and push user activity
The work-in-progress instance is hosted here.
- Setup your development environment.
- Create your own fork of the Spokenvote code.
- Clone your fork onto your computer.
- Postgres is being used both in development and production (edit the database.example.yml and save yours as database.yml).
- Run Bundler in the project's root directory to install any needed gems.
Spokenvote is a public good project distributed under the terms of either the MIT License or the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2 or later.
See GPL-LICENSE and MIT-LICENSE for details.
This project is an open source project of Spokenvote.org, supported in large measure by the efforts of RailsForCharity.org.
Q. Who is the intended audience for the Spokenvote web application?
A: At first small groups who need to reach consensus (e.g. non-profits); eventually envisioned to work at the national political level
Please see the current design wireframes here.
Please ensure you read [the future] STYLE_GUIDELINES before making any contribution to this project.