mostly to operate by consensus among the higher ranks, but we could imagine a system in which each top-ranked avatar had a vote, giving some people multiple votes. EverQuest II offers many ways in which an avatar may earn points for the guild to which the avatar belongs, chiefly completing difficult missions inside the virtual world, earning status points with the guild. The system by which Blackhawks promotes people is very well stated on the guild’s website:
Basic promotions happens based on length of service and amount of status earned. Once you have made your first forums post, the first promotion is to Member. The next title, Contributor, requires at least two full weeks in the guild and a minimum of 5000 earned status points (per character — alts do not inherit your main's rank!).
Contributors and above may take advantage of guild perks like buying certain status items and rent/mount cost reductions. The next promotion, Senior Members, are veterans of the guild who have been here for 2 months and earned a minimum of 15,000 status points.
To be promoted to Commander — you can either be nominated by two of your peers or by someone of higher rank.
To become a Captain you need the nomination of two Captains or higher. ALL nominations are subject to Council/Guild Leader approval.
A Commander will have a limited number of guild abilities enabled. These will be specified at the time of promotion. Captains will have slightly more authority. All ranked position holders generally have to have been a member of the guild for at least two months and have accumulated at least 20000 guild status.
Council members will be selected from the ranks of Captain or via special appointment from the Guild Leader.
All promotional guidelines are subject to change at any time. On rare occasion a member may be promoted before meeting the criteria posted above. This is at the discretion of the guild leader. Occasionally, we may also hold elections if the number of nominated people is high.
The promotions process is, as a general rule, intentionally vague. We are not seeking members who aspire to become commanders and above for the sake of holding a title, or wielding authority. Instead, we seek those individuals who lead by example and action, show organizational and leadership skills and an overwhelming desire to help others. That is the best way to get promoted on our team. Help people who need it, take the initiative and host some events, show maturity and leadership by example. [4]
As outlined by the Berlin group, Liquid Democracy allows citizens to decide from moment to moment who will represent them on what issues. Earlier we noted that it is important to build into the political system a stabilization adjustment that achieves a favorable balance between rapid change and consistency. One way to do this is to delay the effect of a vote, and let the voter rescind it instantly if the voter changes opinions, or to distribute voting dates across the population, for example letting a person cast new votes annually based on their own birthdays. But as the EverQuest II system suggests, a very different way of stabilizing the system is to award political leaders points for things they achieve for their constituents, and have these points degrade at a slow rate.
Traditional sociology assumed that each viable culture possessed a set of relatively stable
Since the 1930s, public opinion polls have been used to chart general popular sentiments, as well as in very focused efforts to predict or understand particular elections. A more recent example is a battery of questions about government programs incorporated in the General Social Survey (GSS), a long-running questionnaire study of the American public, which I am especially familiar with because I managed funding for it in the mid-1990s and have frequently used the data in my own research. One item from that battery, concerning funding for the space program, is a useful, future-oriented item to consider here.
The GSS is administered by an interviewer in the respondent’s home, and the interviewer would introduce the battery of items thus: “We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I'm going to name some of these problems, and for each one I'd like you to tell me whether you think we're spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.” In 1973, fully 61.4 percent of the 1,430 respondents said too much was being spent on 'the space exploration program,' while 7.5 said too little was being spent, and 31.1 percent said the right amount was being invested. These results could be compared with other government programs, and with the responses for the space program in other years. In 2010, 37.7 percent felt too much was being spent on the space program, 17.2 percent said too little, and 45.1 percent felt the current investment was about right. Anyone who wants to explore these and any other results from the General Social Survey can do so online. [5]
If these data were the basis of decision-making through direct democracy, the space program would have been shut down in 1973, but would be continued today. It is possible to weight data from the general public, to give some people more influence than others. For example educated people and those who score higher on tests of scientific knowledge favor the space program more. We have already seen how advocates of fluid democracy plan to identify and empower opinion leaders. However, there is a different but highly compatible approach, seeking to identify the general values served by some government program or policy decision, and measure how important those particular values are to the public at large, even if they do not currently understand the specific issue at hand. Then, professional experts would go through a similar but more complex process to decide how to achieve those goals.
I chose the space program as my example, because years ago I did a pilot study to explore some of the methods needed (Bainbridge 1991*). The inspiration was the intense experience of being at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time of the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, and sharing the horror of all the people there who had dedicated their lives to space exploration. Lacking funding, I was in no position to survey the general public, but the rather knowledgeable students of Harvard University were available to serve as respondents. I administered two very different questionnaires. The first one consisted largely of open-ended questions, where respondents were encouraged to write a number of possible goals for the space program, and 1,007 students did so. Their responses were then typed into a computer, although classification was done manually because today’s natural language clustering programs were not yet available.
The second questionnaire asked respondents to rate each of 125 different possible space goals, which had been derived from the first questionnaire, on a scale saying how good a reason each one was for continuing the space program. Because the data matrix for 125 variables x 125 variables x 894 respondents was too big for the social science statistical software available at the time, I wrote my own clustering program to extract the fundamental values being served by the space program as reflected in how the respondents grouped the items implicitly. For example, military values were distinct from scientific ones, which in turn were distinct from idealistic goals. This pilot study was reported in a book, which is now available online. [6]
This process can be carried out very effectively online today. In 1999, a massive online questionnaire study sponsored by the National Geographic Society, called Survey 2000 (Witte, Amoroso, and Howard 2000*; Bainbridge 2004*), included an open-ended question I developed asking people to write a brief
