Meeting in Milan

[Pietro Speroni di Fenizio]

The meeting in Milan is going extremely well. I was amazed by the level of the some of the platforms out there. And I am happy to report that also Vilfredo came out very very well. We have several new requests for partnership, and collaborations. 

The meeting was organised by Fiorella De Cindio, a professor at the University of Milan. And her colleagues. Among them Stefano Stortone (in this group). Now one of the thing that I discovered is that Fiorella was one of the peer reviewer in the paper "don't vote evolve". She liked the paper, and gave the consent for it to be published. Then without even waiting for it to be published gave her copy to one of her students and asked him to reimplement the tool in their eDemocracy software platform OpenDCN where it is now present as the brainstorming unit. So all those years there was another installation of Vilfredo around, and we never knew about it. But they never really tested it out. Apparently the only time they really tried out the tool they asked a group of people what they thought of a piece of art. With the aim to write an agreed review of it. But it was done too late after they were exposed to it... and so most never responded. In short they are very interested in collaborating. And I would say that we are also interested. Especially as University of Milan they have possibilities to attract funds, and maybe make some serious testing. With groups of different size and different composition.

They invited Anna De Liddo, from the Open University (UK). And the research Anna is doing is extremely related to Vilfredo. They are also looking at small scale deliberation (honestly a big bigger than Vilfredo, on the 50-200 range if I remember well). And they are really into annotating proposals with data, and proofs from peer reviewed papers. And bibliography. All things that Vilfredo does not have. But that would complement well in some type of discussions. i.e. the more formal and serious ones; think a discussion among top international experts on climate change, for example. Anna works in the UK and really liked our work. We both agreed we should collaborate and have invited me to give a talk at her university in London. I will ask if the talk can be open to external participants, as I can imagine also David Bovill might be interested, and others as well.

There was a strong component from Airesis. I have collaborated with Airesis from the start (the temporary anonymity idea, which is one of their battle-flags, was mine) but I never could bring to their attention Vilfredo in full swing. Now they saw the talk and really liked it. And they have agreed (at least the activists that were present but that represent the majority of the core team), that Vilfredo and Airesis should talk to each other. And when they have a deliberation which is too complex for them, and with not too many people (say not more than 20), they should start a Vilfredo session. Vilfredo should help the participants to compute the answer, and then bring back the result. Now Airesis is being used by ex-meet-up groups all over the country. From small local groups to large one-italian-region groups. So I was obviously aware that those groups might easily be too big for us to tackle with. But it is also true that once you take away all the people that do not really vote or participate. Only few people are willing to enter into the nitty gritty of a discussion. So I asked them what was the biggest number of participants they have to deal with in an actual deliberation. You know people actually suggesting and voting, and so on. I was expecting a number in the hundreds, and Alessandro (Alessandro Rodi, present in our group) said 13. So I think there is great potentiality for a really fruitful collaboration with them too.

With some Italian Pirates (using Liquid Feedback) we already have some light collaborations going on. So I reported on it. And many pirates were at the conference. And Alessandro (another Alessandro) got up and gave a passionate impromptu comment on how Vilfredo is working well for them (they did one question so far, ndr) and how it is better than Liquid Feedback as it forces everybody to really try to work out their differences. Let's just say that not everybody from the Liquid Feedback community appreciated that comment ;-). But some did. And some surprisingly so. I had people fighting with me for the first day on the value of delegating (I am strongly against), and after my talk approach me to say they really liked my talk, and we could even speak in a more relaxed and constructive way about delegation.

Paolo Coppola, was present and spoke about their work in Udine. Paolo is a professor now full time MP. I have already spoke about him before. He is interested in bringing Vilfredo for the Parliamentary commissions. And so it was a great occasion for us to finally meet although he could not remain for the whole day of Saturday.

I had a person asking me if I was interested in running Vilfredo experiments in High schools in the south of Italy. This could be really interesting, as we can have several experiments at once. All of similar size, and start to have some testing data. You know Vilfredo works well when the question is relevant and important for the participants. So I suggested for the students the question: "how should we be evaluated at the end of the year". If they accept, this would be really good.

I was extremely flattered by the moderator of our session, Beppe Caravita, which after the talk suggested that Vilfredo algorithm might become the Von Neumann standard algorithm for eDemocracy. If you know that the Von Neumann architecture is the one at the base of all modern computers you realise how flattering such a comment was. And yet it was just the second most flattering comment I received.

All in all a VERY productive week end. I will try to bring to this group the people who were interested in Vilfredo. So maybe we could have some comments from their point of view.

Thanks for reading this; please feel free to comment on,

Pietro

P.S. (By the way, on this I also just got an invitation from a friend to make a similar experiment in Genova, but not from this Milan meeting, so I shall leave this for somewhere else).

[Alessandro Rodi]

Great workshop in Milan!

I think that Vilfredo can be easily integrated in other systems like OpenDCN or Airesis.

I hope we will take some time to discuss about that in next months and have a look to available options.

I would also like to insert in Airesis something else from your papers, like 2D valutation system (how much you understand, how much you agree) and computer aided discussion and contributes writing.

But for now...I will wait Vilfredo 2.0! ;)

[Pietro Speroni di Fenizio]

Indeed great workshop.

Regarding the 2d evaluation system, with <Ahref we are about to lunch a tool that uses it, so you will have ways to observe it working...

OpenDCN has already integrated Vilfredo, I gather. It should be inside their brainstorming tool. But not as an external plug in, but by re-coding it.

I agree you should not try to integrate Vilfredo original but Vilfredo-reloaded. Still considering that Vilfredo-reloaded is being written right now, it would make sense to get you involved somehow to help define the API.

Cheers,

Pietro

[Pietro Speroni di Fenizio]

Continuing with the description of the meeting,

we now welcome 

Alessandro Landi, Alessandro Ciofini and Andrea Ravasio from the meeting in Milan.

Alessandro Ciofini is the Alessandro I spoke about before who gave the talk supporting Vilfredo.

Alessandro Landi is an activist who works with the Airesis team and commented after my talk: Vilfredo opened up a new world for me.

And Andrea Ravasio is a Movimento 5 Stelle Activist from Bergamo, who is a strong supporter on Liquid Feedback and the liquid delegation method. We had some nice, and passionate discussions. (He is VERY passionate when he speaks!) Andrea told me (to my surprise) that he liked the Vilfredo method as well.

At the moment there are different people some thinking how to integrate Vilfredo with Airesis, some with Liquid Feedback. Probably at the beginning Vilfredo will just be an external tool used in some specific instances, but in general it will be necessary to set up some API to let different tools dialogue.

By the way, the slides from my talk are available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q89jjzlk084yvsc/VilfredoMilanoSmall.pdf

The last interesting meeting I had at the conference was with the medical doctor Carlo Cappellini. Carlo teaches medicine, he works as a doctor, and suggested the use of Vilfredo in his profession. We discussed a bit and came out with a possible test case, with him presenting a case to a room of his students. And then the students, each making a diagnosis. And then voting on each other diagnosis. At that point the Pareto front would represent the diversity of opinions within the medical community. He also was involved with the creation in Italy of italian Health Cards. Some credit card size cards with a CPU inside that would let the doctors (and only them) know who you are and have access to your medical history in case you faint and are brought to the hospital. He suggested a front end could be set up for some discussions so that people to participate have to insert their card and be identified. Apparently in hospital it is common to have computers where you can insert one of those cards.

I am inviting Carlo to this group, and hopefully he can join.

That's all for now. We are having a meeting this friday to discuss the future developments. 

[Derek]

Wow, that all sounds amazing!

And now we have the version 2 core done and a first version of a REST API, we're in a good position to offer integration for existing systems - and shouldn't be too hard to get the systems talking to one another - as well as various front end clients for different classes of users.

The use of vilfredo in medicine sounds very cool, I never would have considered that.

[Pietro Speroni di Fenizio]

Wow, that all sounds amazing!

And now we have the version 2 core done and a first version of a REST API, we're in a good position to offer integration for existing systems - and shouldn't be too hard to get the systems talking to one another - as well as various front end clients for different classes of users.

It is. What about the Rest Api documentation, can we put them in some place accessible to the general public? So people can start looking at them?

The use of vilfredo in medicine sounds very cool, I never would have considered that.

Neither did I. And I would go slow, as the risks of doing something wrong and harming someone is really present. Said that the algorithm makes a lot of sense when we are speaking about facts, more than opinions. So it should really work well in this context. 

[Giovani Spagnolo]

And now we have the version 2 core done and a first version of a REST API, we're in a good position to offer integration for existing systems - and shouldn't be too hard to get the systems talking to one another - as well as various front end clients for different classes of users.

It is. What about the Rest Api documentation, can we put them in some place accessible to the general public? So people can start looking at them?

just like the dev blog, api documentation should be even more exhaustive, with samples and accurate descriptions, separate for each API version. Follow common practices ...

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api

http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/reference

https://developers.google.com/youtube/code_samples

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/

giovani