What's new?

Taiwan legislative elections and referendum

Copy of an email I sent to the EM list.

Hello,

Jan asked me to post here my comments about the Taiwan Legislative
elections last Saturday.

I assume that the interested reader knows at least the basics about
Taiwan politics, so I won't explain much that can be found on
wikipedia.

Also, http://www.taipeitimes.com/ is a good source of information in
English.
Post election issue:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News?pubdate=2008-01-13

For those interested, I will create (in Chinese)
http://minguo.info/taiwan/ (link will become active in a couple of

They are not Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a great source of information on general topics. However, it has largely been criticized for its inability to value and incorporate expert opinion. Also, wikipedia can be the worst source of information on some controversial topics. On such topics, I usually learn more from the talk pages than from the article itself.

As a result, some web sites are being created that present themselves as an alternative to wikipedia, trying to avoid the big sister's pitfalls.

One such alternative is the Encyclopedia of Earth: http://www.eoearth.org/ .

Join the USA Free Association

In the FA/DP discussion group, I posted the following comment:

On Thursday 01 November 2007 10:47, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Minguo.info is an FA/DP organization or has at least endorsed
> the concept, and does have a DP engine in place.

Thank you Adb for the reference.

raphfrk: please join the USA FA/DP at http://minguo.info .
Later, when the USA FA is well developed and we have several interested Irish members, we can create an Irish FA/DP within minguo.info, too.

Improved support for anonymous votes & plans for community polls.

Hello,

This entry is about a small step in a wider effort to improve the handling of both personal polls and community polls.

We now support a variety of Election Methods

Hello,

I have made a major update to the web site. When you create a poll, you now have the choice among the following Election Methods:

A few feeds for your newsreader.

Hello,

I have been asked a couple of times about RSS feeds for this site.
Here are a few you might want to add in your news reader.

This feed is for the site's "latest news" section (i.e. here):
http://minguo.info/taxonomy/term/1/0/feed
This is the most important feed to follow the major development for the whole site.

This is the feed for the USA Free Association front page, with all the new polls:
http://minguo.info/usa/rss.xml

And those are for the USA forums:
http://minguo.info/usa/taxonomy/term/2/0/feed
http://minguo.info/usa/taxonomy/term/3/0/feed

How you can help

Several people have sent me emails showing their interest in this project.

I am replying here collectively to all those who would like to help.

Things you only need to do once:

  1. Cast your ballot in some featured polls:

Basic proxy capability now online

Hello,

As previously announced in this section, minguo.info now has a basic Delegable Proxy functionality (see this link to know more about Delegable Proxy Democracy).

Now, you can do the following:

  • Choose to become a proxy. If you do, other people can delegate their votes to you. Each time you'll vote, you'll do so in their name, too, i.e. your vote will carry more weight.

Proxy voting will be implemented next

It was always planned to implement some kind of proxy voting at minguo.info.
I always thought I would do it "when there will be many active users".

However, after some email exchanges with Abd ul-Rahman (Daniel) Lomax and Jan Kok, I have come to realize that proxy voting is important to allow busy people to still contribute to minguo.info and express their opinion without having to spend too much time doing it.

Basically, an interested person can

The 'USA Realm' official opening

Hello,

Although the USA Realm has been operating for a few months already, I am now happy to announce its official opening.

Two keys sections of the main sites have been recently added, which I wanted to have before the official opening:

  1. the Election methods documentation.
  2. a simple Guided Tour
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