Evaluating support for change

Support

One of the features CommonOutcomes proposes is to measure support from users for each live action and outcome.1 These can be configured in different ways through CommonGraph; currently we ask the question "How much do you support this change?", and responses form ratings along a Likert scale: "Strongly Disagree" (1), "Disagree" (2), "Neutral" (3), "Agree" (4) and "Strongly Agree" (5).

The median rating for each change may then be used as an aggregate rating to enable comparisons between alternatives and to prioritise between various issues in a community, while minimising extreme ratings.2

Improving representativity

A possible direction for the platform would be to let users be associated with a limited number of scopes, and let them rate changes only if they belong to the change's scope. This would limit the possible number of ratings to the people and communities concerned. Furthermore, given demographic statistics about an area and about users, we could proceed to debias the measures of support.

  1. No point approving or disapproving an externality since we cannot do anything about it. ↩

  2. See Highest median voting rules on Wikipedia. ↩