Platformer

In Platformer, “position” means essentially what it does in usual political discourse—a statement of belief or principle. A position may be broad in scope or very specific. In usual political activity, positions are stated in natural language that is considered carefully by the group of people who write the platform, and voted on by party membership. In Platformer, since we have inverted the situation, we recognize that different individuals will subscribe to different variations on a given position. Rather than offering a simple binary yes/no choice for a given position, we want to allow individuals to truly represent the nuances of their points of view on a given issue. The process through which an individual chooses a variation on a position is in fact how that individual locates him or herself within a constituency.

It is easiest to think of this as a sort of (inverted) tree. We may begin with a simple statement:

An individual may wish to qualify this statement. We link the qualified version of the statement with the original:

As more individuals encounter this statement, they may wish to add further qualifications. Sometimes, the same qualification will be added in two different locations, each addition representing a distinct variation on the position:

This process may continue extensively. If we imagine an ideal way for an individual to negotiate this process of articulating his or her own specific position, we may say that it would follow this path:

1. Look at the existing variations on the position.

2. Does one of these variations match my beliefs? If yes, choose it.

3. If not, add a variation at the appropriate place in the tree.

The job of the system, then, is to enable people with varying degrees of skill, interest, and expertise to participate in this sort of process. People with appropriate skill and interest may also take on the role of proposing edits to existing trees, and reviewing edits proposed by others. In a wiki-style collaborative mode, we can envision positions being continually articulated and refined by this sort of process. As individuals locate themselves on different position trees, these choices determine their membership in “constituency space”. These choices, in turn, produce the “platforms” that we may view by drawing boundaries within a constituency.