User:Melissawwang/sandbox

= Article evaluation = On the topic of civic technology, the underlying focus upon this course, I familiarized myself with the United States Digital Service. This branch is focused in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and it focuses its mission upon increasing the accessibility of digital technology and maintaining sensitive information efficiently and effectively. After reading through the article, it was a concise length that remained relevant to the topic of the United States's efforts to improve its digital technologies. There was nothing that distracted me in the article, but there were some mentions of the creators of the United States Digital Service such as Jennifer Pahlka and Mikey Dickerson. These mentions spiked more interest for me. There are no viewpoints present in this article, as it is much more informational than opinion-based. I checked the links that were in the citation section, and they are working. The citations were from reliable resources such as The White House. These sources are neutral, and I don't detect bias. Some of the information could be updated, as most of the citations seemed to be updated in 2014 and 2015. There are no conversations occurring on the Talk page of the article. The United States Digital Service page is of interest to the WikiProject Computing, United States Public Policy, United States/Government. Wikipedia discusses this topic differently than the way we talk about civic technology in class because Wikipedia goes into more of the history of who were the brains that created this governmental program. This is the link to my Talk page of the United States Digital Services article.

Possible articles to work on
Potential topics related to civic technology include: Quadratic Voting, the Open Government Initiative, Open Government, Code for America, and/or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). After reviewing each of these topics' Talk pages on Wikipedia, it seems like there were changes in the wording of the Open Government Initiative description because they were becoming too persuasive and political. I noticed in the Code for America page, there were some discussions for adding more detailed information and fixing broken citations. The page also has citations from 2015, so I think there is certainly potential to expand more upon its recent updates/initiatives.

More specifically, I think the Open Government article has potential for improvement. There is good lineation between the different countries that are making efforts to increase visibility upon an "open government" such as the Netherlands, Chile, and Morocco. However, I think the North American section is slightly biased as it states "these policies made it difficult.. to get access to records and documents, which then led to explorations of possible legislative solutions ." I perceive this interpretation to be a bit biased in its phrasing as well as lacking in specifications about the explorations of possible legislative solutions. If I were to edit this article, I would research more into which implementations the government enacted in order to fix this problem.

Another article I think has room for improvement would be the Code for America page, which focuses upon a non-profit organization that diminishes the widening gap between the public and private sectors in technology. This includes the relationship between local and national governments in relation to how they impact the everyday citizen. I see improvement in this article because the recent citations are dated back to 2014-2015, and there should be more analysis upon the impact that the Code for America program has made upon the United States. In articles such as UNICEF, we are able to learn more about how it is funded and the overall structure of the organization (regional offices, managerial committees, etc.) It would be interesting to understand more about Code for America aside from its founding history. We could analyze the effects and new implementations that Code for America is attempting to enforce, such as its Fellowship Program or the new Code for America Global Summit.

Quadratic Voting Personal Contribution
On the topic of quadratic voting, which is labeled as a start-class topic in Wikipedia, there is a lack of analysis and description upon what quadratic voting really is. I plan to branch off of what is already explained on the page, but also include examples as to where quadratic voting has already made its impact (ie, Coloradan legislators in 2019, EximChain, Know Your Customer, etc). I think having more background on why quadratic voting has evolved and the fact that it addresses majority-rule/voting paradox problems is very crucial to understanding why it has become so influential in present day voting. Not only that, I think it would be important to include why this mechanism still contains flaws such as collusion or fraud and managing the intricacies of this system in a grander scale. The main Wikipedia page includes a graphical demonstration of how quadratic voting could work, but I think it would be more helpful to include more graphics such as a demographic map of the country to demonstrate more effects of quadratic voting.

Quadratic Voting
The concept of Quadratic voting is a collective method in order to create binary decision-making votes for individuals to purchase in order to express their preferred issues or topics of discussion in the political environment. By doing so, quadratic voting helps enable users to address issues of voting paradox and majority-rule, which are both aspects that quadratic voting aims to combat. According to its creators, Steven P. Lalley and Glen Weyl, Quadratic Voting achieves the greatest possible good for the greatest number of group members. By allowing individuals to pay for however number of votes based upon voice credit numbers into the votes they purchase. Although this system is still in-the-works, the basis and foundations of quadratic voting (also abbreviated as QV) exhibits potential to readjust the current structure of existing democracies in collaboration with an individual's level of knowledge and investment into a decision.

History of Quadratic Voting
In the creation processes of quadratic voting, this was created as a new tool for democracy and was tested for the first time with the Democratic caucus of the Colorado House of Representatives in April 2019. Quadratic voting was created by a University of Chicago Department of Statistics Professor Steven Lalley and Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist Glen Weyl. Their intentions were to build social technologies more explicitly relevant and updated alongside the richness of the diverse political climate. The main purpose they both wanted to accomplish was to judge if the minority preferences carried any significant weight in comparison to the weaker preferences of the majority rule. Although the concept and mechanisms are still young, being recently published in 2018, there is room for improvement as more political governments begin to adapt and accumulate the quadratic voting processes. There is a possibility that governments can utilize the Colorado House of Representatives as a benchmark for future implementations in the near future as well.

Concept of Mechanism
Quadratic voting is based upon market principles, where each voter is given a budget of vote credits that they have the personal decisions and delegation to spend in order to influence the outcome of a range of decisions. If a participant has a strong preference for or against a specific decision, additional votes could be allocated to proportionally demonstrate the voter's preferences. A vote pricing rule determines the cost of additional votes, with each vote becoming increasingly more expensive. By increasing voter credit costs, this demonstrates an individual's preferences and interests toward the particular decision. This money is eventually cycled back to the voters based upon per capita. Both Weyl and Lalley conducted research to demonstrate that this decision-making policy expedites efficiency as the number of voters increases.

The quadratic nature of the voting suggests that a voter can use their votes more efficiently by spreading them across different issues. For example, a voter with a budget of 16 vote credits can apply 1 vote credit to each of the 16 issues. However, if the individual has a stronger passion or sentiment on an issue, they could allocate 4 votes, at the cost of 16 credits, to the singular issue, effectively using up their entire budget. This mechanism towards voting demonstrates that there is a large incentive to buy and sell votes, or to trade votes. Using this anonymous ballot system provides identity protection from vote buying or trading since these exchanges cannot be verified by the buyer or trader.

Criticisms on Quadratic Voting Mechanisms
While Quadratic voting demonstrates a potential for a method of liquid democratic decision-making, vote trading has many layers to its model in order for it to be successful. Buying an individual vote has a lower buyer margin, which could cause more liquid buyers to accumulate increased amounts of political power. Majority rule based on individual person voting has the potential to lead to focus on only the most popular policies, so smaller policies would not be placed on as much significance. The larger proportion of voters who vote for a policy even with lesser passion compared to the minority proportion of voters who have higher preferences in a less popular topic can lead to a reduction of aggregate welfare. In addition, the complicating structures of contemporary democracy with institutional self-checking (ie., federalism, separation of powers) will continue to expand its policies, so quadratic voting is responsible for correcting any significant changes of one-person-one-vote policies.

Contemporary Applications
Quadratic voting was conducted in an experiment by the Democratic caucus of the Colorado House of Representatives in April 2019. Lawmakers used it to decide on their legislative priorities for the coming two years, selecting among 107 possible bills. Each member was given 100 virtual tokens that would allow them to put either 9 votes on one bill (as 81 virtual tokens represented 9 votes for one bill) and 3 votes on another bill or 5 votes each (25 virtual tokens) on 4 different bills. In the end, the winner was Senate Bill 85, the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, with a total of 60 votes. From this demonstration of quadratic voting, no representative spent all 100 tokens on a single bill, and there was delineation between the discussion topics that were the favorites and also-rans. The computer interface and systematic structure was contributed by Democracy Earth, which is an open-source liquid democracy platform to foster governmental transparency.

The results of this experiment has potential for future inquiries such as through EximChain, which is a platform focused upon scalable blockchain networks for increased public communication. In addition to the Colorado House of Representatives, the Governance Know Your Customer process is integrated alongside quadratic voting in order to create identity checks and verify each individual voter's preferences during the election process.

Response to Peer Reviews
Response to Shriniket's Feedback

I will certainly look more into changing my sentence structure and phrasing when defining quadratic voting. Also, thank you for taking the time to read through my article, I think I could certainly redefine my phrasing so that the readers can understand if specific procedures are tailored only to the generation population or to politicians only. I think the most important thing I need to consider is to really hone in on my personal bias when editing this article. I thought I had tried my best to eliminate any sense of bias, but I'm really glad I got another pair of eyes to read it through and detect any of the bias even without me realizing it. Thank you!

Response to Olivia's Feedback

I think the contemporary application of the quadratic voting processes is something that I can rephrase to make it more understandable and digestible. I think I went into writing the article thinking that a reader would have background knowledge on how the quadratic voting process was implemented, but I can definitely bring in more background and context before fully diving into the topic. I believe the graphic that explains how quadratic voting works is something valuable to visualize how the procedures actually work, so maybe I could reorganize the structure of the article and have the graphic before the detailed information about the contemporary applications. That could make it easier to understand. Thank you for the feedback!

Response to Mervi's Feedback

Just like how Shrin had mentioned earlier, I think it is important to eliminate the bias when I accidentally mentioned "ideally" to describe the Colorado House of Representatives voting process. I can definitely revise that section to focus more upon the possibilities that quadratic voting has towards future applications without adding any opportunities to imply a different situations. I think that I could consider adding a bit more evidence to back it up, but I am glad that you liked the organization of the articles. I tried my best to make it digestible and organized in a way that would make it understandable how I wanted to restructure the original article. Thanks!

Response to James's Feedback

Thank you for letting me know about which article sections should have more information inside of them. I think I would definitely consider adding more on the history of quadratic voting since it is such a new concept that should have more background into its upbringing from its co-founders. I will consider adding the Wikipedia links on what buyer margin and liquid buyers meant since I should make sure this article is as understandable to any reader that comes upon the quadratic voting Wikipedia article. Thank you for letting me know which parts I should consider fixing!