Netopia recently reviewed the book Plurality. Here our reviewer Ralf Grötker answers some additional questions about the book.
Netopia: How did the unusual collaborative writing process influence the outcome?
RG: Interesting question. They don’t say how exactly collaboration happened. All we know is that external people were able to contribute advice – but editorial decisions stayed with the authors. Not that collaborative…
Netopia: From your experience in organising citizen participation, how do the ideas described in the book work in real life?
I like the tool Pol.is, but it could hardly be used for participatory citizen processes such as city development. It is too complicated for most participants, both in regard to the background story (what the tool does) and to handling it. In regard to clients, they just would not buy it.
Netopia: What do you make of Weyl’s Microsoft connection? Are there Microsoft fingerprints all over? Or has he managed to maintain some independence? (Thinking of Jared Lanier, for example, who seems to speak very freely regardless of his affiliation)
RG: I do not see any “Microsoft” in the book. I guess the deal is this: Tang gets all her Taiwan stories. And Weyl gets the title and the buzzword: “plurality” (he has invented “plurality-voting”). Works like this: you have a certain number of votes or dots that you can distribute over a range of options. If you want to support an option with more than one dot, it gets more expensive for you. You do not spend just one more dot, but several more dots if you want to give special support to an option.) It’s an economist’s idea of voting.
There is also a special icon for this kind of “plurality voting”. The icon is used throughout the book for the idea of “plurality” in general.
