Community consensus

The hierarchy

COMMUNITY   a named workspace many citizens share, with an access model
  AREA      a named subdivision holding a set of decisions
    DECISION  one question, one position, one chain

Aggregation happens within an area, because that is the scope at which people are actually working on the same thing.

Pooling

When several citizens have recorded positions on the same question, the community position is computed from them. Inside the trusted layer, votes are weighted by earned merit — bounded at 2×, never more, so no individual can own an outcome.

Where merit does not yet exist, weighting is flat and the record notes that it was. The arithmetic is well defined on day one and becomes meritocratic as the ladder fills.

→ Meritocracy

The delta is the point

The product shows the difference between your position and the community's, and it does not encourage you to resolve it.

Most consensus tools are built to make disagreement disappear. This one treats it as the most informative output available: if you and a group that shares your standard reached different conclusions from the same public record, exactly one of three things is true, and all three are worth knowing.

• Your chain has a link theirs does not, and you should show them.
• Theirs has one yours does not, and you should look.
• You are weighing the same links differently — which is a values difference, not a factual one, and it belongs in Values rather than in an argument about evidence.

That third case is the one most political argument is actually about, and it is unresolvable by evidence. Naming it as a values difference ends a great many pointless fights.

Access

Communities carry an access model — owners, writers, readers, and an optional world-read flag — so a community can be a private working group or a public record.

Minimum samples, and honesty about them

A layer with too few votes is published and flagged, with its weight scaled down as the sample shrinks. It is never silently discarded: one careful citizen who read the record is information, and throwing it away to protect a false precision is its own distortion.