Goals and Tools of Social Software
Current research in the area of social software include the analysis of social procedures and examination of them for fairness, appropriateness, correctness and efficiency. For example, an election procedure could be a simple majority vote, Borda count, a Single Transferable vote (STV), or Approval voting. All of these procedures can be examined for various properties like monotonicity. Monotonicity has the property that voting for a candidate should not harm that candidate. This may seem obvious, true under any system, but it is something which can happen in STV. Another question would be the ability to elect a Condorcet winner in case there is one.
Other principles which are considered by researchers in social software include the concept that a procedure for fair division should be Pareto optimal, equitable and envy free. A procedure for auctions should be one which would encourage bidders to bid their actual valuation – a property which holds with the Vickrey auction.
What is new in social software compared to older fields is the use of tools from computer science like program logic, analysis of algorithms and epistemic logic. Like programs, social procedures dovetail into each other. For instance an airport provides runways for planes to land, but it also provides security checks, and it must provide for ways in which buses and taxis can take arriving passengers to their local destinations. The entire mechanism can be analyzed in the way in which a complex computer program can be analyzed. The Banach-Knaster procedure for dividing a cake fairly, or the Brams and Taylor procedure for fair division have been analyzed in this way. To point to the need for epistemic logic, a building not only needs restrooms, for obvious reasons, it also needs signs indicating where they are. Thus epistemic considerations enter in addition to structural ones. For a more urgent example, in addition to medicines, physicians also need tests to indicate what a patient’s problem is.
Read more about this topic: Social Software (social Procedure)
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“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
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