This is a web application for nested commenting that allows users to semantically tag their posts as agreements or disagreements. The goal of this was to provide a means of mathematically quantifying consensus for democratic and managerial purposes. Fundamentally, I think that the movement of (ugh hang on I have to think)
This project is inactive. I realized that the fundamental component of what made Gadfly interesting was the ability/willingness to semantically tag your own data, and so Firebeer is the indirect continuation of the digital democracy components of Gadfly but built around the idea of extending the semantic tagging for any use whatsoever (if you think this explanation sucks that's because it does, I'm still trying to attack the semantic web, it's an interesting problem).
The wiki for this repo has some documents that I wrote a while ago about the democratic applications of these (kind of arbitrary, in retrospect) semantic tags. Gadfly is really more of a concept that I'm pushing for at this point, but I'm not going about the same road I was of just building a web application for it
-Tyler
Very briefly, this is a prototype webapp for a branching comment system (kind of like Reddit) except to be used specifically for arguments.
At an abstract level, the reason why I'm doing this is because I think that one of the fundamental problems with society is that the more people need to be included in making a decision, the harder it is to reach a consensus. I'm really interested in seeing if the internet can be used to effectively tackle this problem.
I've put a lot of thought into this project.
Send me an email at tylsmith@gmail.com for any reason at all.