The reputation bonuses are just that: bonuses. If you contribute in a positive fashion, your reputation would increase as well. Yet all ideas (including those from anyone receiving a "bonus" boost) must still pass the moderation phase.
Or perhaps bonuses are a bad idea altogether. I thought that someone who graduated from environmental studies would be able to propose environmental policies sooner than someone who has not. Maybe that isn't good.
Thats the correct debate, although you are probably better off just reading their books and deciding for yourself. I think that particular debate session got hung up on a lot of minutiae.
As for the direction of your project, I think as opposed to solving all the problems at once, you may want to construct things piecemeal, while laying out the factual pros and cons of each political "module". For example, using Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, there is no way to create a perfect voting mechanism, so any voting mechanism you put in place will be a traeoff. At one extreme, is unanimous consent, this guarantees everyone is signing off and thus reasonably happy. However, unanimous consent creates a new problem of the holdout position. To balance, voting systems like majority rules limit the holdout problem, but also introduce consent issues like swings in opinion from mob rule and the tyranny of the majority. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could create an elected dictator that could decide. This would be a trustee style system and while it would limit the above issues, it would introduce principal agent problems. By building these individual modules, you could allow your system to be adapted to many situations and allow for the actors themselves to police the less desirable behaviors (IE they know to watch out for holdouts before the process begins), which would be listed in the cons. A similar decision process could apply to the bonus systems (should education enter into it?), systems for evaluating relevant info in the debate section (types of source material, reputation voting) and so on.
In sum, allow the users to determine how they want to decide and mediate each decision before they enter into the process. A module setup may also help you make more progress on your own and get contributions.
The reputation bonuses are just that: bonuses. If you contribute in a positive fashion, your reputation would increase as well. Yet all ideas (including those from anyone receiving a "bonus" boost) must still pass the moderation phase.
Or perhaps bonuses are a bad idea altogether. I thought that someone who graduated from environmental studies would be able to propose environmental policies sooner than someone who has not. Maybe that isn't good.
Thank you for the pointer!