The Document Project

www.documentproject.com

Andrew Inglis

1 Introduction

When people form groups in order to live with and care for one another, stand collectively behind a cause,

and work towards a common goal that they believe in, the results can be powerful and revolutionary.

This has been a theme throughout history. Some of the groups that we see in the world are: friends,

families, organizations, teams, communities, religions, unions, governments, and countries. Within such

diverse and differently sized groups there are similarly different time scales with which they exist - from

hours to generations - different connections - ranging from loose affiliation to strong interconnectedness, and

different enrollments, as people’s needs and desires change, and as they grow. In essence, the groups that

people form are as richly varied and dynamic as life itself.

For groups larger than friends and families, one of the most common methods of expressing their prin-

ciples, collective abilities, and proposed actions is by creating a document. Examples of such documents

are: a government’s constitution and laws, mission statements of companies, and petitions. Changes to the

documents usually don’t occur without great struggle from members of the group, even when the need arises.

This is not a necessarily bad attribute of groups and the documents that they uphold. If we are continually

changing the methods that we live by, then we may never have enough stability to progress as a civilization.

There is a certain level of consistency that is desired and needed. Sometimes, however, the forces to keep

this consistency can overwhelm even the most logical and needed attempts to change systems or sets of rules.

Another point to make about these documents is they are rarely created by the individuals within

the group that support them. This lack of community input is inevitable when documents are followed

for generations, but is also something that is thought to be necessary when dealing with large groups of

people (for example, more than 500 people). It is hard to imagine having millions of people contribute

in a meaningful way to the same document. Instead, the document is created by a small group of leaders,

activists, or representatives in a manner they feel will garner the support of the larger group. Although there

are leaders in our society attempting to be the voice for large amounts of people, there are inherent problems

that single individuals face when trying to represent very large groups of dynamic, changing people.

The question I am trying to answer is: What is the best tool available, within current limitations of

technology and communication, to allow a large number of people with disparate ideas and backgrounds to

coherently and sensibly interact with one another on a large scale when the need arises? And how is the

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benefit of this interaction maximized by making the contributions from each individual as self empowering

as possible?

The purpose of the Document Project (DP) is to search for an answers to these questions. Its goal is

to allow the editing by and contributions of people to a single document at a scale that is unsupportable

by traditional document sharing platforms (such as Google Documents and wiki systems). The platform

attempts to allow 2 people to 7 billion people edit, contribute, and feel a sense of ownership in a single

document that could be as short as a paragraph or as long as a novel, thereby allowing more people to be

invested in a collaborative treatise of shared interests and action, with the real potential of the tool showing

at the level of 20 people or more contributing. This is something that no other collaboration software allows

at this point.

2 Background

We are most familiar with one person creating a document that expresses their ideas, thoughts, and proposed

actions to the world (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Single person creating and editing a document

The tools that allow a person to do this are numerous: a piece of paper, a typewriter, a word processing

editor such as Microsoft Office, an Internet publishing tool such as a blog, an email account. Since a single

person has complete control over the creation of the document, she can write the document in a way that she

sees as valuable as possible for herself and the people that she wants to share it with. Many of the editing

tools created have focused on one person creating content and sharing the content with the world.

The same goes for a small group of people of less than 4 or 5 (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Four people creating and editing a document

In this case, it is also relatively straightforward for a group of people to use the same types of systems that

the individual person use (like a word processor such as Microsoft Word) to create a document that mutually

maximizes their satisfaction. This is because it is possible for the entire group of 4 or 5 people to get together

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and talk to each other at length during the editing process, and settle to a consensus about what to write.

It is still possible then for satisfaction to be high in a group that gets together and creates a document that

expresses themselves as a collective.

Figure 3: Twenty or so people creating and editing a document

For a larger group of five to twenty people, things can get a little more difficult and complicated. It is tricky

to get everyone together at the same time, and when that is possible, it is difficult to come to a consensus

with such a large group. One easy way is for a single person to hear the suggestions of the larger group,

and incorporate those changes into the document. Conversations can happen about what to change, but

even this can get tricky when the number of proposed edits become overwhelming to discuss. There are

several collaborative document editing programs which attempt to ease the discussion of such sized groups:

the programs store proposed changes from members of the group and facilitate discussion about the changes

in an orderly way, so that the controller of the document can make a final decision about how to make the

changes. Such collaborative software programs exist as separate entities, and are also provided as add-ons

to the more traditional single person editing programs mentioned above1.

Figure 4: A large group of 100, 1000, 10000, or more people.

The situation gets even more complicated when 100, 1000, 10000 or more people want to contribute to

a single document (Figure 4). Here are a few methods that are used to handle this endeavor:

• Wiki Systems

Wiki systems, such as Wikipedia, allow the world’s Internet users to edit documents together. Anyone

who wants to change a document is free to do so, anyone else can decide that it is not a good edit and

remove it, and a conversation occurs between the two people in a discussion site along with the rest1See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative real-time editor/ for a list of software available

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of the community interested in that topic, and this cycle continually repeats itself and the documents

continually change2. This system is currently used to create encyclopedias of knowledge: a set of

articles, where each article treats a specific topic independently and distinctly.

• Petitions

Petitions are documents that expresses a group’s principles and collective abilities. The documents are

usually signed by the numerous individuals that back them. The life-cycle of a petition is usually as

follows: an individual or small group of 10 or so people create a document that they feel will garner the

support of a much larger group of people. They then offer the petition to the larger group to pledge

support for the ideas expressed in the document. The goal of almost every petition is to maximize

“people power” by having the strongest message possible and having the largest number of people

signing it.

• Representative Democracy

Systems of government collectively state the intentions of a large group of people by having represen-

tatives selected periodically by smaller subsets of people to represent them for a given period of time.

The representative’s job is then to come to agreement with one another and create rules or a document

that the entire community then abides by. Anyone who wants to change a law can petition represen-

tatives with their viewpoint, vote different representatives in, or become a representative themselves.

We see this type of system in small organizations, to local governments, to national governments, to

the United Nations - it is one of the most widespread democratic systems that we have in our world

today.

When discussing wiki systems, petitions, and representative democracies, it should be stressed that the

point is not to make arguments for replacing them. These systems are positive and integral parts of our

culture. Rather, critiques allow us to explore new options for collaboration in our communities, and the

possibility of filling needs that older systems are not providing.

In beginning to evaluate the pros and cons of systems that can help bring together large groups of people

to support a cause, it is worthwhile to think of the following attributes of such systems:

• Does the system have leaders that have more control over the document than the people

that will support the document?

We are very used to people taking the lead and attempting to be the voice for large amounts of people.

Lots of good can come of this, but it is worth asking How much potential do leaders have to overly

express their own ideas in the final document? Furthermore, it is worth exploring the purpose and

benefits of leadership, especially when it can distance the people of the community from understanding

issues that directly affect them and decisions made on their behalf. One goal of any healthy society is

to empower people to be knowledgeable and control their own lives and destinies. When evaluating a

system that attempts to express the collective ideas of a group, leaders influence should therefore be

evaluated.2Wikipedia advocates a so-called BOLD, revert, discuss cycle - meaning be BOLD with the edits you make,

wait for someone to remove (revert) your edits if there is a disagreement, then have a discussion about. see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle/

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• Does the system let certain individuals influence the document more than others if they

want to?

When people get together to do things, it is common for those with more time or intention to put more

effort in. Just like having leaders, this can be a good thing, since passionate people usually do a good

job handling things they are passionate about. This type of action is so common in our societies that

we assume it as given. However, when creating a document that expresses the collective ideas of a

group, it is not as democratic to allow very uneven contributions. There are many reasons why people

don’t contribute as much as others even if they are just as interested in sharing their voice: they could

be too busy with other things in their life; they may not be informed as much as they would like, or

they may be unsure of their abilities. When evaluating a system that attempts to express the collective

ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to see how accommodating the system is to a wide variety of people’s

abilities and time to contribute.

• Does the system handle the many voices and contributions from it’s users, even as the

group gets larger and larger?

Systems that work just as good when there are 100, 100000, a million, or a billion people using them are

called scalable. Scalability is a good thing since it is unfortunate when a system that is working well at

one size, say with 1000 people involved, stops working when 10000 people get involved, especially when

the goal of the system is to include more and more people. When evaluating systems that attempt to

express the collective ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to imagine how well it works as more and more

people get involved.

• Does the system allow for ideas that are in the majority to suppress ideas that only a

few people have?

The so-called tyranny of the majority is a worry that in any system, decisions made by a majority under

that system would place that majority’s interests so far above a dissenting individual’s interest that the

individual would be actively oppressed3. In addition to creating an oppressive environment for people

with non-majority ideas, this also leads to a narrowing of viewpoint by the community since ideas

from diverse minds are not being expressed. Most importantly, it disallows very differently minded

people from coming together on a given cause only because one group has more people compared to the

other. Allowing ideas that less than half of the people support to fairly influence the document creation

process is a fundamental pillar of building consensus within diverse communities. When evaluating

systems that attempt to express the collective ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to see if such inclusion

is integral to the process.

• Does the system allow people that speak different languages to edit the same document?

Systems that can create groups that are inviting to all languages are important, since the language

difference should not get in the way of people standing collectively behind a cause. If the system

is scalable and able to represent non-majority beliefs fairly as mentioned above, then the system

could accommodate unprecedented numbers and diversity of people. With the ability to have people of

different cultures and languages edit documents with one another, the groups that define the traditional3See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny of the majority

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structure of our communities (such as nations and religions) become less of a barrier between people.

When evaluating a system that attempts to express the collective ideas of a group, it is worthwhile to

ask whether it can allow for this freedom across languages.

Figure 5: The case of representation: wiki systems, petitions, and representative democracies

The three tools of wiki systems, petitions, and representative democracies highlighted above have some

similarities concerning the challenges just mentioned. All three systems use a subset of the population to

create the document of interest (Figure 5), whether it be an encyclopedia article, a petition, or a document

of governance. For a wiki system, although anyone in the world can edit a given document, the number of

people that contribute to a given Wikipedia article is around 300 or less, and there are not any articles that

have thousands of active contributors at any given time4. For a petition, it is the group of activists that

create the document in the first place - less than around 20, and for the representative democracy, it is the

representatives in the governing body, which is less than around 500. These numbers show that while the

amount of people that can be represented by these methods can grow, the number of active creators of the

documents are staying less than 1000 - the amount of contributors is not scaling. This leads to the following

specific observations of these systems abilities to bring together large groups of people:

• Representative Democracy

The more diverse and large a community gets, the more difficult it is for a system to keep the number of

representatives to a constant minimum of around 500 or less and still enable the representatives to work

with each other to come to consensus on important issues. This could be because of the complicated

pressures representatives feel during the process of becoming elected. One of these pressures is that

of smaller groups of people which use resources to influence the representatives in a disproportionate

way. Lastly, it is difficult from within a given governance system to reach solidarity with others from

another governance system, even if such overlap would be helpful to both groups.

• Petition

A petition can be translated into multiple languages for people to read, and it can be read and signed

by an unlimited number of people. Also, there are two forces that minimize the chance for non-majority

ideas to be suppressed. First, in their attempts to collect the most amount of signatures of support

for the document, the drafters create the most accommodating document, and therefore attempt to4See Druck et al. Learning to Predict the Quality of Contributions to Wikipedia.

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incorporate non-majority ideas. Secondly, the very nature of a petition is such that whomever decides

not to support and sign the petition can “walk away” and not support the cause. By doing this, they

gain nothing, but are not forced to support actions they don’t agree with, either.

The maximum number of people that can get together in this traditional method and the maximum

power for change that the document can create, however, is usually not attained for several reasons.

First, any document has multiple points, some of which have the potential to make one supporter or

another feel less interested in supporting the document - so-called “section cooling”. If the document

is written less controversially in order to collect more support, then it lessens the document’s ability to

invoke change, even if more people sign, which may not be the case since a “watered-down” document

is less inspiring to support. Also, after the petition document is created by the leaders, there is a

certain amount of time that is needed to garner support and have people sign the document. During

this time, similar to a representative democracy, smaller groups of people that have disproportionate

resources can unduly influence the discussion of whether the larger community should sign the petition

or not. A last pitfall is that even when people sign the document, pledging their support, they are

not invested 100% in the cause, because they had no say in the creation and development of the

document, and could not express their detailed ideas towards the multiple concepts of the document.

With these challenges in mind, the small group of writers must find a perfect balance by having an

intimate knowledge of all of the supporters for the cause, or have the ability to perform large amounts

of polling research, or, in a shotgun approach, submit numerous documents and hope that one that

catches the minds of a group of supporters. These challenges reduce the power of the petition as a

mechanism for meaningful change in our society.

• Wiki

Wiki systems allow for an unlimited number of people to contribute in a meaningful way to factual,

historical, and scientific documents. Unfortunately, moving from the discussion of these topics to that

of governance and opinion, where unlimited numbers of people are contributing ideas, is not possible

on wiki systems. What does happen on wiki sites is very similiar to representative democracies and

petitions: experts on a given topic are the self-selected representatives for the rest of the community.

Such a system is a natural method for scientific or historical topics where there are a handful of

experts, but does not work well when dealing with such opinionated topics. The alternative to having

representation, where hundreds of thousands of people voice their opinions by editing an article, is a

very different scale from the 300 or so editors that the wiki system currently handles on average for each

document. In essence, wiki system cannot handle the volumes and frequencies of contributions that

would come if as many people that read the documents also contribute to them. In fact, Wikipedia is

the first to mention that it is not a democracy or a place for original thought or opinions5.

3 The Document Project

The Document Project is an attempt to democratically bring people together to write a document and follow

the fundamental ideas of being controlled by the people that will support the document, having fairness of

input, scaling to any number of people, and allowing diverse groups to contribute.5See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not/

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Figure 6: Goal of the Document Project

Representative

Democracy

Petition Wiki Document

Project

documents controlled by

followers of the document

5 2 5 7?

fairness of input 5 5 5 7?

scaling of people that can

give meaningful contribu-

tions

4 2 4 7?

inclusion of minority ideas 5 6 5 7?

diverse people contribut-

ing

4 6 8 7?

Comparison of different methods of community expression. Scales are qualitative from 0 (poor) - 10

(excellent). The Document Project attempts to maximize these numbers with current technologies as best

as possible (represented by all “7?”s).

The Document Project adapts the traditional petition style of community expression so that the final

document expresses a set of collective beliefs and actions of the people supporting the document in the most

powerful and influential manner possible. Enabling the backing of the document to occur at the same time

as the formation of the document is a fundamentally new concept in petition-like documents, and has the

potential to reduce the issue of small resource-rich groups being able to manipulate the larger support group,

since the documents inception, development of support, and pledge of support occur simultaneously. Also,

the method solves the problems of “section cooling”, signer’s investment, and maximizing overall document

influence (number of people signing and “potency of document”) by allowing all final supporters of the

document to play an integral role in the drafting and critiquing of the document. Lastly, it allows contributors

to express dissatisfaction throughout the process, empowering each individual as much as possible in a

democratic setting.

The ideas in the preceding paragraphs are only possible by creating a document sharing system that

scales to an unlimited number of people. This is challenging becuase such a system must collect the changes

that are made by the individuals contributing to the document, but if the number of active contributors is

in the thousands, the amount to discuss and come to consensus and conclusion on also becomes so large that

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it is difficult for each member to evaluate each change that is made 6. This is the main problem that wiki

systems face when attempting to be a document creation system for large amounts of contributors.

The Document Project bases document creation on the preferences of large numbers of contributors by

codifying the basic actions of editing, discussion, and expressions of dissatisfaction into distinct actions that

can be handled properly in a large scale system.

3.1 Document Project Steps

The following is a list of the actions that occur during the creation of a document using the Document

Project:

Figure 7: Main actions that occur in the Document Project. Steps 1,2,3,4,5 and 11 can happen at any time

• Continual Process

– (1) User registration with username and password. If desired, the user enters in as much demo-

graphic info as she wants as so-called tags (age, gender, hobbies, occupation, etc.). Registration

with this limited information allows natural groups to form within the community of any given

document and the ability to recognize what what non-majority ideas are being disenfranchized.

– (2) Document creation: any user can create a document that can then begin to be edited by

others. When the document is started, it is in Version 1. After each editing/voting cycle, the

document goes to Version 2, 3, etc.

– (3) Document registration: users can join a document that they would like to contribute to.

– (4) Listing and Viewing of documents. Figure 8 and 9 show examples of this.

– (5) Viewing of statistics and history of changes that have been made in the document (see Figure

10).

– (11) Allowing users to express dissatisfaction in the current version of the document (Discussed

in detail in Section 3.2),

• During the Editing Phase

– (7) Users begin the overall editing process by editing the document in a normal way, in that the

document is opened in an editor, and the user is free to make any changes and additions that she

would like (Figure 11). We will call this Edit Step 1 (of 2).

6See Rodriguez et al. Advances towards a General-Purpose Societal-Scale Human-Collective Problem-Solving Engine.

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Figure 8: listing of documents that are being edited

After the regular editing in Edit Step 1, the user is then given a list of the changes that she made,

and is prompted to “pack” the changes in Edit Step 2. A package is one or more sentences that a

change was made in (including adding, deleting, and moving a sentence) that must all go into the

next version of the document, or all stay out, for the edit to make sense. Sentences in a package

do not need to be abutting one another, and they can pass between each other as well (Figure

12). Each package made will either go into the next version in its entirety, or not go in at all,

based on the support the package receives in the succeeding voting phase . A comment for each

sentence packages can also be added7

• Between Editing and Voting Phase

– (8) The list of packages created by multiple users are collected to be voted on (Figure 13).

• During the Voting Phase7The comments that can be attached to each Sentence Package are a way to have experts in a given field explain and teach

their rational for the edits that they make. Therefore, in order to bestow their influence, experts will need to educate people

not in their fields by using comments that they attach to their edits. This can be a force that increases the knowledge of the

entire community, and is a way to continue to value expert opinions while at the same time stress empowerment and democratic

decision making.

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Figure 9: the main document panel displays information and shows the users actions at any given time

– (9) Sentence packages made in the editing phase are viewed by all of the contributors of the

document to vote and comment on if desired (Figure 14).

The user votes packages up or down depending on whether he or she would like to see that edit

in the document. Scalability to an unlimited number of users is attainable by not having each

user vote on every edit, rather by using a ranking algorithm that gives each user a combination of

randomly selected packages as well as packages that are becoming popular or contentious based

on voting patterns.

• At the end of the Voting Phase

– (10) The end of the voting phase, a method is performed to compile the document to a new

version. The method selects the packages that will be put into the next version of the document.

Two packages are in conflict with one another when any sentence from one package overlaps or

abutts (i.e., there is no “buffer” sentence between the two sentences) with a sentence from another

package. Packages that are in conflict cannot both be put into the new version. The goal of the

compilation algorithm is to select the package set (a set of packages that can enter the document

with no conflicts) that gives the most agreement to the community that is writing the document.8

8As the number of edits grow to into the thousands, the amount of conflicts, especially for short (1 page or so) documents,

will scale proportionally with the number of proposed edits. However, the method is an attempt to have the least stringent

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Figure 10: Example of viewing a previous version of the document. In this case, the document is in Version

3, but we are viewing the changes made from Version 1 to 2.

A score can be defined for any package or package set in numerous ways by using the voting

information for each package. One simple example of a package score is the amount of “YES”

votes it receives, and the package set score would be the summed total of the individual scores of

the packages in the set.

The search for the package set with the highest score can be performed in several ways. One

simple embodiment is as follows:

∗ (a) Remove all sentences that have more “NO” votes than “YES”.

∗ (b) The remaining packages are ordered into a list by their package score as described above.

∗ (c) For each package in the list, remove the packages that are lower in the ordered list if they

conflict with the current package.

The packages in the list remaining after this removal is the package set.

It is possible that this method will not find the optimal package set. For example, the highest

method possible of compiling a new version of the document while still maintaining document coherence.

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Figure 11: Editing Step 1 (of 2) of the document.

voted package, if not put into the document, could allow for many other packages to enter in, which

would make for a higher overall package set score. A complication of the algorithm to search for

such scenerios is to replace the singe list selection (step b) with all N! (factorial) possible orderings

for the packages. Then select the list with the largest package set score. If the calculation becomes

too large (with N! needing to take place), a Monte Carlo algorithm can be implamented to search

for the highest scoring list and package set.

In either case, showing a graph of the package set scores of all possible package sets for a given

edit, ranked from highest to lowest package set score, one would see a curve that dies off as the

package set become less and less valuable. Only in the comparison of the N! package sets would

one be guaranteed to select the highest scored package set. The drop off of the ranked package

set scores can determine the level of overall acceptance of the version compile: a greater drop-off

means that the highest score package set is the clearest choice out of all of the other potential

package sets to maximize the satisfaction in the next version.9

After the editing cycle, the process returns once again to the Editing phase using a new version of the

document. The cycle of Editing and Voting then repeats.9Since statistics will be available for the support level of packages during voting - if a package almost was chosen for a given

version, then the user can be prompted to enter a similiar package edit in the new version.

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Figure 12: Creating packages. The fundamental unit of each package is the sentence (you cannot put half of

a sentence in a package, for example). Note that each package (1,2, and 3 in this example) can be multiple

sentences long, that the sentences in packages do not need to abutt, and, as seen in package 2 and 3 in this

example, can . Also note the user comments that were made for the packages created. These packages are

shown in “packaged” form in .

3.2 Dealbreaks

After any given voting phase, when a new version of the document is compiled, there is a strong possibility

that groups with ideas that are not in the majority10 have been disenfranchised, and handling this will be a

very important step in the creation of the document.

The difficulty of reaching consensus between differently sized groups can be shown in an example: there

are 100 people of persuasion A and 1000 people of persuasion B of a given topic. There is some change in

the document that is voted on. There are 10 votes not to change from group A, and 900 votes to change

from group B. This is a clear signal to make the change. But what if there is 70 votes from group B not to10The definition of a majority viewpoint can be any idea that has the support of more than 50% and less than or equal to

100% of the people contributing to the document. Setting the number definition of majority to a high number, say 66 or 75%,

is seemingly helpful to create majorities that include a maximal amount of support, but they create impossibly high barriers to

voting in changes, and do not solve the fact that large groups of people will continue to be in a non-majority opinion, something

that must still be addressed. Therefore, any definition of majority is acceptable for this discussion, and we choose 51%

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Figure 13: List of sentence packages that are ready to be voted on when the voting phase begins.

change and 400 votes to change from group A. Clearly, the majority vote says to make the change, but 70%

of the non-majority group didn’t want it. This type of problem will arise naturally and often. One way to

solve it is to normalize the votes to groups. This is difficult and undesirable because the idea of a definable

group A or B or any other group, although useful, either doesn’t exist in the real world or it is very difficult

to define without typecasting or profiling people. We are all individuals, act and think differently, and are

always growing and changing. It would therefore be unrealistic to create these groups once or try to change

them before every voting phase.

The Document Project attempts to solve such problems by allowing contributors to mark particular

sentences in the document as dealbreaks: the contributors will not support the the final document if the

dealbreak sentence or sentences stay in the document (See Figure 16).

In any version of the document, it can be seen how many contributors are supporting the document

(could sign the document as is) or not supporting the document (have one or more dealbreaks that disallow

them from signing the document at the end) (Figure 17).This information can fluidly change from version

to version as new people enter the document, edits are made, votes are taken, new versions are created, and

new dealbreaks are expressed. (Figure 18).

User support and dealbreak sentences can also be seen on a tag based level (Figure 19), which allows the

contributors of the document to see when and how non-majority groups are being forced to not support the

document.

Using the information about dealbreaks and loss of certain non-majority groups from the support of the

document, one option for editors on any given editing cycle (in addition to adding brand new content or

making stylistic changes) is to try to come to consensus with a given dealbreak sentiment. During voting,

users can see that a given package they are voting on is changing a dealbreak sentence (Figure 20). Therefore

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each voter has the power to guide how consensus is built in the document.

The premise of the deal break system described above is that if dissatisfactions from non-majority groups

are seen clearly by the larger group, and the loss of support is realized due to the dissatisfaction of non-

majority groups, then there will be an effort to come to consensus to keep the size and diversity of the

supporters of the document as high as possible. This is an optimistic idea about the innate desires to

understand and come to consensus with one another, but also, in many situations, decisions or causes made

without a large diverse group of people backing it will not be as influential in a pluralistic civilization.

Alternatively, a decision or cause that does have support from people with non-majority ideas is a very

powerful force for change, especially if it is an issue that requires support from a diverse group of people.

The goal is a maximization of people that support the document with the most diversity possible, and to

avoid gridlock when the system veers into a standoff position.

4 Sentence Based Structure

The schema to store the information about the documents, their version histories, about peoples edits on

them, the creation of packages, expressions of dealbreaks, votes on specific packages, and commenting which

allows for the functionality mentioned above is novel. Although some of the functions mentioned above

could be implemented with straightforward use of traditional diff and merging algorithms (such as the

compilation phase), the totality of the features mentioned above, could not be performed without a new

methodology. Moreover, an additional feature of multiple language integration (discussed in Section 5 could

not be performed either.

The fundamental unit of the new method is the sentence. In the beginning of each new version of the

document, each sentence is assigned a location: set of 3 numbers similar to the Dewey decimal system that

explicitly defined what the Chapter, Paragraph, and Sentence location is for that sentence11. For example,

the first three sentences in Chapter 2, paragraph 3 would be C:2/P:3/S:1, C:2/P:3/S:2, C:2/P:3/S:3. When a

document is edited, sentences can either be deleted, moved, changed or inserted. These actions are logged for

the affected sentences as CHANGED FROM, CHANGED TO, DELETED, INSERTED, MOVED FROM,

MOVED TO. For the sentences that are CHANGED TO, MOVED TO, and INSERTED, a location is given

that is fractional to the origional location structure, defining where the sentence exists with respect to the ori-

gional document sentences (Figure 21). During the edit, new sentences are created, along with the fractional

location information of where they exist with respect to the origional version. If a sentence is CHANGED TO

or MOVED TO or both, this adapted sentence has a pointer to the sentences that were CHANGED FROM

and MOVED FROM respectively. And reversely, the CHANGED FROM and MOVED FROM sentenced

point to their CHANGED TO or MOVED TO counterparts. This system therefore allows for complete

tracking of the creation, evolution, movement, and deletion, of every sentence as it is manipulated from

version to version.

The definition of conflicting packages (discussed in 3.1) falls out from the sentence locations of the

proposed changes: if any two packages have a sentence with a location code where the Chapter and Paragraph

numbers are equal, and the Sentence number is equal or less than an integer value away from the other, then11We will assume here that the subdivisions of text that exist in the document are chapters, paragraphs, and sentences,

however, any set of subdivisions can be used

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the two packages are in conflict. This keeps the criteria of having at least one sentence from the old version

between sentences from packages that are accepted into a new version.

When new versions of the document are compiled, the sentences from packages in the selected package

set that are INSERTED, CHANGED TO, and MOVED TO are all turned on in the new version, and

the sentences that are DELETED, CHANGED FROM, and MOVED FROM are all turned off in the next

version. The location numbers for each sentence are then refreshed by reassigning integer locations to the

sentences in the new version.

5 Language

As mentioned in Section 2, some of the most needed collaborations in this world involve people from different

cultures. By enabling people that speak different languages to back a common cause, traditional governmen-

tal and cultural boundaries become less of a barrier between meaningful collaboration between large groups

of diverse people.

Although the Document Project can be used in any single language, another aspect of the method is

its ability to allow people that speak and write in different languages to edit the same document with one

another. Because the sentence is the fundamental unit of editing, discussion, and voting, each sentence can

be immmediatly and automatically translated to other languages when it is created. Comments on packages

and votes as well as the user tags are also immmediatly and automatically translated12. Each sentence

is in reality a multitude of sentences, one being the origional, and the other being automatic translations

of the origional into all of the languages that the Document Project supports. By doing this, the actions

allowing collaboration, editing, voting, and discussion within the same document can be performed using

any language. This makes the entire process of collaboration on a document language-independent.

An example of this is shown in Figure 22 and 23. This particular document is being edited by English and

Spanish speaking people. As edits and voting take place, the website shows the steps in only the language

that is being displayed at the time. Astericks next to sentences and comments are used for all text that has

been automatically translated (Figure 24). After compilation, when new sentences enter the document that

were created in different languages, one can see that the new version has sentences that were voted in that

were origionally created in different languages (Figure 25).

6 Conclusion

There is little more impressive than diverse groups of people overcoming their differences to express solidarity

for needed change in their world. One could argue however that the current tools that people have to12This automatic translation is currently being provided by Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/. Machine transla-

tion algorithms automatically translate text from one language to another. Such algorithms are becoming increasingly accurate

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine translation). One of the driving forces of automatic translation is to reduce the

communication barriers between different cultures. Current translation technologies focus on translating the sentence, in that

they do not chop the sentence up before translating, nor do the algorithms look at neighboring sentence’s content when deter-

mining how to translate any given sentence. This is telling of the power of sentences to convey a single concept in all human

languages. This concept allows machine translation algorithms to be a good method of translation within the Document Project

system.

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communicate with each other leave something to be desired in enabling the fluid creation and adaptation of

groups in ways that our world needs.

The Document Project attempts to allow an unlimited number of people with disparate ideas, back-

grounds, cultures, and languages, to coherently and sensibly interact - without leaders or representatives

- to create a petition, a course of action, or any other type of docuement together when the need arises,

and to maximize the influence of the interaction by making the contributions from each individual as self

empowering as possible.

The Document Project attempts to creep over whatever societal “potential energy barriers” exist for

needed change as best as possible. It does this by tapping into the greatest potential our community has:

its people, coming together against their differences to support a cause they all believe in, and knowing that

the consensus they build is their fundamental power.

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(a) voting on a package

(b) viewing a single package in the document

Figure 14: Example of a vote on a package created in Figure 12 and shown in Figure 13. The user can always

click on “See single sentence package change in version” to view the package they are voting on (b). In this

case, the user is voting to put this package into the next version, and is writing a comment as to why.

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Figure 15: Example of ranked package set scores for a given version compilation. The algorithm that selects

the package set that will be used tries to find the package set with the highest score.

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Figure 16: Example of a users dealbreak page. A user is allowed to express a dealbreak at any time, update

old dealbreaks she made in the past that may have been resolved, and express new dealbreaks from the

current version of the document.

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(a) contributor details

(b) dealbreaks for entire document

Figure 17: (a) View of contributors of the document, whether they are supporting the document (could sign

the document as is) or not supporting the document (have one or more dealbreaks that disallow them from

signing the document at the end), and the words (tags) that describe them. The view shows what group

the user is currently in based on the dealbreaks they expressed (Figure 16). (b) the dealbreaks for the entire

document are shown as the reasons why contributors are not supporting the document.

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(a) Version 1 (b) Version 2

(c) Version 3

Figure 18: Example of the changing of contributors as new people enter the document, edits are made, votes

are taken, new versions are created, and new dealbreaks are expressed.

Figure 19: user support on a tag-based level.

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Figure 20: During voting, users will know that a given package they are voting on is changing a dealbreak

sentence.

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(a) original version

(b) new text added

(c) diff showing sentence locations

Figure 21: (a) In the beginning of each version, there is “fresh” set of sentence locations. When a change is

made (b), the adapted diff algorithm assigns of fractional locations to new and moved sentences (c).

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(a) Spanish view

(b) Engish view

Figure 22: The homepage for a document shown as both English and Spanish. Note that the user tags of a

potentially bilingual group are completely converted into the two languages respectively.

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(a) Spanish view

(b) Engish view

Figure 23: The document displayed as both English and Spanish. Note this is Version 1 of the document,

and there is a (*) in the English version on every sentence, but there are no (*) in the Spanish version. This

means that it was originally submitted in Spanish.

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(a) Spanish view

(b) Engish view

Figure 24: 4 four sentence packages made on the document in Figure 23, two from a person writing in Spanish,

and two from a person writing in English. Note the changing asterisks noting automatic translations in the

two language’s views

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(a) Spanish view

(b) Engish view

Figure 25: Version 2: In this example, all four sentence packages shown in 24 were voted into Version 2.

Note the reciprocal nature of the asterisks which denote automatic translations now integrated into the new

version of the document.

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