Smart Voting, News Organizing and Voter Decision Support

Voter Decision Support Community Group,

I would like to forward some ideas and terminology to the group, for discussion, before adding the content to the group Wiki (https://www.w3.org/community/voter-decision-support/wiki/Main_Page).

Smart voting involves uses of computing technology while preparing to vote. Preparation for voting can start before an election season and can be described as an ongoing activity for some voters – voters, for instance, gathering information with respect to the performance of elected officials.

Types of content relevant to providing voters with decision support include: content from government websites, the websites of political parties and candidates, candidates’ platforms, news articles, interviews, panel discussions, debates, debate coverage and analysis, fact-checking, editorials, letters to the editor, expert content (e.g. content from scientists, historians, economists, foreign policy experts) and encyclopedia articles. Accordingly, schemas for these types of Web content are relevant to the group.

Search engines, recommender systems and content discovery platforms can provide users with notifications whenever new content pertinent to their voting preparation becomes available.

News organization is a topic related to news aggregation. A news aggregator aggregates Web content, such as content from online newspapers, in one location for easy viewing. A news organizer organizes Web content for later use, providing indexing, search and retrieval capabilities. A news organizer may organize: (1) all of the content that a user encounters, (2) all of the content of a certain variety, such as news, that a user encounters, or (3) certain content which a user selects to store for later use. Relevant to smart voting are scenarios where that later use includes voter preparation activities. That is, users may make use of news organizer components to store news articles and other Web content for later uses such as civic participation and voter preparation.

Voter decision support is the utilization of computing technology to provide decision support to voters, for example to help them during voting preparation. Voter decision support seeks to empower voters with computing technology. Approaches to empowering voters with computing technology should recognize that there may be a number of distinct voter preparation styles. Approaches to empowering voters with computing technology should recognize that there may be a number of distinct information gathering styles. Approaches to empowering voters with computing technology should recognize that there may be a number of distinct information reviewing styles when making use of news organizer components.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski