Sygnol top-level candidates.
Here’s another illustration of the listicle sorting app I’m putting together. For now, I’m still making images by hand. But I’m also moving ahead on building tools for automated assembly.
This 4×4 grid is a draft for the top level of the Sygnol namespace, presented in alphabetical order. When the system goes live, you’d be able to rearrange the tiles. That interaction would power features such as playlist-making and ranked-choice polling. You’d also be able to navigate into sortable sublists. For example, selecting OS — the flag for Oscars — would take you into a 3×3 grid of Best Picture nominees, similar to what I presented earlier.
As more content is added, grids would get much larger, and sub-channels would proliferate.
Sygnol is intended to model a new direction for civic software and liquid democracy. It’s inspired, in part, by sites such as 2008’s 10Questions and 3 American Questions from 2016. Those election-year experiments were launched with the goal of giving voters a direct way to compare candidates’ official statements on key policy issues.
10Questions’ ambitious interactive web site was hosted by the New York-based Personal Democracy Forum, heavily promoted by the New York Times, and generously funded by the Knight Foundation. Unfortunately, the candidates ignored it, just as they later ignored the 3 American Questions site. That latter project didn’t produce much more than a few videos explaining the concept, but its featured topics were very well thought out: Climate Change, Federal Debt, and Confidence in Government. So they’ll be available in the inaugural Sygnol namespace as CC, FD, and GV.
I’ll explain the other prospective topics in due course, but one I want to emphasize is ER — Election Reform. It’s central to Sygnol’s mission. An earlier ranked choice interface I built had a poll on Priorities for Improving US Elections. This version is being designed to cover many more issues at far greater depth.
| Code | Title |
|---|---|
| AA | Aimspoll Agenda |
| BH | Big History |
| BI | Border Integrity |
| CC | Climate Change |
| EQ | Income Inequality |
| ER | Election Reform |
| FD | Federal Debt |
| FP | Foreign Policy |
| GV | Confidence in Government |
| HC | Healthcare Reform |
| HH | Herbie Hancock |
| IN | Indaba Strategy |
| OS | Oscar Voter |
| SP | Secular Progress |
| SY | Sygnol Namespaces |
Sygnol
Top-Level Namespace, v.170312