How Users State Their Positions

Any person living in your community or in neighboring communities can state their own position on Kitchen Democracy.

Because many of them work or go to school in your community, and have important insights to contribute.

We require street address for three reasons:

• Users need to see the correlation between positions and distance from a local issue. For example, if a tally is split 50-50, but nearly all the "Yes" participants live more than a mile away from a local issue while nearly all the "No" participants live within a mile, then it is critical that decision makers have that information. Street addresses enable us to calculate distance for those cases.
• Most users who subscribe to email update services are not interested in emails about local issues which are miles away on the other side of town. Street addresses enable us to decide which emails are local to which users - and to give users the option to select what email to receive.
• There is no foolproof way of preventing identity fraud in online polling. Our objective is to collect enough information so that the risk of fraud widespread enough to significantly alter the tally is acceptably small. Street addresses are an important piece of information which help us reach that objective.

We usually screen statements at least once per day. All statements which are not held (i.e., usually all statements) are released for posting at the end of our screening process. Usually, these statements are posted immediately.
Occasionally, statements which we release for posting belong to users who have not yet verified their membership. In this case, those statements are not posted, nor tallied, until those members have verified their membership. This may occur at any time.

Yes.

Note: On October 1, 2007, Kitchen Democracy simplified the tally process to make this true. In issues suggested before October 1, 2007 users who simply 'voted' but did not add a comment to their vote had their 'vote' included in the tally, but no comment was added to the comment listing. So, in those issues, the tally was usually greater than the number of comments. Moreover, for those issues there were occasionally more comments than votes. This was because we only included registered voters in our tallies, while we included all comments in the comments page.

Since October 1, 2007, all statements are listed on the statement pages, including simple statements such as 'I say yes'. All statements of position are included in the tally, including those from users who are not registered voters. This ensures consistency between the total tally and the number of statements.

The issue author sets the deadline, and can change the deadline at any time. All changes are noted on the issue history pages. We recommend that the deadline be set shortly before the decision is made.

We announce the decision in an email update, and then move the entire issue to the Closed Issues page of our website where it remains as public record.