David King and I will be fielding questions about Unity08's rules for the delegate and convention process today at noon on the Unity08 website.

A lot of people in politics have looked skeptically at the Unity08 effort. I, as a participant in and fierce advocate of online politics, am very excited to be part of a group looking to the Internet to drive every aspect of the candidate selction and campaign processes. To be sure, the goals Unity08 has set out for itself are more than ambitious.

As a member of the Rules Committee, we are tasked with debating and discussing such things as:

• How an online convention should work - timeframes, rounds of voting, etc.
• How identification and voter registration would be verified so one online vote is actually the equivalent of one real-world vote.
• Ballot security for cyber elections.
• What the candidate nomination process and the incorporation of draft movements looks like.
• Which voting mechanism works best? Plurality? Preferential? Cumulative? Range?

A lot of thought is going into this. While there is definitely a significant danger of this all going down to spectacular failure, everyone involved in it is working hard to advance the cause of online politics, but also the cause of participatory democracy.

The chat is open to Unity08 delegates. To be a delegate, sign up here.