rdf, we've been working on improving our ability to provide granular levels of access to our system. Right now for a variety of reasons we don't have the level of control that we want on this front, so rather than open things wide up, we decided to create a community which is somewhat 'safer', but clearly less useful for marketing. Ultimately we as a community will have to decide what portions of the site to make public and which ones to keep to members only.

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Jeff, I'm looking forward to your additional thoughts and questions. Here is a first stab response to what I think you are asking:

1) Clearly registration verification is a critical problem, as firmly establishing one person one vote is the central underpinning of any successful representative community. In this beta phase we are allowing people to just sign-up without any 'real/verifiable' information. Our view is that it is currently more important to get enough people in the system, testing the tools, etc... than putting barriers to entry. Once we get deeper in the beta we are going to disable this registration page and people will have to go through our payment page to join. The membership fee serves several important purposes, not the least of which is helping (although it is imperfect) verify identity and ensuring that people don't join and then vote multiple times (we can do this by restricting each credit card to X transactions). I will get into other benefits of the paid membership model later if you are interested.

2) Delegable proxy: our view on this is that your representative has your proxy, but your representative does not have a vote equivalent to the number of proxies he/she has been given, rather each representative has an equal vote. The reasons for this are basically that we want to discourage proxy hoarding and encourage a broad range of people to serve as representatives (imagine how many proxies Kos or Eli Pariser could accumulate). The rule as we current have it is that the top 20 vote getters + anyone with over 10k proxies is a representative. I'm going to read through the article you linked and will surely learn something new...

3) Open Source voting code -- agreed completely and I will have our programmer discuss what we are doing on this front in a later post.

Thanks for the great thoughts and keep 'em coming. This is an idea that has been gestating for a while and one that is by its very nature a communal project.

Mathwiz, thanks for the thoughts and I would counter that while many of the experts haven't won many elections recently (Bob Shrum for example), there are people who have won elections, or come very close in races that no one thought would be close, and I think we have a lot to learn from them. One of the dangers in my mind about the rise of the blogosphere is the ease with which one can become a backseat campaigner. If we don't actually run any campaigns we can never actually lose, so we bear no responsibility for losses, but can continue to criticize those who do actually run things...

As for your question of information, I think you make a great point on the what we believe section. I can change this, and probably will, but the problem right now is that this section just has a starter set of principles and then a set of debates we are having on those principles, but it doesn't really represent what we believe per-se. The initial set of beta testers (including you hopefully) will be the ones who really define and refine that list... Then i'll be comfortable going more public with it.