The network is divided into two classes of participants: “editors” and ”judges,” with distinctive roles.
Editors follow and unfollow judges, thereby bestowing “authority” on them. If a judge is followed by five editors, for example, the judge has an authority of five.
Judges vote to support stories after they are published on the web. A judge’s vote adds his or her authority to the ”score” of the story, and a running tally is kept of the highest-scoring stories.
Every few days, an “edition” will be published in which the highest-scoring stories from the past few days are publicly recognized and “funded” by the system.
The system will have a fixed number of editors (say 15 or so) and potentially thousands of judges.
The intent is to leverage the network’s authority structure to award funding to the “best” works of journalism in a participatory manner, or phrased as a question, to ask what kind of journalism will be favored by a particular community under these affordances.
