Citizens' Electoral System [osw]
 

I. General Provisions

The Citizen's Electoral System [osw] has been created and promoted to facilitate Victoria Cukt's (a virtual candidate of CUKT) successful running for the post of the President of the Polish Republic. After she has won the post Poland will be a country of the highest level of technological development in this part of Europe.
The Victoria Cukt Party (Partia Witktoria Cukt), established to realised this objective, is composed of CUKT officials. It deals with the organisation of the presidential campaign and works on the Citizens' Electoral System [osw]: a computer realisation of the idea of electronic democracy - a socio-political system in which all of the citizens will actively undertake decisions crucial for the state's and nation's future.
Citizens' Electoral System [osw] will function in the computer network, using a graphic image of Victoria Cukt as its multimedia interface facilitating contact with the citizens.
The data stored at OSW server will be selected, categorised in real time and compared with the information received by Victoria Cukt from the digital media of the whole world. The results of data-processing will be uttered by Victoria Cukt as answers to citizens'' questions and visualised as statistical presentations of the stances towards the tackled issues most popular at a given moment. After some time, the received and processed proposals which Victoria Cukt presents will form her political programme; consequently, Citizens' Electoral System [osw] will become the expression of the society's will.
The members of Victoria Cukt Party are planning to launch the basic version of Citizens' Electoral System [osw] at the turn of August 2000, when the presidential campaign in Poland will reach its peak (to date no official candidate has been proposed) and Victoria Cukt will have received sufficient funds and social support to enter a subsequent stage in the development of OSW, namely a multi-sensorial social environment whose structure and functioning are close to the simulated reality based on the principles of electronic democracy.
The omniscience of Victoria Cukt's virtual personality, along with the statistical objectivity and absolute mathematical impartiality of OSW have yet not been known as a tool helping to solve Poland's political and social questions and make our country the state of a considerable influence over the global civilisation.
 

II. Description of the basic version of OSW

The basic version of OSW is composed of a multimedia interface which is an interactively animated image of Victoria Cukt and a dynamically generated database, where the electorate's questions and postulates are stored and divided into categories, subsequently uttered by Victoria Cukt.
The users who will write the address wiktoriacukt.pl on the Internet browsers can connect to the Victoria Cukt Party's server.
Victoria Cukt and a text field will appear on the screen, so one can write in one's own opinion in the text field.
The text will be introduced into the database in real time, next it will be categorised according to key words and classified as a proper thematic group.
The writing-in of a text will stimulate the reading of former records from a given thematic group by Victoria Cukt. This will be done in the form of an animation showing facial movements and producing uttered words from singular phonemes by means of a separate mechanism which allows to audio-visualise textual data at the moment of their input to the system.
Victoria Cukt's utterances (in the form of 3D animation and sound) will be generated in the OSW through the selection of suitable phonemes and their composition into words, sentences and full utterances of Victoria Cukt.
An utterance which has just been introduced will be reproduced as the last. In case it has not been ascribed by the system to a given category or associated to other postulates, the text will be uttered by Victoria Cukt in the course of its being typed in on the keyboard.
 
 

III. Software requirements of the basic OSW version

The creation of the Citizens' Electoral System [osw] requires the use of several  programming languages of the Net, along with multimedia and database applications:
- a 3D graphic interface, i.e. interactively animated image of Victoria Cukt who utters texts being input into the database, is created in the 3D Studio programme and can be recorded in any format which makes its functioning on the Internet possible: vrml, flash, tvml;
- speech synthesis and its co-ordination with the animation in the Net and database can be achieved using Microsoft Agents technology;
- the database and server mechanisms of verification and selection of the input information can be crated using MySQL system and Java servlets.

Among the technologies which are still being considered experimental, and which may speed up and simplify the realisation and launching of OSW is the tvml language for the Internet TV transmissions, which theoretically solves the problem of speech synthesis and its synchronisation with the character's movements, as well as its instant interaction with the input textual data.
 
 

CUKT
 

Programming consultant:
Radosław Tereszczuk
r9@pingwin.icm.edu.pl