Introduction

The Full Gamut is an experimental monthly on-line publication designed for people with a broad interest in society and world events: people who enjoy exposure to a variety of topics and viewpoints that may be outside their primary interests or comfort zones, but who have limited time to sift through the Internet's prolific noise for meaningful signal. The Full Gamut's goal is to pick out the very best and most important articles currently available on the Internet on any topic - the articles that everyone should read, for whatever reason - while using an objectively fair selection process to avoid systematic bias toward particular special interests or political ideologies.

In contrast with the subjective notion of editorial balance that conventional publications rely on to limit bias among competing viewpoints, the Full Gamut pursues the more objective goal of representative balance. Instead of trying to "balance" each individual article among across competing viewpoints through the judgment of a handful of editors, the Full Gamut strives for balance across the publication as a whole through a broader editorial body and an article selection process derived from basic principles of representative democracy. The Full Gamut's selection process allows individual articles to represent particular viewpoints authentically and without censorship, while ensuring that all viewpoints get attention proportional to their support within the editorial body. Additionally, the Full Gamut accompanies each published article with concrete statistics reflecting the article's support, giving broad-minded readers useful information not only about what people are thinking, but how many think that way. See the Balance page for more details.

The Full Gamut in its preliminary "proof of concept" phase will rely on a small editorial body at MIT consisting of interested students and affiliates, particularly representatitves of existing student groups who would like to give their interests and viewpoints broader exposure within and perhaps beyond the MIT community. Participants are asked to devote a few minutes to an hour per month, depending on their free time and level of interest, proposing, reading, and voting on articles. Proposing an article essentially involves E-mailing me a URL, a short one-paragraph summary/teaser, and (if desired) the proposer's student group affiliation. Articles can be MIT-specific, regional, or general in scope, and can be on any topic of interest to the participants themselves from politics and social issues to arts and games. Voting on articles initially uses a "publication point" system closely related to the Single Transferrable Vote (STV) that the City of Cambridge uses to elect local representatives. The intended result is a very short monthly E-mail newsletter/blog linking to maybe five articles per month, emphasizing quality and conciseness in order to maximize readership. Future project phases will expand the editorial base and refine the article selection process in order to increase the publication's quality and breadth. See the Project Plan page for more details.