Hi,
(I don't know if you'll find this useful or just blatant
self-advertising -- it is probably a bit of both :-)
It is a very recent paper arguing for a variant of
liquid
democracy, a kind of delegative democracy introducing a
dampening factor that reduces the weight of votes that travel
through long delegation chains. We argue that it might be a good
decision-making system for online social networks.
Viscous Democracy for Social Networks - CACM Virtual Extension -
June 2011
http://chato.cl/blog/en/2011/05/viscous_democracy_for_social_networks.html
The link above includes a summary as well as links to the
(paywall'd) article in CACM, and the authors' copy (free as in
beer).
Cheers,