I don't have a lot of time, I have read through the many options twice and cannot understand what i am being asked to do and why they repeat each other in odd ways. I notice that my preferred option, the voters should be able to decide where a small dedicated amount of public money goes to political parties (as proposed by Power Inquiry), is not on offer. I am very opposed to any system which locks funding to existing size of parties or votes for this as this funds the status quo.

{Ed. It therefore sounds as if you support option D. I hope the point you make about the Power Enquiry is covered by note ii). The relevant bits of that enquiry are in my comment below.  Peter Emerson}

The Power Enquiry made the following recommendastions:
19. Donations from individuals to parties should be capped at £10,000, and
organisational donations capped at £100 per member, subject to full
democratic scrutiny within the organisation.
20. State funding to support local activity by political parties should be introduced
based on the allocation of individual voter vouchers. This would mean that at
a general election a voter will be able to tick a box allocating a £3 donation
per year from public funds to a party of his or her choice to be used by that
party for local activity. It would be open to the voter to make the donation to a
party other than the one they have just voted for.

{Ed. So, given our note ii), we think the point on vouchers is covered by option I. Note ii) is on the Phase II page:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/the_deborda_experiment/phase_2 

Peter Emerson.}

I agree that the options are over-complicated and that working through sets of issues about state funding, donations, other sources of income, the party/individual splt, the constituency/national split, the desirable degree of ring-fencing, the position of indirect political participants, etc. might be more helpful.

I have still to wrap my wet towel round my head before venturing an opinion on the options. But it is very interesting as a process, to which its confusingness -one of the more realistic aspects, after all, in relation to preparation for voting in many circumstances -makes its contribution.

I find it hard to know where to post comments. After posting one, is seems that I could not post another under the same heading! Not easy to find one's way with the system!Brian. 

I'm still thinking about the different options that have emerged from Stage 1.
But I just wanted to share a process reflection at this stage, which is that there are 13-14 options which have emerged from the Stage 1 review. They look to me like a fair reflection of the discussion is stage 1.
But as a facilitator who quite often has to take groups through making choices between sets of options, I have to say that it's almost impossible to visualise more than 5-7 options. Obviously (this is an experiment) I'll print out the page and work through the list of options.
The conventional wisdom is that people can keep 5 plus/minus 2 concepts in their heads at one time (i.e 3 - 7). So: if we re-did this on another subject - would there be a way of grouping concepts and sub-concepts into 5-7 groups?
Best
Andrew Curry

{Ed.  Hence the summary, with just the five families.  So we did try.  Peter Emerson.}

Hi Chris - Peter replied to your previous comment, not myself. But anyway, what we meant by that is that the option to separate vote cast from funding allocated is taken as a given - so any options presented here include that facility - as no-one seems to think we shouldn't have it in. I agree that isn't quite clear in note ii - i'm changing it to reflect that

Jon