Social Networks for Collective Decision-making

Overview

How can large groups of people exploit new information technology to make collective decisions more effectively? For instance, how can 1000 donors of $20 each best decide what to do with $20,000? Is one-person/one-vote really the best way?

Smartocracy was funded by Wallace Global Fund and Threshold Foundation to re-grant $12,500 to an independent media project, using our "social network for decision-making" to collectively decide among the projects submitted. We're raising additional money of which at least $2,500 is assured.

We hope to demonstrate to foundations the value of engaging networks of smart people in their decisions. If this goes well, it will demonstrate that we can help them make better decisions, and spend less money doing it, and we'll hopefully get other funding to do more. And we think there are lots of other interesting uses.

Democracy has a fundamental problem, namely that "one-person/one-vote" guarantees that the wisest among us will be devalued, in favor of the least-informed. Here, participants have equal weight, not in voting, but in deciding who to give their votes to. Instead of "one person/ one vote", it's "one person/ ten votes to give away".

Details

Smartocracy is an experiment in "augmented democracy", a meritocratic social network for collective decision-making. Each participant gets 10 votes to give away, and gets to exercise those votes given to them.

We think it can be a simple but powerful new way to make collective decisions of all kinds meritocratically, especially for decisions where "one-person/one-vote" is too blunt.

The first official use will be to grant $15,000 to the best of an open selection of proposals submitted online.

Funding is from challenge grants from Threshold Foundation and Wallace Global Fund. The project is an initiative of Brad deGraf and Media Venture Collective. Here's the proposal that was funded.

Smartocracy is a dead-simple social network, where a link from User A to User B is effectively a "proxy assignment" of one vote. In giving User B a proxy, User A is designating them as someone they trust to make good decisions.

Participation is by invitation (aka proxy assignment) from another participant.

Each participant gets an equal number of votes (initially 10) for each decision to be made, to be exercised not by them but by their proxies. That simple change, from voting to delegating your vote, creates meritocracy in an equitable, natural way. The most highly respected participants are by definition on more people's lists.

Any unexercised votes (e.g. if a participant doesn't have time or doesn't feel qualified) cascade to the proxies of the non-voter, until they hit an actual voter, who exercises them all.

Each use can be "domain specific", i.e. proxies can be assigned differently depending on the subject area of the decision to be made.

This approach combines the best of direct and representative democracy and creates a true meritocracy where merit is decided at the individual level, but aggregated for collective use.

Information technology makes this possible. New social-networking software makes it easy to allow any user to identify those they trust most, to make that information useful online (anonymously of course), and to use it to make collective decisions.

We are past our beta phase (see the first few votes under Open Votes), and are officially accepting submissions for funding (the last entry under Open Votes).

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