Prototyping group decision making with automatic delegation

lonk
2022-05-14T15:08:24Z

Hey folks,

I want to prototype a tool to help groups of people make decisions using a new decision making mechanism.

We have two systems of democratic decision making that have major downsides:

1. Direct democracy - everyone votes on every issue. Downside: not everyone has the time and the necessary expertise to vote on every issue.

2. Representative democracy - everyone votes who will represent them and the representatives vote on every issue. The downside is the corruption - the representatives may not represent the best interest of those who entrusted them.

The idea I want to explore is a hybrid of the two systems:

Like in a direct democracy you can vote on every issue.

If you do not vote on a given issue, then your vote is automatically delegated to people who voted like you in the past.

To test this out I want to build a website [1] where anyone can create a group and invite others to the group. The group members can create proposals and vote on them to make a decision.

For the idea to be tested the group needs to make many decisions over time (ie, not one-off polls like strawpoll.*). Only then can it take advantage of the delegation based on “voted like you in the past”.

The details of the design will depend on the use-case:

How should the group roles work? Would it be enough to have owner & member roles?

How to invite to the group - by sending email or a link.

Should every member be able to propose options or just the creator or the vote?

Should the voting be closed automatically after some time or by hand?

Do you delegate implicitly or explicitly - ie, have a vote option to delegate.

Do you vote for a single option or can you rank options in the order of your preferences?

Open ballot vs secret ballot?

Some ideas for use-cases:

Choose the next “team-building” activity at work.

Make content moderation decisions.

Which book to read next in a book club. Maybe transfer the list of books and the votes from the previous vote to the next.

Make and record company decisions by shareholders. In this case you would want to weigh the votes based on share ownership.

I think starting with a specific use-case in mind is a better strategy than trying to build a generic tool.

What do you think? What would you use such a tool for?

[1] - I will likely make it part of my existing project https://linklonk.com/ unless I find an available good-sounding domain name.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tech/11ay/prototyping_group_decision_making_with_automatic_delegation

Votes: 12

Comments: 13