Prototyping group decision making with automatic delegation

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.