The following was a class report done together with Valkyrie Savage where we compared my idea for voting described in the previous post with others similar ideas we found around. This idea is envisioned as a backend for the massive online collaborative decision making system already described. Please comment below if we missed something or understood something wrong.

Abstract

We designed a voting scheme which allows a group of people to better decide on a common opinion about an issue. Currently, the most used approach is to simply count number of votes against and for, while not taking into account people who do not cast a vote. Our approach is to have each person define delegates whose votes will be counted when he/she does not vote him/herself. In this way we get a social network, a trust network, between users which can be used to transitively compute missing votes. We believe such a result better represents the will of the group.

Keep reading

One more old document explaining technical background of the voting system presented in the previous post. Historically it was made few years before the ideas of the previous post, so it does not describe all the properties needed for it. But it does explain how to achieve that just a smaller number of people have to vote and you can still have some understanding what is the opinion of the whole population of a group. This is a necessary property when you want to vote often and on many different topics. We cannot assume that all members of the group will have time and/or knowledge to decide on all those questions, but we believe that they at least know who in their social network is capable of making such a decision and at the same time share their values. So they can delegate voting on this particular questions to them.

Keep reading