The Features
The final product will have a number of distinct features, each created with the intention of helping communities to solve different types of problems. Each feature relates to an aspect of self-organisation, collective decision-making, and the allocation of scarce resources.
Below is the current plan for the set of features in the Forum app. Please note that this is subject to change and development, particularly based on feedback from organisations that participate in trials.
This app is centred upon a voting mechanism called QV, or “Quadratic Voting”. Click here to learn the general principles of this system.
Single Vote
Use this to collect feedback for a single decision or related set of decisions, independent of other past or future votes. This is the quickest and easiest kind of engagement to use, and most closely reflects a ‘normal’ election.
To use this feature, either create or join a poll, and cast your allocation of votes before the stated deadline. The set of voters forms a temporary decentralised system, which uses a consensus algorithm to process votes and show users the results.
Group Dynamics
Create a group for your club, company or other organisation. The group feature enables organisations of all shapes and sizes to make decisions in an ongoing manner, which maximises flexibility and fairness over time.
One weakness of traditional voting is that it treats each vote as a separate event. This effectively treats each vote as being equally important to all the participants. In reality, you might not care much about most decisions within a group, because they don’t affect you much, or you don’t know enough to give an informed opinion. In these cases, you might only cast a few votes, and save up your tokens.
For issues where you know more, and care more about the outcome, it’s only fair that your votes should carry more weight. This is achieved by ‘budgeting over time’. Not budgeting money, but voting tokens, which are translated into votes. See ‘What is QV?‘ for details.
The end result is that people can save and spend tokens dynamically, exerting greater influence on collective decisions where they know a lot and care a lot. When a voter doesn’t know or care very much, they leave most of the decision-making to others. This does a far better job of harnessing the collective intelligence of a group, than always weighting people’s votes equally.
Resource allocation
Often, the market forces of supply and demand provide an effective way to distribute resources. Under this approach, people buy and sell items until everyone has what they want. However, there may be times when it’s not appropriate to use a market-based approach. In these circumstances, the ‘resource allocation’ feature will prove most useful.
This feature invites people (either within an existing group or in a one-off allocation) to rate how much they want each of a set of items. ‘Items’ should be understood in the broadest possible sense – these could be physical objects, NFTs, time slots, or stalls at an event. It could even be used to find a fair allocation of tasks, risks and responsibilities.
Once everyone in a group has submitted their preferences, the system uses an evolutionary simulation, to find the best possible distribution of items. You’ll have the option to choose how whether the system should be more egalitarian (the least well-off are prioritised), versus utilitarian (the greatest good for the greatest number).
Open Forum
This is where the magic happens. This will be the last main feature to be developed, as it requires much stronger security than the others. With this feature, you can create and vote on polls at the national level. It’s a bit like a giant group that anyone in the country can participate in.
The concept is partly inspired by the blockchains that power cryptocurrencies, but that’s where the similarities end. Firstly, there’s no way for anyone to make money with Forum, so you can wave goodbye to crypto scams. Second, the Open Forum is light to run and doesn’t consume large amounts of computing power, like Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrencies.
This part of the Forum universe is more akin to the Wild West, or an unregulated social media platform. The Forum philosophy is centred around self-organisation, so even if we could regulate how people use it, this would be unethical. The Open Forum will, however, have options for users to customise what polls they see, and other parts of their experience on the app.
By running across millions of minds for several years, the Open Forum will provide the perfect environment for generating new ideas. For taking the best aspects of diverse schools of thought, and integrating valuable information from the lived experiences of all people in Britain. For bringing the collective wisdom of a nation to bear on traditional political structures. The aim is not to overthrow ‘the system’, but rather to build a system that works for all of us.