Community-Driven Policy and Voting Platform Development
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Hi voting theory forum folks,
I'm interested in organizing an open project to develop a citizen-driven policy proposal and voting platform. The goal is to coordinate grassroots community action and democratic decision-making by supporting structured deliberation and consensus building in a highly transparent and user-friendly context.
Yes, this is idealistic. And yes, similar efforts have existed in various forms—but I think there's still massive potential for a platform that can get it right: flexible, extensible, and designed from the ground up not to implode under the weight of its own idealism.
This would be a bottom-up, modular tool for civic coordination, starting at the local/community level, with potential for broader applications. I’d love to hear thoughts, critiques, or help in getting this off the ground.
CORE GOALS:
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Support community-scale policy proposals with deliberation and structured decision-making.
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Integrate flexible voting algorithms with open performance data and modular implementation.
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Ensure security, transparency, and usability across political and organizational contexts.
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Create a platform that enables ongoing civic engagement, not just isolated votes.
TENTATIVE FEATURES:
Voting System Infrastructure:
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A database of vetted voting algorithms with metadata: performance metrics, theoretical properties, use cases.
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“Drop-in” voting modules for proposals, elections, organizational decisions, etc.
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Transparent, publishable results, exportable for researchers or media.
User and Participation System:
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Location-based registration for relevance to local initiatives.
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User profiles with optional transparency of voting history or engagement.
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Track record system to encourage accountability and trust.
Policy and Engagement Tools:
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Boards for drafting, amending, and discussing policy proposals.
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Following/subscribing to issues, proposals, or users. Tags to enable navigation of policies by topic, etc.
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Alerts/updates when votes open, proposals pass, or amendments are made.
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Explanatory/educational resources, or sandbox tools to test out or simulate voting methods (making such a sandbox accessible to lay people seems ambitious in itself, and would probably be a separate module).
Known Challenges:
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Voter verification: balancing identity validation, security, and anonymity.
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Scalability: supporting everything from small groups to large-scale initiatives.
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Cognitive load: designing a UX that doesn’t overwhelm non-experts with voting theory.
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Discussion quality: avoiding trolling, astroturfing, or misinformation while keeping the platform open.
Next Steps / Feedback Welcome:
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I’d love to gather feedback from others here on:
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Technical or design risks from a voting theory or civic tech lens.
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What platforms or tools already exist that we might integrate with or learn from.
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Who might be interested in helping sketch an MVP or prototype.
If there’s interest, I’d be happy to help coordinate an initial call or async brainstorming doc. This is an ambitious project that has the potential to explode in complexity, so I think it would be essential to have clear guiding principles. One vision is the concept of a “virtual town hall”—that would roughly be the goal. I look forward to hearing anybody's thoughts.
I think we have an opportunity to build something that makes a difference by enabling communities to make clear, larger-scale, and good-faith collective agreements. While this would not be an authoritative platform, I think it would help in coordinating civic engagements with policy proposals and, if done right with enough public support, could have downstream influence in actual political decisions. Thanks for reading.
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