Blogs – Ethelo

Use Liquid Trust for Next Level Liquid Democracy

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 06:03:47 +0000

Use Liquid Trust for Next Level Liquid Democracy

When any group is faced with a large decision or set of decisions, it’s important to ensure that those decisions are being made by the people with the most knowledge and experience on each issue. This is where liquid democracy shines as an example of effective decision-making.

Liquid democracy is a digitally-enabled democratic voting system that empowers participants to either vote on issues directly or to delegate their voting power to someone who has more knowledge or experience in a particular area.

Ethelo’s unique decision algorithm incorporates a wide variety of factors for complex group decision-making. It also incorporates the ability to support Liquid Trust, which we believe will push the boundaries of liquid democracy further than they’ve ever gone before.

Note to Reader: The Ethelo platform does not yet include Liquid Trust interfaces, but the data architecture is in place and we are looking forward to adding this important extension soon. Here is a taste of what is to come!

Building Trust

When there’s an important decision to be made, you want to know that the very best people are making it and taking other viewpoints into account as needed. This is true whether you are trying to decide on the best plan for a new project in your town, or about the strategic priorities for your company. In many important decisions, the knowledge of who to trust can be more important than detailed knowledge about the specific decision at hand.

For the rest of this blog post, let’s assume that the decision at hand is the design of a new community center. There are several general issues on the table, including performing arts facilities, art gallery, and gymnasium facilities. Under each of those issues, there are various options – for example, under the ‘gym’ issue we might have three options; no gym, a small gym, and a large gym. It’s the community’s job to evaluate all the options to decide what the center should look like.

If a community member was to vote directly using Ethelo (not relying on any delegates to help them), they would weigh the issues and score the options using tools that might look something like this:

To see how this might work, check out this video example of direct voting for a community centre.

As you can see, direct Ethelo voting has multiple layers and many individual questions to be answered within those layers. While it sounds great to say that each person should be able to make their own decision on all these issues and options, the reality is that most people do not have the expertise – or in many cases, the time. This is where liquid democracy comes in, by allowing participants to select delegates they trust, and assigning them influence in different areas.

Unlike a representative democracy, or even traditional liquid democracy, a participant can have as many delegates as they want, with different trust levels for each. Ethelo enables a participant to “build” their vote, by merging the votes of their delegates into a single vote, with each delegate’s vote given a weight depending on how much they were trusted.

But, Ethelo doesn’t stop at allowing participants in a decision to have multiple delegates. It also allows participants to be very specific and granular about where and how different delegates exercise influence within the decision itself.

As noted above, decisions in Ethelo are usually partitioned into distinct issues. Participants can identify a different group of delegates for each issue, and score (on a scale) how much they trust each delegate’s expertise on that issue. If they participant wants to get really detailed, they can even score delegates on their expertise in applying different evaluative criteria to the options themselves.

There’s no backroom wheeling and dealing going on — everything’s out in the open and everyone has access to the same information. Each delegate has a rank and influence score that everyone else can see. Moreover, delegate votes automatically become public, so everyone in the network can hold them accountable to make good decisions – and withdraw their trust in them instantly if they don’t!

How It Works

The beauty of Ethelo is that all of the trust-building calculations happen behind the scenes and the user’s experience is seamless.

When building a trust network for a decision, each person can choose delegates based on how much they trust that delegate’s expertise on a particular decision – and more specifically, the issues and criteria within that decision.

Let’s look at “issue-based” trust. In the community center example, the ‘municipal office’ issue might contain three options: a conference room only, a full suite of offices, or no offices. Rather than voting directly on the options, a participant might assign trust levels to three delegates for the municipal office issue. Another user might assign different trust levels to those same three delegates, or choose five completely different delegates. The possibilities are endless, but the result is still the same — Ethelo will look at the votes provided by the delegates on the options under each issue, and build a vote for each participant by weighting each delegate’s vote in proportion to how much they were trusted by the participant, and combining them into a single composite vote.

This allows for very nuanced delegation, with different delegates having different amounts of influence on different issues within a decision, based on their perceived expertise.

For an even more fine-tuned approach, Ethelo can allow participants to vote using “criteria-based” trust, in which they rank delegates on their expertise in different evaluation criteria as well as issues.

For example, in our community center decision, a participant votes directly by evaluating each option on a scale. However, it is possible for participants to evaluate options in a much more granular way, but looking at how each option performs under a variety of different criteria; does the option address climate change, does it support health and fitness etc. In the following diagram, we see “small gym” being evaluated on 6 different criteria:

When doing criteria-based voting, the participant must also weigh the relative importance of the various criteria.

These weights, combined with the options scores under the various criteria, allow Ethelo to calculate a total score for each option. Using these three points of information (issue weights, option scores, and criteria weights), a participant can create their direct vote.

Trust voting allows participants to skip the evaluation of options, and rely instead on a group of delegates to apply those criteria to the options on their behalf. In that case, the participant assigns delegates different levels of trust in applying different criteria. So, a participant might identify three delegates who are knowledgeable about addressing climate change, and assign a trust level to the three delegates under that criteria.

In this way, a participant is spared the task – and challenge – of applying different criteria to all the options. They need only weigh how important the criteria are (in their view) and assign trust levels to a set of delegates based on their understanding of those criteria. This is sufficient to vote.

The best part of the Ethelo approach to voting is that the underlying calculations happen instantly and are completely invisible to the end user. All that a participant has to do is move various sliders along a scale from 0 to 100 and watch their votes change in real-time on the screen.

Next Level Democracy

Trust Networks approach allow Participants to engage intelligently in decision-making processes without being experts in the substance of the decision at hand. Instead, they can rely on social knowledge such reputation, relationships, statements, and shared connections. People are extremely effective at reaching conclusions about trust based on social factors.

Current models of representative democracy rely heavily on this social wisdom, but it is undermined by the highly concentrated and general power of the representatives they elect. With Trust Networks, Ethelo allows the selection of many and diverse experts, and allocations of influence to those experts in a much more granular and directed manner.

The future of eDemocracy will be built on trust. Trust Networks, to be exact!

Press Release: Ethelo Acquires Citizen Budget

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 05:56:04 +0000

Press Release: Ethelo Acquires Citizen Budget

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 15, 2019

Ethelo and Open North are excited to announce that Ethelo has acquired “Citizen Budget”- Canada’s leading municipal budget consultation tool.

Launched in 2011 by Open North, the Citizen Budget simulator has been used by over 100 Canadian municipalities for their public budget engagements. The interactive online tool has enabled cities of all sizes, from all regions in Canada, to dramatically improve public engagement in one of their most important responsibilities; financial planning.

Through this acquisition, municipalities and other organizations can now benefit from the integration of Citizen Budget with Ethelo’s advanced algorithms and democratic decision-making tools. Ethelo is already used by governments in Canada and abroad for planning, policy development and budgeting. The combined offering will form the most comprehensive suite of online public engagement tools on the market, providing a ‘one-stop shop’ for local governments.

Says John Richardson, CEO of Ethelo: “Democracy is at a crossroads; voter confidence is at an all-time low and the challenges facing government are complex. Public servants working hard to create positive change need technologies that can create public trust and buy-in. The addition of Citizen Budget to Ethelo’s suite of participatory decision tools will bring citizen engagement in budgeting and public policy to a new level in Canada and abroad.”

Ethelo plans to expand the Citizen Budget platform to include social dialogue and tools for real-time results and collective budget analysis. The improved platform will better enable organizations to gather insightful public input on financial planning and budgeting. It will also empower residents and stakeholders, who are often unable to participate in important decision-making that affects them and their communities.

“At a time when cities are facing increased pressures to balance their budgets, we are excited to see Ethelo take on the next phase of Citizen Budget. With its advanced decision-making algorithm and array of powerful public engagement tools Ethelo is uniquely positioned to grow the reach and impact of Citizen Budget.”

– Jean-Noé Landry, Executive Director of Open North.

Open North and Ethelo have entered into a cooperation agreement to support this transition and offer complementary services to governments and organizations around the world.

About Ethelo

Ethelo helps its clients offer more transparency and participation on the most contentious public issues in a way that creates better outcomes and stronger buy-in. Its sophisticated participatory decision platform has been used by all levels of government as well as the private and non-profit sector ensure inclusive, fair and transparent decision-making processes and defuse opposition. Ethelo’s unique algorithms and ability to solve complex problems while building support has been described by the Canadian government as “an exceptional advance that is clearly ahead of competitors.”

About Open North

Open North is Canada’s leading not-for-profit organization working to open up data, government, community engagement, and technologies. Open North works with Canada’s most innovative and connected cities to create open smart cities. Through its interdisciplinary applied research, Open North brings international practices to local communities while connecting local communities, governments, and partners to international networks and communities of practice.

Curious to see what’s new in Citizen Budget?

Check out this page or contact us for a demo via the form below.

The Theory Behind Ethelo

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 05:47:25 +0000

The Theory Behind Ethelo

Ethelo Theory

“Ethelo” is a word from ancient Greek that means “intention” or “willpower.” The theory underlying ethelo is that complex problems can be solved by identifying decisions that will focus the disparate intentions of unique individuals into single unified collective intention and action.

Ethelo theory treats each participant’s latent desires as a quantifiable energy that can be modelled across different decision scenarios. An ideal group decision, in this approach, is one in which the greatest amount of intentional energy is harnessed from the group. Importantly, in identifying an outcome that attracts the greatest support, the Ethelo theory does not simply sum the individual levels of satisfaction but also looks to emergent factors such as fairness or inequality in the distribution of that satisfaction.

A “strong” decision in Ethelo theory is one that optimizes the available intentional energy by looking at both individual as well as collective factors such as fairness. Such decisions are “efficient” in ensuring that the greatest amount of potential intentional energy is conserved in the transition from the individual to the collective.

A Theory of Fairness

Ethelo theory is based on the work of John Rawls, a 20th-century philosopher and social contract theorist. Rawls wrote about the importance of fairness in democracy. He devised a number of thought experiments such as the famous original position in which everyone is impartially situated as equals behind a veil of ignorance as they negotiate the social contract.

Central to Rawls’ thinking was the balance that must be struck between personal satisfaction and ideas of fairness rooted in the distribution of satisfaction. As a matter of first principle, he argued, everyone will accept some degree of inequality if it means we do better collectively as a result – “a rising tide raises all boats.” Rawls’ conclusions about the degree of acceptable inequality, and how to strike the balance, have been the topic of much argument since. However, his basic framing of the social contract is an enduring legacy and has been described as the most important work in 20th-century political philosophy.

Rawls’ “Theory of Justice” was published in 1971, and “Justice as Fairness” was published in 1985. His philosophical intuition on the importance of fairness has since been validated empirically in the social sciences under the general heading of “social preferences” and “inequity aversion.” Studies show that people will reject unfair outcomes even when they would otherwise benefit. Likewise, they will support outcomes they dislike if the process was seen as fair. This powerful phenomenon has been documented in both human and animal experiments.

Ethelo is a practical solution to the philosophical and social challenge of making group decisions that balance individual factors and collective factors such as inequity aversion.

The Space of Possibility

Ethelo theory imagines, for each decision, that there is a “space” that contains all the possible outcomes for that decision. Each potential outcome is like a point in this space. For example, we might imagine the space is like the surface of a table; outcomes that are similar would be closer together on the table, outcomes that are dissimilar are far apart. Note this may be a misleading example as the space of conceivable possibility is more like an n-dimensional network than a continuous two-dimensional space. But it is imaginable and mathematically possible to find some projection on a two-dimensional space like a table.

Over this flat table of potential outcomes, imagine a rolling hillside. This hillside is a function (the “influent function”), which represents a person’s support for each of the potential outcomes. That is, for each outcome (= point on the table), the height of a participant’s influent function (= the rolling hill) represents the amount of support they would have for that outcome. If the function over a point is high, the support for that option is high, and conversely, low.

Making a collective decision, then, is a matter of performing an operation that integrates the individual influent functions across the group to find a specific outcome that will optimize the support of all the individuals.

Modelling Intention

Ethelo uses web-based tools to gather information that allow us to model the influent function of each participant. Rather than trying to gather information about each potential outcome (generally impossible as there can be millions in complex decision) we can represent a complex decision as a much smaller set of key sub-decisions. We use these web tools to measure a participant’s response to the sub-decisions, and use that information to extrapolate their level of support for all the outcomes. The Ethelo toolset gathers information on the different decision-junctures in the overall evaluation process.

Ethelo takes the approach that the preferences of a group can be represented in the same way as that for an individual; as an influent function over a space of outcomes.

Optimizing Collective Energy

The “collective” influent function is created by aggregating the individual functions in a way that balances individual factors (such as personal satisfaction) with collective factors (such as fairness in the distribution of satisfaction). In this way, Ethelo incorporates the thinking of John Rawls and the importance of fairness.

What makes Ethelo unique is that support for a potential outcome is viewed, not just as the sum of the various individuals’ support for that outcome, but also as deeply dependent on the distribution of support for that outcome. If the support is highly polarized, then there will be internal resistance to execution of the decision and it will be a “weak” decision. That is, the “intentional energy” behind a polarizing outcome will be reduced as a result of the polarization. On the other hand, if people in a group experience similar levels of support for an outcome, then it will be perceived as fair and the resulting intentional energy will increase (or decrease) due to the unity of sentiment.

Ethelo Stated Simply

Stated simply, Ethelo is a prioritization algorithm that harnesses the collective wisdom of a group. It breaks a decision problem down into a series of stages and smaller, component decisions and distributes the task of solving those smaller problems across the group. Using this information, it is able to model levels of support for all possible outcomes – and it searches to find an outcome that will maximize the strength of group support by maximizing the average support and minimizing unfairness in the distribution of that support.

Ethelo on the Blockchain

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 05:36:04 +0000

Ethelo on the Blockchain

More Than Money: While bitcoin has seen many ups and downs, blockchain, the technology behind it, is steadily growing.

For months, talk around bitcoin and so called cryptocurrencies has dominated the financial and technology sectors. Last year, the value of bitcoin reached an all time high at more than $16,000 for an individual coin and even those unfamiliar with tech or finance wanted in on the action. It was quite the feat considering bitcoin had been valued at only $1,000 just nine months earlier.

But since the start of the new year, bitcoin’s meteoric rise has come to a halt. The oft buzzed about cryptocurrency hit a six-week low in January and the value of the coin has dropped as low as $7,000.

As a result, many are heralding the end of the mysterious and misunderstood cryptocurrency. But while bitcoin’s fate is hard to predict, the technology behind bitcoin — blockchain — is clearly destined for greatness.

In addition to disrupting the financial world, blockchain technology is being used in numerous industries from healthcare to education. Last month, Coindesk, a website that specializes in covering all things blockchain, reported that Apple Inc. recently filed for a patent that indicates the company is interested in blockchain technology. This move from the technology giant is a sign that more widespread use of blockchain is on the horizon.

Blockchain is essentially an irrevocable ledger. Data or any kind of information stored on this ledger is stored on blocks which are linked. The data stored in the blocks is dependent on each block in the chain and can only be altered if all the blocks are altered.

Recognizing the power of this revolutionary technology, Ethelo is moving toward integrating blockchain in our group decision-making technology. In the summer of 2018, we will be publishing Ethelo on Ethereum as a Distributed Voting App and Oracle.

Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based platform and operating system. With this technology, we’ll be able to store votes and other decision-critical information generated through Ethelo engagements on the blockchain.

There are a lot of benefits to integrating Ethelo with blockchain. By design, data stored via blockchain is more secure than other digital storage infrastructure because it contains a high level of encryption. That’s because the data is decentralized. Data stored on the blockchain is also safe from falsification because one block cannot be altered without altering all blocks on the chain.

Blockchain also allows for an increased amount of transparency because the data is held on open-source platforms. This means that decision-making processes conducted using blockchain will be open to the public, allowing for a greater level of trust between the parties involved.

With the integration of blockchain, Ethelo could be used for decision making in a wide variety of industries moving to the blockchain, including in the financial market, to make investment decisions. One of the main draws of blockchain are smart contracts. These contracts can be executed directly between two parties without the need for a middleman. They’re ratified via the blockchain. Ethelo’s platform can be used to make a wide range of decision and by integrating smart contracts, users would be able to evaluate several different contract scenarios before agreeing to one.

And blockchain simplifies these processes because transactions conducted with blockchain technology are automatic. It’s designed with “if X then Y” execution scripts.This can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes involved parties to reach a conclusion and for the results of decision-making engagements to be released.

Ethelo isn’t the first decision-making platform to integrate blockchain. However, unlike other voting platforms, Ethelo’s powerful and unique group decision technology will make it an important player in the development of smart contracts and other consensus-based decision-making. Better group decision-making will be critical for the many new initiatives that are developing around blockchain technology.

John Rawls and Ethelo

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 05:17:33 +0000

John Rawls and Ethelo

Ethelo draws its philosophical roots from the work of John Rawls, a 20th-century philosophy and social contract theorist.

Rawls wrote about the importance of fairness in social decision-making. He proposed a framework for analyzing democracy and justifying its existence as the basis of our society. He argued that democratic principles, even in the purest ideal of democracy, would not prevent inequality nor should they. However, he proposed that a properly constructed democracy would put a limit on the extent of that inequality.

Rawls was a social contract theorist, and followed a tradition of Jean Jacques Rousseau and others. The core idea of social contract theory is that the laws and rules that society imposes on individuals can only be justified if we can assume everyone in society agreed to those rules – or, rather, they would agree, if they were asked. Such an assumption is philosophically handy. However, whether it’s useful to imagine such a fiction, or whether people would agree to the current society is obviously very much in question. In time the idea lost out to ideas such as utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, who proposed a more pragmatic approach of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

Rawls’ “great idea” caused social contract theory to be pulled out of the dustbin of history, brushed off, and put on a pedestal once again. He proposed a unique new approach which created a solid ground for assuming collective agreement around a theoretical social contract – and a way to strike the balance between personal satisfaction and inequality. This was fairness, or in his words justice. His two most famous books – A Theory of Justice and Justice as Fairness, explained and expanded the idea. His approach, and centering of fairness as the key component of a valid social contract reinvigorated social contract theory and cemented Rawls’ reputation as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. How did he do it?

Rawls proposed a now famous test called the original position to justify the social contract as a frame of reference that can allow us to determine where the line between personal satisfaction and inequality should be drawn.

The Veil of Ignorance

Rawls proposed that we imagine that everyone in society is situated as “impartial equals” behind a “veil of ignorance” as they negotiate the social contract. More concretely, we should imagine all members of a society are seated at a vast conference table, as they negotiate the terms of the social contract – the laws, regulations, policies and even customs of the society. But there is a catch; no one at the table knows who they will be born as when the negotiation is done. The “veil of ignorance” prevents them from knowing what life they will live in the new society, and this enforces a risk-management approach to the negotiations.

Where does the logic of this veil of ignorance lead us? As a matter of first principle, he argued, everyone will accept some degree of inequality if it means our chance of doing better personally (even in a random draw) improves as a result. There is a benefit to all of us, he argued, when highly productive people have more resources to play with; a rising tide raises all boats. However, he said that while some level of inequality may be justified, there is a limit. A rational actor will only accept so much risk, if they don’t know who they will be born as. For example, a society that has 21% children living in poverty while an elite 1% own more than half the wealth would not survive Rawls’ analysis.

Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” test caused great debate. Certainly he did not have the last word; his “original position” has been criticized for example, for ignoring the role of society in shaping identity, preferences and relationships. There are logical inconsistencies which have been pointed out. However, his strategy for tackling the issue of fairness in social contracts evoked a powerful, intuitive resonance and became the center of debate which continues to this day. His ideas had an enormous impact on the field of social contract theory and political philosophy generally.

Rawl’s philosophical intuition on the importance of fairness has found evidentiary support in other disciplines. It has been validated empirically in the social sciences, under the general heading of “social preferences” and “inequity aversion.” Studies in game theory and behaviour economics show that people will reject unfair outcomes even when they would otherwise benefit. Likewise, they will support outcomes they dislike if the process was seen as fair. This powerful phenomenon is not limited to humans either – it has been documented in animal experiments involving monkeys, birds and other social animals.

Fairness, it seems, is a fundamental social instinct, and although we can come up with words to describe it, it precedes language itself. Certainly it is deeply embedded in our expectations of the rules of society.

Ethelo and Rawls

Ethelo is a group decision methodology based on the idea of fairness, and draws directly from Rawl’s theory and his “veil of ignorance” approach.

Imagine the negotiating table, at which the social contract – or indeed, any group decision – is being negotiated. On the table, is a stack of all the potential social contracts. There may be a very large number – we would include every variation and permutation of possible agreements. As we go through the stack of contracts together, everyone turns a colour which indicates their satisfaction with the contract in front of them. We cannot see their face – but we can see the colours of everyone in the room turns as they go through the stack of contracts.

We can turn the idea of the veil of ignorance on its head, and solve the problem in reverse by imagining a special twist. Instead of an imaginary negotiation where we are sitting at the table, not knowing what body we will be born into, instead, imagine a room of anonymous people changing colour as they work through the stack of contracts. That is, each possible social contract is represented as a distribution of profiles across the colour spectrum. Our search is not for the ideal social contract – but for the optimal distribution of colour. We are looking for an ideal distribution of colour.

This twist is an equivalent situation to Rawl’s problem, but one that is easier to solve. By imagining different contracts as different colour distributions, we can more easily compare them – and use mathematical and computational tools for that comparison.

For example, imagine two social contracts with exactly the same AVERAGE satisfaction;

Contract One

Contract Two

Why? Two reasons;

Personal risk: The odds of being quite unhappy are higher in the first contract. The first contract has a higher number of very happy people, to be true – but the chance of being one of those very happy people is not high.
Collective effectiveness; The odds of being able to execute on the decision effectively, and achieve a good outcome is much lower in the first outcome than in the second. This is key. In the first outcome, there will be division and polarization. Those who did oppose the outcome will resist it – and they won’t go away. This will act as a drag on the energy of the group. On the other hand, the second contract will have much greater unity – a sense that everyone is roughly in agreement, and that the outcome is fair. This might also be framed in terms of risk; the risk of failure or of problems not recognized by the majority, is higher in the first.

Scenario Analysis

In a normal voting scenario, there are only a limited number of discrete potential outcomes put in front of a group. Imagine Brexit for example, or a US election. Voters have little influence over the choices they are faced with; their only role is to select a favourite. This naturally leads to highly differentiated options, and in the results, the voting group splits. No matter what the outcome, there will be winners and losers. In such a situation, majority vote will govern and minorities will lose. However democracy doesn’t mean majority vote. It means one person, one vote – that people should have equal influence. And, implicitly – equal satisfaction with the outcome – or as equal as possible.

Majority vote is simply an aggregation methodology – and there are other approaches to the aggregation of participant preferences that can lead to better outcomes. When group size is small, many organizations prefer consensus achieved through discussion. However, such an approach does not scale easily. The key breakthrough of Ethelo, which is scalable, is to lift the hood on the generation of choices, and the logical structure of the decision itself.

At the heart of the Ethelo approach is the idea of scenario analysis. Instead of just a few potential outcomes, Ethelo conceives of a group decision as consisting of a set of decision parameters. That is, a decision can be broken down into a set of smaller decisions revolving around key ingredients such as options, issues, criteria and constraints which can be recombined in a multitude of ways to simulate all possible outcomes. In this approach, rather than just one or two potential outcomes, there can be a vast number – all slight variations of each other, covering the whole spectrum of possibility.

The Ethelo platform is designed to enable custom workflows for different decision types. It enables participants to collaborate on solving all these smaller problems, discussing them as they go. Each participant comes up with their own favourite solution – but in doing so, provides the Ethelo platform with enough information to model their preferences across the whole range of possible scenarios. Then, it searches through all those scenarios to find outcomes that will have a fair distribution of support, that that maximizes support while minimizing polarization.

The Importance of Fairness

The observant reader may have noticed; we have left one question unanswered. That is, what is the “ideal” distribution of colour across the group, or in other words, satisfaction? How can we know in advance which possible outcome would strike the right balance of fairness and personal satisfaction for participants? Some people may be more risk tolerant than others for example – more willing to accept outcomes with sharp divisions between winners and losers. Indeed, this was a criticism of Rawls. But this challenge can also be solved. We can simply ask people directly.

When Ethelo undertakes its scenario analysis it looks at each potential outcome as having two key characteristics; average satisfaction, which it seeks to maximize, and a second characteristic which it seeks to minimize. That second characteristic is inequality, or in mathematical terms variance. Variance describes how polarized a distribution is. For example, if 50% of voters completely oppose an outcome, and 50% completely support it, then variance is maximized. However, if everyone is left feeling exactly equally happy, variance is minimized.

In the decision language of Ethelo, the relative weighting between average satisfaction and variance in satisfaction is called fairness. As Rawls would have observed – a typical participant will accept some variance if it increases the average level of satisfaction (and their chance of personal satisfaction). And just as participants can use Ethelo’s custom tools to vote on options and weigh the importance of issues, they can also use sliders or other graphical interfaces to indicate how important fairness is to them.

It is therefore possible to treat fairness itself as one of the decision parameters that participants give feedback on, alongside the options, issues etc. We can find the ideal fairness for a group for a given decision. This also allows an enormous amount of flexibility. Rather than assuming that all groups will warrant the same amount of fairness in all decisions – fairness levels can be customized on a case-by-case basis.

Rawls provided a test for the validity of society and the rules by which it operates. That test showed how far we had to go – and also a framework for how to get there. The answer can be found in democracy – but a better designed democracy than we have now.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is perhaps the most successful theory of modern political philosophy. Its great benefit is its simplicity; “the greatest good for the greatest number.” However, this simple maxim hides some mathematical ambiguities. Should we be aiming for the maximum TOTAL amount of good, which means maximizing both the average good and the number of people? Or should we maximize the average good – in which case a small number of very happy people would be better than a large but slightly unhappier group? Or should we aim to improve the lot of the least well-off people – maximizing the minimal utility?

The beauty of utilitarianism is how nicely it conforms to rules of mathematics, and of measurement. It can be easily applied by large, modern bureaucracies to measures of income, health or productivity. However, it subtly fails to capture the idea of fairness. The author Ursula LeGuis captured this in her short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where a very happy village had a dark secret; all the unhappiness was carried by a sick, imprisoned child. The village of Omelas had maximized its utility; but at a great moral cost. Totalitarianism, which punishes dissent to enforce a maximum happiness, highlights a similar utilitarian dilemma.

Rawls’ Theory of Fairness successfully responded to these challenges facing utilitarianism. However, it nonetheless lacked the easy mathematical applicability of utilitarianism. But that is because Rawls was not a mathematician. By using a two-part analysis of utility – one that measures both average utility AND variance in utility – in combination with scenario analysis, we can bring the rigour of utilitarianism to social contract theory and systematize fairness.

Ethelo and the mathematical framework underlying it is in fact an ethical framework. It does not look merely at outcomes, like utilitarianism. It does not look at an internal application of a universal moral imperative like Kant’s deontological framework. Rather, it understands the good as the fair expression of collective intention, that is, an expression that minimizes dissonance and maximizes happiness. It is a kind of utilitarianism, but it doesn’t look directly at what is “happiness”. Rather, it focuses on providing a fair process for people to analyze decisions collectively and select an optimal outcome. So it is a form of procedural ethics, the rules of a deliberative negotiation around a social contract.

Variance in satisfaction:

. What would make an ideal distribution of colour? Well, this is a matter of taste. Different people have different tolerance for risk. However, we can agree on certain rules for example;

The value of a distribution is not merely about how many people support an outcome, or even the average level of support. We also care about the distribution of that support.

eDemocracy for Cities Gets a Big Boost

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 04:32:32 +0000

eDemocracy for Cities Gets a Big Boost

Press Release: July 17, 2019

Ethelo has received a $300,000 Social Innovation Fund grant from the McConnell Family Foundation to advance eDemocracy in cities across Canada.

The two-year grant is provided through McConnell’s Cities for People initiative:

The aim of the Cities for People initiative is to support inclusive urban innovation that contributes to more resilient and livable cities for all people. Urbanization represents one of the greatest challenges of our times, particularly because of rising social inequalities, unprecedented demographic shifts, and environmental degradation. We must make fundamental changes to the way we think about and build cities if they are to become places where all people can thrive.

The award will accelerate Ethelo’s innovative approach to systemic impact and democratic change, according to Ethelo’s founder and CEO John Richardson.

“This generous grant will ramp up Ethelo’s capacity to support local governments in engaging community members in critical decisions that affect them,” says Richardson. “From participatory budgeting to citizen-directed policy-making, a new, highly empowered approach to civic engagement is emerging, and Ethelo is glad to be a part of it.””This generous grant will ramp up Ethelo’s capacity to support local governments in engaging community members in critical decisions that affect them,” says Richardson. “From participatory budgeting to citizen-directed policy-making, a new, highly empowered approach to civic engagement is emerging, and Ethelo is glad to be a part of it.”

The funding will be directed towards Ethelo’s work promoting democracy in local communities and increasing access to tools such as Citizen Budget. Citizen Budget, Canada’s leading budget simulator, was acquired by Ethelo in spring 2019.

About the McConnell Family Foundation:

The McConnell Family Foundation is one of Canada’s oldest and largest private foundations, and dedicated to innovative approaches to social, cultural, economic and environmental challenges.

About Ethelo:

Ethelo is a social enterprise comprised of two partner organizations; Ethelo Decisions, the technology company behind the Ethelo collaboration platform, and Ethelo Democracy, the founding nonprofit dedicated to online participatory democracy.

Curious to find out more about what Ethelo does? Click here for to learn more.

Climate Leader Ben West Joins eDemocracy Solutions and Launches Carbon Budget Platform

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 04:09:42 +0000

Climate Leader Ben West Joins eDemocracy Solutions and Launches Carbon Budget Platform

After nearly two decades of working on the issue of climate change, outspoken campaign organizer Ben West has now taken on a new role as Executive Director that he believes could help play a critical role in untangling some of our most polarizing issues.

“The climate crisis has its roots in the crisis facing our democracy,” said West. “We’ve had all the technology and understanding we have needed to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas pollution decades ago. However, our current democratic processes have failed to facilitate meaningful change. A breakthrough in participatory democracy technology and effective community engagement could be a game-changer.”

eDemocracy Solutions is the non-profit sister organization of Ethelo Decisions, which is a technology company founded by Ashoka Fellow John Richardson to facilitate participatory decision making for complex problems. This service has been used by governments, companies and non-profit organizations around the world and has won various awards for its work. The technology is based on a patented algorithm that harnesses the intelligence of crowds to identify decisions with broad support by attempts to move away from outcomes with winners and losers. Instead, the focus is on finding the least polarizing results and therefore Ethelo helps policymakers obtain the social license to tackle contentious issues.

“We are very excited to welcome Ben West to our team,” said Richardson. “eDemocracy is the reason why Ethelo was created, and Ben brings a unique mix of skills and experience that will be a real game-changer. The global eDemocracy movement is one of the few solutions to the problems facing modern democracy. and we believe the impact will be seen through the carbon budget platform and other new eDemocracy campaigns,” said Richardson.

Ben’s role will be about focusing the Ethelo technology for eDemocracy solutions. Governments at all levels, as well as elected politicians and candidates in both Canada and abroad, have used Ethelo to conduct participatory decision processes on contentious public issues. The technology has proved highly effective at engaging large, diverse groups in solving complex social and environmental problems and finding solutions that are optimized to avoid scenarios with winners and losers, “And that,” according to West, “is the key to eDemocracy’s potential for change, this is a platform designed to reduce conflict and find the solutions with the best chance of achieving social license.”

Ben will be a speaker at this week’s EcoCity World Summit in Vancouver where he will be talking about climate communications and effective public engagement. To mark the start of this event eDemocracy Solutions will be launching a new carbon budget platform built on the foundation of Ethelo’s participatory decision-making technology. This public engagement process will include micro-targeted strategic communications campaigns tailored to increase public participation to a level of statistical accuracy.

“Municipalities and other levels of government have adopted climate emergency declarations and aggressive GHG reduction targets. However, they have a major challenge before them to identify the right mix of policies and incentives that will have the social license to move from plan to reality,” said West.

In the months ahead eDemocracy Solutions will launch a series of pilot projects in BC and soon, elsewhere across Canada and internationally working with partners in government, NGO’s and community organizations. EcoCity World Summit attendees and others will have the opportunity to sign up for a live demo and Q & A about the new carbon budget platform and associated community engagement efforts.

“It’s time for our democracy to evolve in ways that provide convenient yet meaningful opportunities for more meaningful participation. The scale of change required to face the climate emergency is so significant that everyone should have a say about how this is done. This is a big challenge and also an exciting opportunity. Together we can re-shape the world for the better” said West.

Want to follow the work that eDemocracy Solutions is doing? Sign up below for updates.

Ethelo Open Source Strategy

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 04:02:39 +0000

Ethelo Open Source Strategy

Ethelo is currently patented in the US (Patent No. 9,727,883) but the primary purpose of the patent is protective. Our plan is to Open Source the Ethelo engine under an Affero Copyleft license. We will also provide an Open API to the Ethelo engine and support a community of developers interested in optimizing the Ethelo engine code.

Background

We retained Andrew and Lena Hall of Hall Law (one of San Francisco’s leading Open Source law firms) to advise us on the best approach to open sourcing the Ethelo platform. Hall Law helped us arrive at a plan to Open Source the Ethelo engine under an Affero Copyleft license. They also assisted us in drafting an Affero GPL, Contributors License Agreement, and Copyright Notice.

The strategy is to not only open-source the Ethelo engine code, but also to provide an Open API to the Ethelo engine and provide free access to that API for developers interested in utilizing the Ethelo engine code for public purposes. The strategy is nuanced, and distinguishes between private and democratic use, and has differing treatment of the Ethelo engine core and the Ethelo platform. We also envisage a compensation strategy for contributors.

Objectives

Our Open Source Strategy has several objectives:

Protect Ethelo’s ability to monetize the technology when used for commercial purposes
Remove barriers for foundations and gov’ts with open source requirements to fund or use Ethelo
Remove cost barriers for democracy-mandated organizations to use Ethelo
Attract third-party energy towards improving the Ethelo codebase

This Open Source Strategy would apply to the Ethelo Engine – in particular what is referred to here as the “Ethelo Core” a subset of the core functions of the Ethelo Engine.

Definitions

Ethelo Engine: the computation functionality of Ethelo, programmed in C++. The Engine manages all the vote calculations and is the most distinctive part of Ethelo. The Engine can be conceptually divided into two pieces:

Engine Core: a subset of the functionality of the Ethelo Engine that constitutes the critical functionality, in particular scenario generation based on boolean constraints.
Engine Extras: what is left of the engine after the Engine Core is subtracted. Not critical, but still very useful functionality. For example, Engine Extra’s might include calculated constraints which are useful for many business decisions.

Ethelo Platform: The Engine is distinct from the Ethelo Platform which is programmed in Rails and Ember and which generates the interface and manages all the other user data.

Ethelo Trademark: Ethelo Decisions Inc. owns the trademark to “Ethelo” in the US and Canada.

Ethelo Patent: Ethelo Decisions Inc. owns the US patent for the Ethelo Engine

Affero Open Source License

The Engine Core will be subject to an Open Source affero copyleft license, in which any software program that attaches to or uses the Engine Core as part of its functioning must also adopt the license.

The Engine Core license will also contain a share-alike provision, which requires anyone who integrates the Engine Core code to make their source code available back to Ethelo.

The Engine Core license will also be subject to an attribution provision that requires the software that uses the Engine Core to acknowledge “Powered by Ethelo”.

Organizations not wishing to share their code can can use the Engine Core without triggering the Open Source License by using the Ethelo API. The API will also provide an SDK and various tools.

eDemocracy Webinar Explores How Local Governments Can Lead Climate Action

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 03:50:45 +0000

eDemocracy Webinar Explores How Local Governments Can Lead Climate Action

Contrary to what’s portrayed in most media, the solutions to the climate crisis are not going to come from international coalitions creating wide-ranging policy. Instead, true action and progress will happen from the bottom up when citizens work in cooperation with local government.

The Climate Caucus is working to inspire that sense of local empowerment across Canada. The group is a non-partisan network of Canadian elected officials who are working together to create policies that will hold global warming to 1.5°C, in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) target.

The group’s founder, Rik Logtenberg, recently joined us for an eDemocracy webinar to share the story of how it’s working and how others can join the fight to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate.

Logtenberg was elected to the council of Nelson, British Columbia, in 2017 after working in climate activism for more than a decade. During that time, he came to realize that real change comes about by creating social conditions for action.

“The Climate Caucus is about helping to spread the word that this crisis is real and using our position as local government leaders to model the behavior we want to see in people and encourage our community to recognize the reality of climate change,” Logtenberg said.

Logtenberg said that, for most people, climate change is not a cut and dry issue that they completely believe or completely disbelieve. Rather, they take varying degrees of action based on the level of threat they perceive and the actions they see others taking.

During the webinar, Logtenberg outlined three ways that local governments can inspire their residents to change their behavior.

1. Declare a climate emergency or something similar to let the public know that climate change is coming and that it’s a real threat they need to take seriously.
2. Form a climate action committee to serve as liaisons between government and citizens. The committee can inform the government about the public’s feelings and help build consensus for public policy.
3. Develop an adaptation plan that includes widening storm drains, developing secondary water sources, and providing food security.

“We need people to be making visible changes, then other people use them as a reference,” Logtenberg said. “When you see it, you’re more likely to make that change yourself. If enough people do this, you pass a tipping point and see a city becoming a leader in climate action.”

Like Logtenberg, eDemocracy Solutions Executive Director Ben West has spent decades as a climate activist and organizer. During that time, he’s come to realize the importance of consensus in decision making, particularly in divisive issues like climate change.

West sees Ethelo’s eDemocracy Carbon Budget as the perfect tool for bringing about the behavior change Logtenberg describes as essential for meeting IPCC targets.

The fundamental ideas behind Ethelo are about finding that common ground and engaging the community in a way to find the broadest support,” West said. “We can’t get all the way there just by recycling; we need to involve the community to the extent that they see their connection to the issue and the role they play in solving it.”

You can view the full webinar recording with Logtenberg and West here.

Designing a Bitcoin-based Voting System

blog — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 03:45:29 +0000

Designing a Bitcoin-based Voting System

Bitcoin – a decentralized electric currency system released in 2009 – has inspired all sorts of tech possibilities at PartyX. The Bitcoin system uses peer-to-peer networking, digital signatures and cryptographic proof to enable irreversible transactions without relying on trust – rather, records of all transactions are recorded on a public history, called a blockchain.

We see strong potential that this technology could be applied to online voting. Here’s what it has to offer:

1. Secrecy/Control over private information:

The user decides who can see their voting information, when and how clearly. For example, they may publish their voting data on a specific issue through a trust network they have defined, and they may cancel this access and change their vote. They might have the option to ‘blur’ it; that is, so that it can only be seen by others in a group of 10 other votes or within a certain degree of accuracy, for example. They might do this so that they can enter a collective of people who have agreed to share a similar level of information with each other.

Default is always privacy – or better yet, privacy is a required field. Because the settings might be complex, people might use Ethelo to set their privacy settings, by relying upon privacy settings published by other trusted participants. If a default trust group is required to determine the default settings, that group could be “everyone,” or “everyone who has personally set their privacy settings.”

Information setting out levels of access for personal information may need to be set out in a separate blockchain from the one that holds the voting information. In this case, a query will have to first access the personal information blockchain in order to do certain types of analysis on the vote blockchain.

Anyone can access their own vote, and change it up until the deadline, if there is one. It may be good to offer a second channel of verification if some key information is changed, example SMS cellphone. For example, I will get a text message exactly ten minutes after I log off asking me to confirm I just made changes.

During a period before the deadline, it may be important that votes cannot be revealed to anyone else through any networks. This setting would need to be established when the decision is set up. So, if other people are relying on me, my vote “freezes” as far as they are concerned eg. three hours before the vote. This prevents vote-buying, because it can’t be confirmed that someone didn’t change their vote at the last minute.

It is simple to enforce a voting deadline; anyone can just make a copy of the blockchain at that time. The blockchain might carry a timestamp. If people agree on what the blockchain was at a certain time, that’s what it was.

2. Use existing bitcoin encryption miners.

We design the bitvote/votecoin system so that it can easily plug into the existing bitcoin miner network for encryptions and decryptions. Computer power would be paid for in terms of bitcoins, for whatever a similar amount of computing would earn in terms of bitcoins. This means that there would necessarily be a charge for use of the votecoin/bitvote network. Basically, bitcoins will be the currency that drives this collective decision-making process.

3. Auditability

Anyone can throw the vote blockchain at the Ethelo API to calculate the results.

4. Convertibility

This system would allow influence to be convertible between decision processes… if the two decision processes consent and an influence exchange rate is agreed upon. In this way, we will be treating bitvotes like a currency.

For example, two environmental organizations whose mandates closely overlap may decide to join forces. It is difficult under non-profit law for societies to merge, as there is not an asset like a corporation, which allows consolidation of ownership. However, if both organizations are using Ethelo to consult with their members about direction, and that membership is overlapping to some extent, it makes sense that they merge their decision-making process. If one is vastly bigger than another, they could do this by agreeing on an influents exchange level for the members.