Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision Making

Smartocracy is a social software system for collective decision making. The system is composed of a social network that links individuals to those they trust to make good decisions and a decision network that links individuals to their voted-on solutions. Such networks allow a variety of algorithms to convert the link choices made by individual participants into specific decision outcomes. Simply interpreting the linkages differently (e.g. ignoring trust links, or using them to weight an individual's vote) provides a variety of outcomes fit for different decision making scenarios. This paper will discuss the Smartocracy network data structures, the suite of collective decision making algorithms currently supported, and the results of two collective decisions regarding the design of the system.