Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

Direct democracy doesn’t scale, but representative democracies lose touch with the public. What to do? “Societal-Scale Decision-Making Using Social Networks“, by Marko Antonio Rodriguez and Daniel Joshua Steinbock, suggests an intriguing possibility based on social networks. Instead of voting for preselected candidates, you assign voting power to whoever you trust - dividing it among several people if desired, or retaining some or all for yourself.

The voting power then propagates along the social network formed by trust relationships. People trusted by others will “aggregate” voting (or decision-making) power. It’s just a simple simulation at this point, but the authors are looking ahead to network politics:

The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of global society makes decentralization both necessary and attainable…It is our position that dynamic representation is a critical part of this shift as it plays out in the context of public policymaking. In order to manage the complexity of global society, it will be necessary to replace the traditionally static, hierarchical forms of representation with new network-based models which adapt to the rapidly changing dynamics and contexts of decentralized society.

Via WorldChanging.com