Human Collaboration and Self-Organization at Scale: Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Platforms
Abstract
YouTube competes with Hollywood as an entertainment channel, and also supplements Hollywood by acting as a distribution mechanism. Twitter has a similar relationship to news media, and Coursera to Universities. But Washington has no such counterpart; there are no online alternatives for making democratic decisions at large scale as a society. As opposed to building consensus and compromise, public discussion boards often devolve into flame wars when dealing with contentious socio-political issues. A full solution to this problem would involve many components, and is beyond any one group. Our goal is to develop algorithms and mechanisms for large scale consensus, develop tools and run experiments, and in doing so, further the cause of large scale participatory democracy. In fact, we expect our research to have significant impact on decision making in large groups in general, not just in democratic processes. We will also develop foundational theories about large scale collaboration in other settings. eg. crowd- sourced science, and the sharing economy. In addition, we will identifying theoretical and algorithmic techniques that underly both human collaboration at scale and natural/engineered self organizing systems such as robot swarms and DNA molecules. The US Defense forces often find themselves embroiled in international situations where promoting democracy is a key objective. This is made harder when there are no pre-existing reliable democratic institutions. We believe that crowdsourced decision making platforms and mechanisms such as the ones that we are designing will start to play a large role in this transition in the coming decades. So we believe this is a core area for the DoD
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 11, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1510082
Entities
People
- Ashish Goel
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- Stanford University