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What are the best software driven coordination systems for promoting collective action? Would love less mainstream examples.

Seems like there's more opportunities than feedback mechanisms (ratings), pooled auctions (Kickstarter), and market making (Uber, eBay, Amazon).

What can we do with pre commitment?

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yep, I thought the same about pre-commitment, but I guess the problem is not software itself: for proposals that don't need general consensus, but only a certain threshold of support, the problem seems to be getting enough attention. Kickstarter does well in this area, but I don't think the pre-commitment involving money is such a big deal in the collective coordination aspect. I mean, you could post a call to action on a random blog, and if it gathered enough attention you would have managed to promote collective action. That requires nothing new. It has more to do with the inability to gather the attention of enough people on a single focus when there are so many other potential focuses fighting for that same attention. In my opinion, the deadlines in Kickstarter are more interesting than the pre-commitment for coordination.

And then for proposals that require general consensus, it seems to be even more complicated. In theory democracy is about this, and we kinda accept the idea of democratic consensus, but in practice things end up having to be implemented by or pass through the hands of individual actors, and it's there where everything starts to rot. So you need to make sure the distance between consensus and its practical application is short enough too? Also, as the article says, you'd like to guarantee that "those who take a different course of action will not suffer negative consequences". But this is kinda contradictory with general consensus. And you get different groups "coordinating" in different directions. Ahhh... and the less power you have, the bigger your consensus group needs to be.

The benefit of the Kickstarter-like crowdfunding model is that it solves the coordination problem. When you bid/pledge on a threshold-funded project, your bid is only paid if the project reaches its preset funding threshold-- if the threshold is not met, you pay nothing. Thus, it is individually rational to pledge on a project if you expect that your pledge will meaningfully contribute to the threshold being reached and you derive individual benefit from the project itself; each contributor is essentially "matching" others' pledges. The project creator herself can then strategically choose the threshold amount and the scope of her project to improve their appeal to prospective contributors.

(There are a few emerging problems with this model, but they're generally related to having to trust that the project will be correctly fulfilled. These problems have nothing to do with the basics of collective fund-raising; they would also arise in the exact same way whenever an individual agent is contracting with a third-party for any sort of good or service. The fact that these are by far the most commonly-cited issues with the threshold-based crowdfunding model is itself proof that the funding aspect works quite well indeed.)

I like your comment. I think this point you mention is very relevant for more complex cases:

> if you expect that your pledge will meaningfully contribute to the threshold being reached

Kickstarter solves the coordination problem for their case (which is great), but coordination is harder or easier depending on the scale. Kickstarter here deals with a "rather simple" coordination problem: value proposition and conditions are very clear and straightforward, risks are low, there are no opposing parties / colliding interests, and thresholds are low enough that individual contributions can be quite meaningful. So even if they have an interesting business around solving that coordination problem, and they managed to reach the critical mass for it to work (which I highlight as trickier than the actual software)... as programmers would say, the solution doesn't generalize. (Even if it might be a good place to start looking).

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