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Comment by 00rion | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently working on a social network that helps groups of people make decisions and build consensus. In most organizations, decisions are made from the top down and then implemented by small groups within the organization. The goal will be to enable large groups to make decisions involving broad-based goals and provide a mechanism to form working groups to carryout the actions necessary to implement those goals. What does HN think?

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It seems like every few months a democratic idealist looks around and realizes that nobody chooses democracy as a decision making method when they have the choice, and goes about making tools to try to fix this peculiar fact.

The reason why nations use democracy as a decision-making method is 1) it has populist appeal and 2) they have a lot of resources to waste on bad decisions. The intelligence of a decision goes down with the number of people involved, until we arrive at the ideal of universal suffrage.

That's why broad, not specific, goals would be decided by large groups. One broad goal might be to "end domestic NSA surveillance". Specific actions could be decided by teams of people in working groups which is similar to the way actionable decisions are made in many businesses.

I've always wondered how a system like that could work. If you do it right, it could be very useful.

It would be interesting if for example Hacker news discussion threads could something decide on collective actions to take.

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