Merit Democracy

Description

Erdem Ovacik:

"Merit Democracy is a collective decision making process and organisation, where participants bet on the future outcomes of proposals, and get rewarded if the proposals actually succeed in solving a collectively pre-agreed problem. Merit democracy uses market dynamics and data science in order to link participants to decisions, and decisions to collective outcomes.

Hence, merit democracy links and aligns the collective goods with incentives of the individuals in that collective. The aim of the process is to achieve high quality decisions, a high pace of decision-making, transparency and perhaps most importantly, low barrier to entry to the whole process.

...

Merit Democracy’s intent is to facilitate collective decisions for a large group, ie more than 10,000 members. This is due to the inherent cost of administering the measurements of changes in the metrics. The larger community is needed in order to justify the relatively high expected costs of measuring outcomes, and facilitation of market places for public goods."

(https://erdemovacik.substack.com/p/merit-democracy-1df27e2c5e43)

How-To

Erdem Ovacik:

"The process of merit democracy consists of:

Establishing and revising challenges that create marketplaces by defining metrics and their value to commons

Predicting future outcomes of proposals through the challenges as marketplaces

(Delegated) voting on proposals

Measurement proposals’ impact and linking that to contributors

* The ways that members / citizens engage in the decision process are, by:

Ranking, creating, prioritising challenges. Every member can create a new challenge. More importantly, all are asked to make their allocation of public resources for addressing the challenges.

Creating, investing in proposals, and suggesting and voting on edit requests. Discussing the proposals.

Voting on proposals, changing vote-delegation lines. Establishing voting groups, aka parties. Providing arguments why they vote for- or against a proposal. Viewing most popular arguments against one’s intended vote stance.

* Members / citizens are rewarded in the following ways:

Investment in and contribution to proposals that deliver public value, as measured by the collective.

A fixed total budget rewards the voters that have represented others through the liquid delegations. Total number of vote delegations for a given timeframe are used to allocate amount of reward."

(https://erdemovacik.substack.com/p/merit-democracy-1df27e2c5e43)