In the wake of one of the most surprising elections in the province’s history, Premier Christy Clark made a broad, sweeping statement in her acceptance speech: “Tonight, we have received a mandate from the people of British Columbia.”

The speech went on to note the great number of British Columbians who did not vote for the Liberals – less than one quarter of eligible voters actually voted Liberal – and that the Party would work just as hard for those who didn’t vote for them, as for those who did.

It was a powerful message, but rang hollow to the many British Columbians who understand how politics works, and haven’t seen a viable alternative. After all, in our current state of democracy, a majority is all that is necessary for another four years of power, and, outside of referendums, the voices of the people in policy decisions are often under represented, if represented at all.

Decision-making doesn’t have to be that way, and we are now at an unprecedented point a history where a true mandate for B.C. is possible – and practical.

That’s where PartyX’s BC Mandate campaign comes in. Powered by the Ethelo decision engine, BC Mandate offered an online platform to capture the voices of all participants in advance of the provincial election, and then used the Ethelo engine to compile a set of provincial policies, which had been proposed by a variety of parties and interest groups.

The intent was to find the combination of policies that captured the greatest “ethelo score.” This score indicates how much support a set of policies would garner within a group. Also, how much collective will-power is behind a decision to make it happen! It does this by taking into account people’s priorities and weighing them alongside everyone else’s.

As part of this process on bcmandate.ca, participants voted on their level of support for a variety of policy proposals and below is the set of policies that, together, have the highest Ethelo score – 86 per cent.

Supported Policies

• Expand the liquified natural gas industry
• Oppose pipelines
• Increase corporate income and high earners taxes
• Create more supervised safe injection sites
• Equalize generational spending
• Increase the minimum wage
• Hold a transportation referendum
• Support $10 a day childcare plan
• Improved education access for Aboriginal students
• Reform post-secondary education funding
• Stop enforcing cannabis possession laws
• Put the brakes on private health clinics
• Restore legal aid in B.C.
• Reform to election advertising policies

Rejected Policies

• Increase funding for the police force
• Cut government services
• Reduce taxes
• Promote renewable energy
• Support open net salmon farming
• Expand the oil industry
• Introduce private health care and insurance

The above set of options was the #1 ranked “collective ballot,” with the highest level of support of more than 500,000 different possible collective ballots. It was remarkable among the lead ballots to see such consistency over the most important issue categories, namely “finance and taxation” and then “health and education.”

Approximately 300 B.C. residents participated in BC Mandate, and many others explored the platform from other provinces and countries. So while the results aren’t to be considered statistically significant, the power of the BC Mandate story continues, as more people experience the opportunities for better decision making made possible by Ethelo, from politics to organizations, community groups and even households.

Thank you, everyone, who participated in the first PartyX launch of Ethelo. There’s much more to come.

The post A True Mandate for B.C. appeared first on Party X.

I first heard of Ethelo about a year ago.  As my understanding of the platform increased, something started to tickle the back of my brain.  Specifically, it was the moment I saw the graph of standard deviation that humans typically fall into when making decisions.  The point of Ethelo is to minimize the “camelback” distribution of satisfaction and normalize the distribution to reduce inequities.

This got me thinking about human nature and a philosophical problem that is familiar to most: The Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Briefly, this dilemma is posited around two prisoners who are each incarcerated individually and given two options:

1. Stay silent.
2. Betray the other prisoner.

The stakes are set so as to incent each party to betray the other as per the matrix below.

Fear of doing more time than the other prisoner, and the possibility of going free, informs the rationality of the choice.  Because each prisoner is unable to confidently guess the choice of the other, the most stable choice, with the greatest potential of both equality and inequality, is to Betray.  Since the prisoners cannot speak to each other, this is a rational choice. Traditional game theory ends up with each player being worse off than if they acted for the greater good, if one considers the cumulative time spent in prison.  To put it another way, even if the choice lands in the top right or bottom left quadrant (one defects, the other does not), this is still holistically a better option than both defecting.  Three years in jail is preferable to four, in a utilitarian sense.

This is a microcosm of our society to some extent and, upon seeing the Ethelo chart indicating standard deviation of satisfaction when making a choice, I started thinking about how far this went.

First, consider human nature.  How often do we make decisions that are fueled by a desire to maximize our own reward, or, at the very least, ensure we’re not losing to our neighbor?  Fairly often, I’d wager.  How much do we trust others to act in our best interests?  I’m not a lawyer, but the existence of a ridiculously overloaded legal system is a good indication that our society doesn’t hold a lot of trust in the good intentions of others.

Second, consider the state of the world.  In many realms, it’s a race to the bottom, which is actually the opposite of what we would expect given this piece of game theory.  If decisions were made in accordance with the Dilemma, then everyone would be roughly in the same state of being.  But instead we have drastic inequities.  Why?

For one, it’s because the Dilemma is a drastic oversimplification of how our society functions.  But it is interesting to consider the net result of it.  The prisoners are more satisfied with the outcome even if they both lose a bit more but remain equal.  Which leads us to Ethelo.

Ethelo can bring balance to an equation and minimize the inequalities between people when making a decision, which leads to the most stable configuration for an outcome and even for a society. We have seen this through the course of history; as a society becomes more starkly stratified, it eventually topples and wealth is redistributed, typically through violence and war.  Societies with a strong and vibrant middle class tend to be the most stable, in the same way that decisions benefiting everyone equally tend to be the most widely accepted.

We don’t consider these concepts when choosing political parties or determining a course of action, typically, because humans tend to be less concerned about notions of equality and more concerned about their own success.  It’s not high-minded egalitarianism that drives the decision of the Prisoners, it’s the fear of being punished disproportionately coupled with the distrust in the other person.  Again, the Prisoners are a drastic oversimplification since there are only four possible outcomes.  Our society is significantly more complex with trillions of possible outcomes for decisions made daily.  But we still choose a party based on which will benefit us the most individually in accordance with our ideals.

So, let’s tie it all together. The current system revolves around winners and losers; by examining the decisions being made in a more comprehensive manner, we can reduce inequality.  We can use these principles of equality to the benefit of society as a whole.  We can create the matrix of possible outcomes using the math of Ethelo to determine the outcome that will maximize the satisfaction of all while minimizing inequalities; we can foster the most stable configuration of the decision and, through a series of these decisions, the most stable society.  We need to engineer equality into the fabric of the questions being asked. It will not just happen on its own.

The post Ethelo & the Prisoner’s Dilemma appeared first on Party X.

Read the News Release

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Democracy – government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system [http://bit.ly/YEF92i ]

The above definition is but one of the things that people think of when they start to picture what a democratic system might look like. Freedom, equality, and the ability to choose their own systems of policy and justice. What people fail to take into account is that democracy also requires the consent of the people enacting and living within these systems; so when this consent fails to be obtained, can a true democracy still be upheld?

During the last election in British Columbia voter turnout fell to 51% – the lowest it has ever been in recorded history. Various reasons ranging from saturation of negative election coverage to candidate mistrust have been cited for this drop, but the take-away is simply that voters in BC are not interested in participating in this system anymore. Going back to the original definition, when people don’t vote can we really say that power is being held by the people? It seems to be that power is truly being held by half the people and exercised on behalf of the whole population. In a system where we were all truly free to vote this would not be a problem, but this is not a system where we are all truly free. When attack advertisements demoralize you to the point of uncaring, is it freedom to abstain due to disillusionment? When lack of available information drives you not to vote for fear of ignorance, are we free to overcome our misgivings?

Information, or Lack of…

A professor in my first year of university once told me that democracy involves the informed consent of the electorate involved. Informed. And information relays on both the access to facts and the ability to absorb them. When we live in a perpetual state of systematic inadequacy due to both flawed political process and coverage, both of these avenues become compromised. We are only truly free to exercise our democratic rights when our minds are just as unconstrained as our bodies in their ability to make a decision.

Now this may seem like an ideal world I’m talking about, because of course not everyone in society will be able to act with the same clarity and freedom as others. Some of us have depression, or drug addiction, or seventeen energetic kittens constantly prancing around taking up all of our mental energy because if we stop looking after even one for even a second they’ll knock over a candle, light the house on fire, and burn everything you hold dear straight to the ground. But the point is that even though we cannot create a perfect atmosphere for political participation, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Especially when a current system does not work, and friends… it is clearly not working.

Participation Involves People

Part of the problem is that it’s not just the ability that inhibits our participation but the variety of participation available. Despite living in a place where we are told that we can vote in any way we want, this mode of thinking is an untruth. Party platforms have erased the pathways of variety we should be enjoying and we are left to choose only the options which are presented to us. We pick the politician and party which most closely resembles our ideology and are forced to take all their deficiencies with it. We vote for things and people we don’t believe in… That’s not power, it’s complacency; and it limits our interest and engagement when we’re constantly having these disbeliefs shoved down our throat.

At its heart what Ethelo hopes to address is the idea that we are voting for things that we don’t actually want, both explicitly through campaign promises and implicitly through hidden agendas. The BC Mandate Campaign seeks both to inform voters and gain their consent for issue solution through a variety of online avenues; to combat the un-informing, nonconsensual party system currently in place. Party X doesn’t hold a monopoly on this agenda, there are many ideas and avenues out there which could work equally or collaboratively as well as the one that we’ve chosen, and we would encourage you to send us your criticisms or comments. What we mean to start is not an idea so much as a dialogue; a discussion surrounding inadequacies in our politics, since constant evolution is nothing more or less than what is required to adept to our cultural definition of what it means to be free.

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Read the news release here.

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Hey there cyberspace friends! On the advent of our crowdfunding campaign and alpha launch we thought we’d extend a hand to all those who are following along with us thus far, as well as to those who we hope to meet along the way. The BC Mandate Campaign is an important beginning in many ways for us. It is a chance for greater equality, greater accountability, and an answer to the question of what we can do to keep our governing system evolving in a world which requires constant change to survive.

I say “an answer” because there is no “the answer”, and it may be that even some of the people reading this have concerns over the ‘how’ of what we’re trying to achieve here, and to that we say “send them in! We’d love to talk about them!” In the absence of those questions right now let’s just answer the big one of why anyone would want to support Ethelo.

The concept of political platforms, packaged sets of beliefs that must all go together, is outdated. Why must we be forced to accept the entire basket of goods they are offering us, in exchange for the one or two ideas that actually resonate with us. At the heart, this is what Ethelo hopes to achieve; the chance to turn our democracy into a dialogue, and not the one-way shouting we have come to expect. By doing away with the policy basket known as a ‘platform’, we can reduce inequality between us, and give a voice to those who may not feel represented by pre-packaged policy. By supporting us, and supporting Ethelo, you are creating your own avenue for messaging out to the world, turning the current one-way democracy into a democratic dialogue.

Thank you for all the support that you have shown us so far, and for your continuing involvement and interest. Please consider clicking through to our crowdfunding campaign or joining our emailing list on Partyx.com. Our Indiegogo page can be found at:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/partyx-and-the-bc-mandate-campaign

 Any and all contributions are greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Lidia, on behalf of the PartyX team

The post Funding for the Future of Democracy appeared first on Party X.

There’s little question that much of the conflict in the world arises from disagreement. I want your land, but you live there and don’t want to give it to me. You want my resources, but I don’t think you have a right to take them. And on and on, throughout history, humans have disagreed, and fought over those disagreements, sometimes—often—with devastating outcomes. With all our cultural and technological advances, we have not been able to eliminate the human want and environmental destruction that plagues our planet. We have yet to achieve what Marcuse called the “pacification of human existence” where humanity triumphs in its struggle for survival via a technological base that supports life in all its forms.

But imagine technology designed and built with harmony in mind – not only as an end goal, but baked right in, as it were. What would society look like if our tools reflected the goals of fairness, equality, peace, collaboration and sharing that would bring balance to this planet? Today human civilization relies on a heavily polluting industrial complex that produces technologies of death, destruction and mass distraction, motivated by power, greed and profit. But it doesn’t have to be like that. And indeed, there are people around the world working for peace and prosperity for all, envisioning a new and different world, another, better world.

Ethelo is part of that vision. It is a revolution in decision-making, a powerful engine that drives better decisions based on maximizing stakeholder satisfaction and minimizing group discord. By presenting decision-makers with the most supported outcome, parsed via its unique patent-pending algorithm from amongst large stakeholder-input datasets, Ethelo discovers a harmonious path forward. Where previously there may have been conflict, dissatisfaction or a “work-to-rule” mentality, Ethelo offers outcomes that a vast majority of stakeholders can not only live with, but also get behind; conflict dissolves and solutions appear.

Ethelo can be used to canvas the will and mood of stakeholders groups – large or small, corporate or community, geographically distributed or not – facing decisions ranging from single issue to complex and multi-faceted. Because we think big at Ethelo, try on this scenario for size:

Currently there is contentious debate at the International Criminal Court over the Crime of Aggression, referred to as the “supreme international crime” at Nuremberg. Only five countries have ratified the amendments that will criminalize the planning, preparation, initiation or execution of an act of aggression that violates the Charter of the United Nations. This includes the invasion, attack, military occupation, annexation, bombardment or blockade by the armed forces of one state against another. Ratification from 30 member states is needed by the end of 2016 in order for the crime to come under the jurisdiction of the ICC. But a divide has emerged between smaller nations desiring to criminalize illegal war making and the bigger nations, who perhaps want to keep their options open. In particular, larger countries such as the US take issue with the definition of the Crime of Aggression.

How could Ethelo be applied to this impasse? Imagine an online space where member countries could define the issue(s) and within each issue, identify options for possible solutions, working independently – or collectively where proposals are similar. There could be a handful of issues – or dozens – each with its own options and sub-options, enabling each country or voting bloc to fine-tune their preferences over the many facets of the decision.

Then imagine a powerful decision-making engine that would parse and rank the thousands of possible outcomes according to which ones will have the greatest support from the collective—in this case UN member states—taking into account resistance which arises naturally from feelings of inequality. The result? A new kind of decision that creates equality of satisfaction among participants, promoting harmony and giving outcomes the best chance to work in the real world.

By optimizing the collective will or intention of the group, Ethelo offers a new path forward, a way around the impasse, be it in your workplace, your community or the international stage.

Ethelo is a gamechanger because it makes stakeholder satisfaction, whether a two-party arbitration or world peace, a realistic expectation. And it’s going to change the world, one decision at a time.

The post Deciding Better, Together: Analysis of Ethelo appeared first on Party X.

See the Release

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See the Release 

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With identity verification a central tech challenge to trustworthy online collective decision-making, the PartyX Hack Team has been brainstorming ways that social networks networks can effectively achieve identity verification for a centralized decision-making or voting system. This discussion paper is a preliminary overview on how algorithms could analyze social graphs to create a ‘certainty’ factor for online identity.

1. Allow the decision-making platform to integrate social network information, so that participants can connect with friends and acquaintances they might know on Facebook, Linkdn, Google+, Twitter et cetera. The underlying assumption here is the voting or decision-making process will be something such as Ethelo that uses social networks as part of the decision-making process.

2. An identity verification algorithm will assign a “confidence score” to each user on the system, by analyzing their social network connections. Trulio is an example of this type of algorithm technology. The network analysis algorithm would look for ‘fake’ profiles by looking for characteristics that distinguish them from a real person’s network presence, such as isolation of nodes. Also, the algorithm will look for ‘key guarantors’, those individuals in a person’s social network whose guarantee of true identity will be the most significant, both due to their place in the network and the confidence the system already has in their identity.

3. Support but not require “official” verification processes, such as cross-checks with government databases, at the users’ option. For example, a user on the system could submit their name and address, and the government body could cross-check that with official records and post by letter an authorization code to the registered address for that person, which the individual could then enter to be  be confirmed on the system. People who are confirmed through a high-accuracy process would have higher impact as guarantors for others due to the high confidence rating.

4. Access the capacity of people to verify each other. If a user receives a low confidence rating using the verification algorithm, the platform could look at their social network, and identify those acquaintances that, if verified, will be most influential in raising confidence of the persons’ identity. Then the system would invite one or more of those contacts to verify the user’s identity. Verification would consist of presenting the guarantor with a photo and the name of the person, also perhaps their location of residence, and let the guarantor choose how confidently they will attest to their name and identity. The system can be programmed to manage a guarantor process that is continually looking for ways to increase confidence (or falsify it) of the lowest confidence members. For members whose ID confidence cannot be increase through guarantor verification, other processes can be brought into play (such as credit cards, ID confirmation, release of information forms).

This process could be used to assign an accuracy rating to a voting result, based upon the confidence rating assigned to the participants. If for example, one particular outcome received 10% more support than another outcome, and the system is 98% confident of the identities of all those who participated, then the result could be deemed valid. While not a “perfect” system, it could be used in conjunction with other security systems to add another layer of confidence to results.

This process has the advantage of easy scalability without a time-consuming, government-based process. Moreover, it will grow stronger and more accurate the more people are added to the system, and the more alternative ways of verifying identity are added.

If you have feedback or are interested in this project, please contact john@partyx.com.

The post Social Identity Verification appeared first on Party X.