CultureStake

CultureStake: Collective decision making for culture

“Radical imagination is not something individuals have but something collectives do” - Max Haiven

CultureStake is a community platform for collective cultural decision-making. Innovative quadratic voting on the blockchain supports transparent and intuitive methods to identify and produce potent meaningful cultural experiences from around the world in any locality. Culturestake connects artists, cultural commissioners, venues, and audiences and puts the governance and funding of cultural production in all of their hands.

We propose CultureStake as a robust and sustainable alternative to centralised and private decision-making practices where major curators, artists and sponsors and patrons have the upper hand. For example it could programme Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth so that the art that is platformed reflects the perspectives of London citizens and city visitors.

CultureStake aims to

• Harness the collective intelligence and imagination of communities with a stake in the cultures of a place;
• Decentralise and distribute resources and cultural decision making;
• Engage audiences and participants as stakeholders.

CultureStake aims to formalise and make legible previously intangible and disparate cultural stakeholders for deeper, reflective governance.

CultureStake is the launch project of Furtherfield’s new initiative DECAL, Decentralised Arts Lab, which models cooperative systems for cultural organisations, in partnership with 2NQ (local commissioning organisation) and oscoin (decentralized network and currency for OSS collaboration).

CultureStake is an experiment in community decision-making for governance and funding.

CultureStake develops a working model for coordinating stakeholder insights and decision-making. The first prototype will be built by a working group at Furtherfield from its gallery in the heart of a North London park. It will be a system for allocating community members with tokenised stakes in its governance.

CultureStake’s experimental governance tests a mechanism called Quadratic voting. Distributed in proportion to the level of engagement someone has had with the organisation, tokens are used to ‘buy’ votes in decision-making processes. Individuals can use their votes evenly, or save up and ‘spend’ them on organisational decisions about which they have particularly strong feelings. An improvement on 1 person 1 vote, the quadratic voting mechanism is proposed as a solution to the "tyranny of the majority" problem and the inability of binary choice referenda to "understand" the intention of voters.

Quadratic voting allows participants to indicate their preference and intensity of preference for any decision (as opposed to a simple for or against decision). It is designed “to allow users to buy votes at an exponentially increasing cost for each vote. In this way, a large number of less-resourced but passionate voters cannot be overwhelmed by a few dispassionate wealthy voters. Also, a passionate minority cannot be overwhelmed by a passive but primarily indifferent minority” avoiding known limitations of other traditional voting models.

Furtherfield is seeking to develop new ways of allowing their local and global community of communities to see themselves together - to work together, to collaborate, to discover shared interests and to find common ground - to build economic and technical systems to deliberate and make decisions in their mutual interest.

By coordinating and connecting Furtherfield's international community of artists, techies and thinkers and the groups that we work with in Finsbury Park we have the opportunity to combine the powerful insights of grounded communities with experimental practitioners.