Smartocracy

Smartocracy = a voting (governance) system, whereby you do not excercise your vote directly, but can choose a number of proxies that you trust.

URL = http://www.smartocracy.com/

"Smartocracy is a dead-simple social network, where a link from User A to User B is effectively a "proxy assignment" of one vote. In giving User B a proxy, User A is designating them as someone they trust to make good decisions.

Participation is by invitation (aka proxy assignment) from another participant.

Each participant gets an equal number of votes (initially 10) for each decision to be made, to be exercised not by them but by their proxies. That simple change, from voting to delegating your vote, creates meritocracy in an equitable, natural way. The most highly respected participants are by definition on more people's lists.

Any unexercised votes (e.g. if a participant doesn't have time or doesn't feel qualified) cascade to the proxies of the non-voter, until they hit an actual voter, who exercises them all.

Each use can be "domain specific", i.e. proxies can be assigned differently depending on the subject area of the decision to be made.

This approach combines the best of direct and representative democracy and creates a true meritocracy where merit is decided at the individual level, but aggregated for collective use.

Information technology makes this possible. New social-networking software makes it easy to allow any user to identify those they trust most, to make that information useful online (anonymously of course), and to use it to make collective decisions. " (http://www.smartocracy.com/)

More Information

Research project on Augmented Democracy tools at http://www.mediaventure.org/docs/Smartocracy-wgf_v11.htm