decision-making

Communities often need to come together and deliberate to make decisions that affect their community. Town Meetings, local zoning board meetings, school board meetings are only a few examples of decision-making in a civic context.

Our projects

Sourcemap

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Sourcemap is a social network built around supply chains, enabling collective engagement with where things come from and what they are made of.


How might communities use it?
An open-source project, Sourcemap provides resources for calculating the carbon footprint and geographic spread of various products and services, including consumer electronics, travel, and food.

At what stage of development is it?
We are deploying Sourcemap through in-depth case studies with designers and business owners in product design, hospitality, and food and drink. The Sourcemap team is actively seeking collaborators and pilot study participants to develop the tool for general use.

Other collaborators: David Zwarg and Hiroshi Ishii

Project team: 
Leo Bonanni
Project team: 
Matthew Hockenberry

Selectricity

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Selectricity is "voting machinery for the masses." It consists of a suite of tools to allow groups of people to make decisions using cutting-edge voting technologies. While most voting technology projects are geared to government-based decision-making, Selectricity aims to apply decades of voting research created for governments toward everyday decisions. The system emphasizes preferential decision-making, cryptographic means of voter verifiability, and algorithmically complex election methods.

How might communities use it?
It helps groups make better decisions, more easily. It allows voting, usually in form of ranking a list of choices in order of preference. It has been used for electing the boards of non-profit organizations and or choosing the officers of student groups. It is simple and fast enough to help a group decide where to go to dinner or when to have a meeting. It's flexible enough to be integrated into an outside website or used from a mobile phone.

At what stage of development is it?
Selectricity is under active development and new features are added each month. That said, currently released features have already seen thousands of users of a variety of types and are well tested. We understand that we're building election software and, as a result, we're very conservative about releasing new features. Everything on the "live" site is tested in a large number of real world environments over weeks or months. Additional testing of new features including kiosk mode and structured roll out of other new features developed in the first half of the year.

Code is available, under a free software and open source license, in our source code repository.

Related Tools & Resources: 
QuickVotes: get Selectricity for your site
Project team: 
Benjamin Mako Hill

Community Partners & Projects

EveryBlock

EveryBlock is a new experiment in journalism, offering a Web "newspaper" for every city block in a number of American cities.

Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.

Campaign for the .nyc TLD

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As the Internet becomes central to civic, commercial, community, and cultural life, those with the best tools and understanding of its capabilities will prosper. Using research, education, training, and outreach, Connecting.nyc Inc.'s mission is to prepare the city for our networked future. To do so, we will use the .nyc TLD (like .com or .org but just for New York City) to plan, to organize, and to empower New York City's residents, institutions, and businesses to better connect with one another and the world.

The opportunity to acquire the .nyc TLD will arise in 2009.

Rye Reflections

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Can a citizens' publication work in a community of 5000?

Rye Reflections started in June, 2005, in the New Hampshire seacoast community of Rye. It publishes monthly, and members meet once a week for two hours at the Rye Public Library.

Recent blog posts, discussions, and resources