The voting scheme outlined in Dan Larimer's More Equal Animals is designed to produce good election outcomes. Termed fractal democracy, this scheme involves sorting an electorate into equal groups and requiring each group to choose a representative. The representatives are then sorted into groups and each of these group again selects a representative. The process repeats until it produces a group of representatives small enough to make decisions.
Eden is pioneering fractal democracy. Being a novice on the topic, I've been thinking about how such a scheme could be modeled. My naive approach is to take an initial group (n) of 10,000 and randomly assign three relative values to each group member. The first value would represent actual suitability for leadership relative to other group members (A). The second value would represent relative electability (B). The third value would represent a binary discernment selecting for either A or B (C).
Electing 10 people from 10,000 in these terms would produce a group half comprised of those most suitable for leadership and half comprised of those with high electability. This strikes me as a plausible outcome.
However, the C value, the discernment of the electorate, probably wouldn't be random in a real group. Neither would the AB relationship. There might be strong overlap between these values. The stronger the overlap, the less important C becomes. Once A=B for all in n, C becomes irrelevant.
In the ideal case, value A would be objectively measured public knowledge. Larimer suggests games of skill like chess could be incorporated into the election process. But measures of suitability more closely tailored to circumstance could also be developed. I'm not super involved in Eden (yet), but I love the idea of trying out a scheme like this in the context of blockchain governance.
Whenever I run across a new governance idea, I ask myself if its implementation could get us closer to Star Trek's planetary federation. If the idea seems like it would move things in that direction, I support it. Although fractal democracy could easily be done in a low tech way, even for very large groups of people, this governance scheme does indeed appear capable of scaling to meet global needs. It passes the Star Trek test, which is interesting.
