Constitution analysis

[markwhiting]

The problem

We have a non-archival paper about the constitutional mechanism we developed. However, we are yet to evaluate the mechanism formally and so have not been able to submit a more substantive paper about it to an archival venue.

My proposal

1. Study a testbed of users, e.g. Daemo or a spun up community, depending on our growth in the coming months.
2. Develop a social science style protocol in which two cases are studied simultaneously with the same participants, on different issues. i.e. some decisions are conducted using the constitution, and some are conducted using one of a selection of control techniques. The control would be decisions in which particular parts of our mechanism are modified randomly for a given decision. For example, switching from stakeholder aware voting, to unified voting, or as another example, switching from passive platform involvement to active platform involvement. In this type of protocol, the participants are party to the study, but are invested in honest participation.
3. Use the protocol to study the impacts of: 1) splitting the voting population around stakeholder incentives, 2) isolating the platform team and its management from the workers and requesters, 3) giving externally incentivized stakeholders the power to set the mission of an organization.

This study would be something that members of the new cohort could work on if interested, and would also be open to anyone else in our community.

Short-term and, and long-term implications

The short-term implications of this work include:

1. producing a paper that we could submit to a venue like CSCW'18 (Submissions due April 16, 2018).
2. increasing awareness of Daemo from the standpoint of its governance mechanism
3. having awareness about how to work to improve our constitutional mechanism

The long-term implications of this work include:

1. demonstrating how a constitution like this could be used to help multi-stakeholder socio-technical systems in expressing collective goals to platform providers.
2. providing insight for organizations (e.g. Facebook) to build mediation tools allowing their different stakeholder groups to collectively identify goals and policies, helping the organizations to navigate complex socio-technical decision spaces.

Contact

Mark Whiting is @markwhiting on GitHub and Slack.

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