Selectricity

Oddly, Mako Hill and Alyssa Wright, two computing culturists, have won a grant from MTV to continue developing Selectricity, Mako’s experiment in technologies for quotidian democracy.

Mako’s experiences with collaborative decision making in the open source community led him to develop rubyvote, a library that offers relatively simple interfaces to computationally complex voting methods, including preferential methods. Preferential voting allows for a bit of that John Stuart Mill magic: The greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Mill was apparently the first member of the British Parliament to call for women’s vote, incidentally, so not bad (mixed) company.

Mako demonstrated rubyvote’s principles by hacking out Selectriciy, a minimal example application. One can create a vote in about 25 seconds, then vote in about 10. There’s an SMS interface, and scalable security if necessary. The target user is not a nation voting, but rather a few people deciding where to go for dinner after a movie. You know what it’s like: You’ve just stumbled out of Cheeni Kum on a monsoon night and you’re trying to figure out where to get snacks. It can take an hour, what about here? why not there? and eventually people just give up and settle, uncomfortably, for Barista. You can do better.

One of the big arguments against preferential voting, or new voting technologies, is the fear that they would disenfranchise the average person who doesn’t yet understand how they work. Certainly, making all voting technologies open source is critical, but the issue of familiarity is worth considering. We’re hoping that MTV — and eventually American Idol — will move their voting over to Selectricity, allowing it to work as both a technical tool but also pedagogically, training future voters. Why not integrate democratic processes into all your software and communications tools? Why not use the best democratic processes available, so long as they’re available to everyone?