Mission 2017-01-29T19:35:44+00:00

Mission

The concept of democracy is all about collective self-governance. It is about inclusive, disciplined, rich and enjoyable conversation. And it is about community- based decision making and about public buy-in to legislation, which an older generation was far more inclined to accept as edicts from on high.

Problem
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Solution
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Strategy
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Problem

Humanity has prospered through its ability to act collectively. However, problems with how groups make decisions has led to critical challenges, including economic inequality, climate change, political instability, military aggression, and dwindling resources.

These are the great challenges of our times, and they cannot be solved using the same decision making processes of time’s past.

Democracy has been famously described as the worst system of government, except for all the others. But problems with democracy are becoming more apparent. Concentrations of power, undue influence, factional division, lack of accountability and disengaged citizens are bringing faith in democracy to an all-time low. At the same time, democracies are facing a challenge from technologically sophisticated authoritarian states.

To survive, democracy must use technology to deepen the advantages that group participation and collective wisdom can provide. We need to optimize mobile technology and social networks to access the best available human understanding. We need to integrate our collective intelligence using information technology and big data analytics. We need real-time feedback loops and inclusive, iterative processes that can generate broad consensus and united efforts for effective execution.

Solution

Ethelo was created to improve group decision-making using democratic principles. It harnesses the reach and computational power of the internet to aggregate the intelligence of groups in a fair and broadly supported way.

Ethelo avoids the polarizing dynamic of majority votes, in which a single “winning” faction holds all the power. Instead, it uses behavioural science and sophisticated data aggregation to achieve the fundamental democratic principle, “fairness in the distribution of influence.”

Ethelo allows broad engagement in solving complex problems of planning and public policy. These multi-factor problems can have thousands or millions of scenarios – far beyond the grasp of traditional processes. Ethelo uses social technology to distribute the task of decision analysis, and then applies tailored algorithms to find decision paths that will attract broad support.

Ethelo makes scalable, optimized consensus on contentious issues an achievable reality. Learn more about the technology here

Strategy

Our strategy for social change is to upgrade democracy by providing citizens with the tools to create and participate in democratic processes. Ethelo helps people and citizen organizations build a public mandate for political change. 

We provide free Ethelo licenses for citizen groups to engage citizens in democratic decision-making on public policy issues. Upcoming in 2017 we will provide a public API to the Ethelo Engine, and open source access to the core Ethelo code for public interest-minded developers to experiment with and build upon.

Ethelo enables groups to come to collective decisions on political issues ranging from community action to public policy and legislative change. If you or your organization would like to use Ethelo to build a public mandate for social change, please contact us.

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