6 March 2023, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Ehud Shapiro

Abstract

For the past five years our Digital Democracy research group at Weizmann, together with many colleagues, have explored the many challenges facing the grassroots formation and democratic governance of autonomous and egalitarian digital communities. A key challenge is how to ensure equality in democratic governance. In this talk we will review several works that attempt to address this multifaceted challenge, aiming to achieve equality in: (1) Forming a constitution ab initio, including its amendment rule. (2) The grassroots sybil (fake and duplicate identities)-resilient formation of digital communities. (3) Voting despite sybil penetration. (4) Making proposals to be voted upon in elections, legislation, and budgeting. (5) The deliberative formation of new proposals and of coalitions around them. (6) Community forking.

A common tool employed in these works is Reality-Aware Social Choice, which identifies the status quo, or 'reality', as an essential and distinguished alternative that any newly chosen alternative must be preferred over.

For more information on the Computational Social Choice Seminar, please consult https://staff.science.uva.nl/u.endriss/seminar/.