Principles

Authenticity

Decisions reflect genuine group desires.

In heirloom democracies, campaign finance pressure creates perverse incentives for candidates, and makes them vulnerable to influence from lobbyists. Meanwhile news media drives focus to sensational topics and away from important, but boring issues. The result is biased decisions, leaving voters with a persistent feeling of frustration.

Knola achieves authenticity by collecting direct input from group members. Every participant contributes to a random selection of decisions. So each decision consists of a natural cross-section of people's motivations. This structure naturally resists influence from politics and lobbying.

This shifts power from legislators to their constituents. The result is less bias, and thus fewer detrimental choices.

Elucidation

Decisions are powered by knowledge.

In modern elections, ballots are strongly influenced by voters' reactions to campaigns. Candidates' slogans, sound bites, and party affiliation is most of what we get. Reacting is natural, but reasoning leads to better outcomes, and data is the main ingredient in reasoning. Legislators receive much more data when crafting the law, but are still constrained by public perception.

Knola eliminates the consequences of ignorance by conjoining power and information. As a proposal forms, participants help identify the most important questions. Then researchers collaborate to gather and verify facts, analysts compete to produce the best predictions, and presenters vie to summarize with least bias.

This shifts power from provocation to experience. The result is enlightened, rational participants, and wise choices.

Invention

Evolution strengthens the ideas behind decisions.

Lawmaking is a creative process, slowly condensing many raw ideas into consensus policy. However, in heirloom democracies, legislation remains primitive, because lawmakers don't have enough time and space to innovate well. They briefly debate a few obvious ideas, vote, and then move to the next issue.

With Knola decisions draw on creativity from a much larger group of people, including both regular participants and specialists who focus on refining ideas in difficult areas. Participants provide their concerns and ideas for each proposal. If a proposal is unsuccessful, designers can use this information to devise a more popular revision.

Over time, this refinement process eventually produces downright ingenious ideas.

Proximity

Decisions are made by those impacted.

Democracies give equal say to every voter on every issue. However, on most issues, some people are much more affected than others. Thus this allocation of authority often leads to oppressive policies. State and local governments receive some relief from this, by being allowed to decide on proximate issues. However, their powers are divided along rigid geographic boundaries, which are growing less useful as communities become more interconnected.

Knola offers tools to fix this, allowing the scope and weight of relevant opinions to be determined for each decision. So the significantly impacted people carry the most influence, although indirectly affected people also contribute proportional input.

The result is consistently humane decisions, which balance the interests of fractions and the whole.

Advancement

Predictions grow smarter over time.

Legislatures conduct research when designing laws, which often includes forecasting the effects of a bill. However, because there aren't sufficient incentives, the forecasting process remains relatively crude. This means legislators often make decisions based on poor guesses, leading to poor outcomes.

Knola fosters an ecosystem of smart people vying to produce the most accurate forecasts. For a proposal, potentially many forecasters register predictions of the impact. Knola summaries highlight the forecasters with strong track records, meaning those who techniques proved trustworthy in a variety of previous proposals. Knola also incentivizes forecasters to develop accurate models by rewarding correct predictions, using a small portion of the budget assigned to successful proposals.

The result is prescient decisions, and far fewer regrets.

Verifiability

Mistakes are easily caught and corrected.

Heirloom democracies are poorly protected from bogus perceptions. In both elections and legislatures, voting doesn't capture rationale, so it's difficult to know if results were based on misinformation. Even when the reasons can be found false, repairing the law is still a long, arduous struggle.

With Knola, bad decisions are easily overturned. Except for anonymizing input from participants, all of the raw data is perpetually publicly available. This includes facts and predictions provided to participants, and their detailed thoughts before and after the presentation.

So anyone can undertake to check a particular decision. If the facts are found to be wrong or incomplete, the decision is invalidated and the process reopens with new participants.

This eliminates any motivation for tampering, and eventually results in unassailable decisions.