Decision Process

0. Conception

A conceiver writes a description of the proposal and registers it with Knola. Any participant can request assignment as decision manager for an open proposal. It might be their own favorite idea, a popular suggestion from a group, or even randomly chosen from a hat. Once the group agrees on proposal assignment, the new decision manager gets to work.

1. Research

The decision manager arranges the gathering of facts about the past and present, with the goal of answering most of the factual questions of volunteers evaluating the proposal. For small decisions, the manager might do this work themselves. Large decisions might call for a whole team of volunteers or hired investigators.

2. Analysis

Whereas research attempts to understand the past and present, analysis attempts to predict the future. Using comparable experiences, established models, and perhaps crowd-sourced guesses, analysts compete to predict how the proposal will change the facts. For instance, analysts might guess that constructing a new bridge will reduce rush hour congestion on a nearby bridge by 42%.

Analysis is both helpful for making an initial decision, and for revisiting a decision if the analysis proves to be wrong. Thus prediction techniques will grow gradually more accurate over time.

3. Summarization

Facts from research and predictions from analysis are condensed into a presentation for evaluators. The presentation might be text, audio, or video. Ideal presentations fit easily into a person's attention span, so most evaluators should be able to absorb the information in 15 minutes.

To eliminate bias from particularly important decisions, independent presenters prepare multiple alternative versions. Biased presentations will produce significantly different outcomes from the rest, and thus will be discarded.

4. Refinement

A small group of volunteer evaluators considers presentations and provides feedback, particularly by identifying missing information or articulating presentation problems. Especially if relatively few evaluators support the action, it will return to the research or analysis stages. For instance, for a proposal to build a new bridge, evaluators might want to know how noisy construction would be before forming an opinion.

5. Decision

Evaluators review the refined presentations, and choose whether to support or oppose the proposal. Knola records both the general inclination and stated reasons. For instance, an evaluator might explain that they prefer not to construct the bridge, because it would require cutting down too many nearby trees. These reasons help inform future alternative proposals, so the group can eventually find an acceptable idea.