Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network

Citation: Steve Hardt, Lia C. R. Lopes (2015/06/05) Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network. Technical Disclosure Commons (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network
Download: http://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs series/79/
Tagged: google (RSS)

Summary

Defines "The Golden Rule of Liquid Democracy": If I give you my vote, I can see what you do with it. Compliant policies include all votes public, all votes private and no delegation, delegated votes visible.

Describes Google Votes based on Google internal Google+ social network. Supports various types of voting, including approval, ranking, binary. UI educates users about delegated voting. Users with votes delegated to them can either cast a personal, private vote, or a vote using delegations, with notifications sent to delegators.

From March 2012 to February 2015, Googlers using Google Votes have created 370 issues, 131 of them grouped into 30 ballots. Google Votes has been visited by 20,000 Googlers, with 15,000 casting over 87,000 votes (including delegated votes). Issues with category "food" have the highest number of votes cast, over 73,000, and the largest number of issues, at 150.

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Of the total vote count across all issues, 3.6% were delegated votes. This is a small percentage but is significant considering effectively all users were new to the concept of delegated voting. Delegation advertisements were effective, 486 delegation advertisements were sent and 355 delegations currently exist.