Digital Democracy
Researching Alternative Forms of Governance
The latest technologies like cryptocurrencies and organizations such as Shape Your City and Hearthstone Village are currently exploring alternative forms of governance which allow ordinary users to have a say in the organization. This prompted questions on how a similar concept could be adapted for use at Emily Carr University for the Student Union to use and allow students and staff to have a bigger say in what happens around the school.
The system was initially designed to integrate with current systems at Emily Carr University. By speaking with Student Union reps and leaders, I was able to gauge the current structure and begin creating a community governance system. Initially it was developed as operating entirely online, but as a way of improving community engagement, it was later decided that a workshop should be integrated alongside the online model to promote in-person discussion since it provides more qualitative information to begin ideating and building new community-led processes and concepts.
A workshop was developed as a way to test my voting system. Using Miro allowed me to develop multiple workshopA voting system called Cascade was developed using the rank-choice method currently used in countries like Ireland as a fairer alternative to our first-past-the-post system as baseline. Then, by incorporating multiple rounds of votes, communities are allowed for ongoing discussion and engagement as ideas are fleshed out and a final decision is reached.scenarios to consider and discuss with school community members to find the best way to run it.
A workshop allowing for discussion, idea sharing and image and model building was created as a part of the voting process to increase community involvement. This method also allowed for my voting system to be tested against other methods to determine its effectiveness for large-scale decision making. The flow path of the workshop was developed through several iterations using Miro.
Running the workshop as part of user-research provided a real-world test for the voting system. For this workshop, participants discussed the spaces around Emily Carr University to determine a space which garnered the most interest in developing, then working together to create a new vision for how that space could be better utilized.
To create a space where everyone would be able to join was a top priority, It was important that those who could not make it to the workshops still were able to have a say in how decisions are made. Wireframes in Miro and mockups in Figma were created for a website which allowed for these interactions to continue online.
By posting images and models created during the workshops along with the insights from discussions, gives those participating through the online platform better insight into how and why decisions were made before contributing their own ideas and finally, voting to determine a result.
