Smartocracy:
Social Networks for Collective Decision Making
Marko A. Rodriguez
1
, Daniel J. Steinbock
2
, Jennifer H. Watkins
1
, Carlos Gershenson
3
,
Johan Bollen
1
, Victor Grey
4
, Brad deGraf
5
1
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545
2
Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
3
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium 1160
4
2idi Corporation, Concord, California 94524
5
Media Venture Collective, Mill Valley, California 94941
Email: marko@lanl.gov
Abstract
Smartocracy is a social software system for collec-
tive decision making. The system is composed of a so-
cial network that links individuals to those they trust to
make good decisions and a decision network that links
individuals to their voted-on solutions. Such networks
allow a variety of algorithms to convert the link choices
made by individual participants into specific decision
outcomes. Simply interpreting the linkages differently
(e.g. ignoring trust links, or using them to weight an
individual’s vote) provides a variety of outcomes fit for
different decision making scenarios. This paper will
discuss the Smartocracy network data structures, the
suite of collective decision making algorithms currently
supported, and the results of two collective decisions
regarding the design of the system.
1 Introduction
The recent explosion of so-called ‘social software’
on the Internet has been characterized by democratic
approaches to content generation [11]. The Wiki is an
exemplar of this approach, where all users have equal
power to add or modify the content of any hypertext
[5]. Wikis are social software that support democratic
collaborative authorship. Systems exist to support
generative collaboration in many fields including,
but not limited to, journalism
1
, scholarly citation
2
,
1
Digg available at: http://digg.com
2
CiteULike available at: http://citeulike.org
photography
3
, and hypertext bookmarking
4
.
While these systems vary in the forms of col-
laboration they support, they have in common an
egalitarian social structure and they all aggregate user
contributions into shared representations of collective
belief. For instance, in addition to contributing news
stories, users of the Digg web service vote for stories
they think highly of and can view the most popular
stories for different subjects. Del.icio.us users save
and categorize bookmarks for websites they like into
a common pool and can easily view the most popular
sites for any category. Similar patterns of contribution
and aggregation occur with varying prominence
throughout the social software sphere. Despite the
proliferation of such systems with traditional methods
of aggregation, there has yet to emerge a generalized
software model for the intelligent aggregation of
individual contributions beyond mere vote-counting.
If such a model did exist, it could systematically
improve the state of the art in social software design
and promote the innovation of systems geared more di-
rectly toward the aggregation of individual knowledge
into collective knowledge, i.e. software supported col-
laborative problem solving and decision making [2, 12].
Smartocracy
5
is a web-based social software sys-
tem for collective problem solving/decision making.
Smartocracy uses a problem-solution model where in-
dividuals pose problems (i.e. issues, questions) to the
3
Flickr available at: http://flickr.com
4
Del.icio.us available at: http://del.icio.us
5
Smartocracy available at: http://www.smartocracy.net
Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2007
1U.S. Government Work Not Protected by U.S. Copyright