Quic: Efficient Chat-Based Decision-Making for Democratic Participation in Organizations Using the Evocracy Protocol

Abstract

Even today, democratic participation in organizations is underutilized, despite the advantages of workplace democracy, such as increased trust, job satisfaction, and employee motivation. We present and describe Quic, an open-source software implementation of the Evocracy protocol, designed to facilitate scalable and democratic decision-making through a conversational interface. The underlying Evocracy protocol leverages collective intelligence by structuring organizational decision-making through an evolutionary approach: participants first independently propose solutions, then iteratively synthesize ideas in small groups. With Quic we aim to examine the conceptual underpinnings of Evocracy and how it can encourage inclusive decision-making. Moreover, the chatbot frontend of Quic integrates into popular commercial communication platforms and allows us to test how efficiently the application integrates into daily workflows. We describe how Quic is designed to advance workplace democracy and suggest a Design Science Research approach assessing Quic’s impact on employee engagement, decision quality, and integrability into existing routines, while exploring the broader applications of the Evocracy protocol in complex organizational settings.