Crowdsourcing top priorities from networks
Each user receives 100 votes monthly, which they can pass on to three types of nodes in the network: other users, problem pages, or solution pages. Basalt creates rankings of priorities that can be viewed on other people's pages or aggregated by a network of people one follows or all users on the platform.
Users can provide financial support to priorities they care about through a monthly subscription. The funds, following users’ votes, trickle down through the network to reach the projects and orgs working on the solving different issues.
The platform operates as a knowledge and discourse hub aimed at enhancing clarity of thinking around societal problems. It attempts to counter the curse of knowledge bias and make knowledge accessible to more people. Why is this important? A well-informed populace leads to a better-functioning democracy. A more informed society incentivizes a gradual shift towards gradually more direct voting circuits on the platform. (See On liquid democracy and a gradient between representational and direct democracy )
Most large-scale democratic systems adopt representational democracy. Direct democracy avoids many pitfalls of representational democracy—such as politicians being far removed from their constituents, becoming a relatively small elite, incentivizing lobbying and corruption, or/and creating low political engagement. However, direct democracy isn’t scalable, as everyone cannot be expert on everything.
Basalt, by using liquid democracy, attempts to move beyond the binary choice between representational and direct democracy. Users can pass votes to others if they are not well-informed on certain issues, vote on problem pages when they trust an expert but don't know the solutions, or vote directly on organizations addressing specific problems if they have developed enough expertise.
The Basalt voting mechanism could encourage the emergence of a new class of experts. If someone in your close network knows more about a certain topic, you could pass your votes to them, empowering them to learn more.
Basalt enables people outside of established professional politicians or activist roles to be nodes in the decision-making chains. Engaging people within everyone's network may be more effective for better evaluations, as we may be evolutionarily better equipped to judge people we know personally, have met in real life, or who have been assessed by our community.
No, with one click, you can decide not to pass funding on each of the node you vote on.