SBIR Phase II: Software technology to facilitate decentralized coordination across groups working on systemic problems

The broader impact/ commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project creates a platform specifically designed for more democratic online group-to-group collaboration in a distributed system. This could provide insights into new ways software can support collaboration, democratic infrastructure, and improve current understanding of how to optimize democratic and decentralized IT governance systems more broadly. Once successful, the technology will accelerate the rate of innovation and coordination across multi-disciplinary teams. The project is an effort to study how to create software with group-node database architecture relationships. The goal is to create layers of group network formation while balancing scalability with resiliency. The main innovation is a software-based system for decentralized organizations, which will eventually be using a decentralized underlying infrastructure such as distributed web technology or blockchain. This paradigm incorporates (a) social protocols for effective teaming and coalition formation; (b) automation supporting democratic/cooperative organizations working in a distributed network; (c) accelerated information discovery across disciplines and sectors, (d) data science optimization for model thinking for global optimization solutions in complex systems. The platform would also explore fractal and emergent group dynamics, as an opportunity for thousands (if not millions) of tiny experiments regarding the specific nature of group formation, commons coordination, and effective communication for distributed organizations at scale. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.