SBIR Phase I: SocialRoots

What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity? This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I is focused on creating a platform specifically designed for more democratic online collaboration. It will give one of the first real-world examples into how groups of users interact with other groups via less centralized software architectures. This will provide insights into a new set of ways to architect software permissions and relationships relating to group to group information sharing. The platform would also be an exploration into how to support fractal and emergent group dynamics, as well as an opportunity for thousands if not millions of tiny experiments regarding the specific nature of group formation, coalition formation and higher-level communication needs for effective democratic organizing at scale. This could provide immensely meaningful 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. The project is an effort to study how to create architecture for IT software with many-to-many relationships. The goal is to create layers of group interaction while balancing scalability with resiliency. This proposal is focused on building a new paradigm of software design that supports the concept of group to group information exchange, which will improve collaboration in democratic organizations. The main innovation is a software-based system for decentralized organizations, which will eventually be using blockchain. This paradigm would incorporate (a) Group to group and coalition formation; (b) Permissions supporting democratic/sociocratic/cooperative organizations; (c) The ability for users to connect more easily with each other in a more organized way (via existing communication tools) and exchange high-level information across groups while maintaining autonomy; and (d) Visibility into the matrix of group and coalition formation, which would enable all individuals better context for further coordination and decision-making. A decentralized app (Dapp) that allows the platform to be managed democratically with member/user decision making via blockchain will be developed during the potential Phase II. 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.