SBIR Phase I: SocialRoots

建议的活动有何更广泛的影响？这个小企业创新研究第一阶段的重点是创建一个专门为更民主的在线协作设计的平台。它将提供第一个真实的例子，说明用户组如何通过不太集中的软件架构与其他组进行交互。这将为构建软件权限和与组间信息共享相关的关系提供一组新方法。该平台还将探索如何支持分形和涌现的群体动力学，并为数千甚至数百万个关于群体形成、联盟形成和大规模有效民主组织的更高级别沟通需求的具体性质的微小实验提供机会。这可以为软件支持协作、民主基础设施的新方式提供非常有意义的见解，并改善当前对如何更广泛地优化民主和分散的IT治理系统的理解。该项目旨在研究如何为具有多对多关系的IT软件创建体系结构。目标是创建组交互层，同时平衡可伸缩性和弹性。该建议的重点是建立一个新的软件设计范例，支持组对组信息交换的概念，这将改善民主组织中的协作。主要的创新是为分散的组织提供一个基于软件的系统，该系统最终将使用区块链。这种模式将包括(a)组对组和联盟的形成；(b)支持民主/社会/合作组织的许可；(c)用户能够更容易地以更有组织的方式（通过现有的通讯工具）相互联系，并在保持自主性的同时跨群体交换高级信息；(d)了解团体和联盟形成的矩阵，使所有个人能够更好地进行进一步的协调和决策。在潜在的第二阶段，将开发一个去中心化的应用程序（Dapp），允许平台通过区块链与成员/用户决策进行民主管理。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.