SBIR Phase I: SocialRoots

拟议活动的广泛影响是什么？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而设计的平台。它将给出第一个真实世界的例子，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。这将提供一组新的方法来架构软件权限和与组到组信息共享相关的关系。该平台还将探索如何支持分形和新兴的群体动态，以及为成千上万的微小实验提供机会，这些实验涉及群体形成的特定性质，联盟形成和更高层次的沟通需求，以实现大规模的有效民主组织。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，并提高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。该项目是研究如何创建具有多对多关系的IT软件体系结构的努力。目标是创建组交互层，同时平衡可伸缩性和弹性。该提案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。主要的创新是一个基于软件的系统，用于分散的组织，最终将使用区块链。这一模式将包括：（a）群体对群体和联盟的形成;（B）对民主/社会/合作组织的支持;（c）用户以更有组织的方式更容易相互联系的能力（通过现有的通信工具），并在保持自主性的同时，在各群体之间交换高级别信息;以及（d）对团体和联盟形成矩阵的了解，这将使所有个人能够更好地了解进一步协调和决策的背景。在潜在的第二阶段，将开发一个分散的应用程序（Dapp），允许平台通过区块链进行民主管理，成员/用户决策。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.