I’m noticing a genre of collective decisionmaking systems we could build. I’ll call them Open Objective Systems (opobs).

Opobs have two defining features:

• An objective function, which describes a goal by providing a way of scoring proposed plans. The objective function gives higher scores to plans that will please the most people.
• Openness. Having an objective function allows the planning process to be open to plan proposals from absolutely anyone, and whichever plan gets the highest score according to the objective function will be actioned, regardless of where it came from. (and the winning plan’s author (or the authors of each incremental improvement) might be awarded a prize).

Reach for an opob whenever you need to develop complex plans that take lots of needs into account and that can be objectively measured, and where it’s important to us that the planning process is fair, transparent, and open to contributions from all affected people.

Four examples

• Group matchmaking, dynamically planning events, parties, sessions, or driving group dating meetup systems (an institution sorely needed), or assembling grouphouses, or, the motivating example that spurred this document: Dividing up an awkwardly large community of retreat applicants into multiple reasonably sized events. In these sorts of situations, every applicant will have a unique pile of negotiable preferences about who, and what kind of people they do or don’t want to spend time with, what sort of venues they like, and when they’re available. There are many ways you could sort your applicants into buckets of space and time to try to maximize the rate of desirable encounters, and it would be best if we could make this process of assigning people to buckets fair and objective and open. And we can, with opobs, so we shall.
• The most ambitious potentially transformative opob concept that I’ve noticed is something I call a propinquity city, an opob for deciding where residents and services will be located, granting residents a guarantee that the city will make its best earnest effort to place them among people and workplaces who they want and/or are wanted by, liberating them from the bidding wars of land speculation and rent and the callous aristocracies that feed on its casualties, while promoting and sustaining actual communities instead of just class strata. I find that the social and economic problems of cities are wired deep, probably inherent to the way urban land is owned and traded. A position-planning opob seems like it might be a crucial part of the solution.
• I’ll give an example of a sorta opob that already exists: Markets enact plans according to the objective function of revenue minus costs, while investment processes keep them fairly open to new ideas. Markets work alright. Uniquely for an opob, markets were practical even without computers, the other proposals weren't, which I think mostly explains why we're only just starting to talk about them now.
• Scheduling often needs to take the complex preferences of sometimes enormous sets of people (consider college timetables) and weave them into a structured plan that’s scored on the minimization of dead time between sessions, travel time, or of clashes between optional activities. I find that dynamic scheduling is especially desperately needed for streamlining the organization of small, irregular, focused (efficient) meetings and hangouts, which are so good and so important, but conventional scheduling processes are so prohibitively grating that many crucial conversations pass unborn. Dynamic scheduling would definitely benefit from being phrased as an optimization problem, though openness is less obviously important here. Automated, algorithmic approaches are necessary and possibly sufficient, but, why should anyone have to trust an opaque algorithm with something as important as the scheduling of their lives? On principle, a dynamic scheduler should be open and negotiable to the humans subject to it, its objective function should be disclosed, and it would be cool if different scheduling algorithms were able to compete with each other in a fair arena where the best solution wins.

I might build some of these, now

I’d like to make a group matchmaking system to solve our retreat division problem, but no promises (It might not be the right approach. And I might just go back to working on wasm userland standards.)

It would be irresponsible to try to build a propinquity city without doing a lot of simulated testing of propinquity systems, but the simulated testing itself might be fun, if we can think of the right games for it. Propinquity systems might end up being really useful in the virtual social environments or ludic social networks that I expect to see popping up in social VR environments.

mako yass

February 2023

Some additional thoughts about open objective systems:

Privacy

Money

A simple group matchmaker