Editing Selectricity/Justin Sharps UROP Proposal (section)

== Project Description ==

I’m proposing to work on a project known as Selectricity for Summer 2007. I will be working at the Media Lab within the Computing Culture group, under the direct supervision of Benjamin Mako Hill and faculty supervisor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. Selectricity is an enhanced version of RubyVote, a collection of voting libraries developed at an earlier time by Mako to enhance the decision making experience in the open source software community. Selectricity uses software and a simple web interface (Ruby and Ruby on Rails) to bring complex voting algorithms into the everyday decision making process. Selectricity will be developed as a free and open source program, and will be distributed under the GNU GPL. It emphasizes preferential algorithms but offers access to plurality and majority methods as well. Selectricity also offers cryptographic means of voter verifiability, ensuring a fair decision making process.

While Selectricity is primarily web-based, in response to indicated interest, there are plans to work with a cell phone accessible version as well. An early model of Selectricity is available at http://hyperchad.media.mit.edu/.

Selectricity was recently selected to receive a grant from mtvU and Cisco as part of the Digital Incubator project. The exposure will help bring innovative advances in the decision making process to many people in contexts important to them (a possibility could be American Idol!). Hopefully, working with a democratic decision making process everyday will help everyone make better decisions in all parts of their lives.