Votiverse: A Configurable Governance Platform for Democratic Decision-Making
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arXiv
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866915950442315776 |
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| author | Macrini, Diego |
| author_facet | Macrini, Diego |
| contents | Democracy is not a single mechanism. It is a space of possible configurations -- a spectrum stretching from pure direct participation to full delegation of authority. The systems we live under today occupy a narrow band of that spectrum, chosen centuries ago under constraints that no longer apply, and rarely questioned since. Votiverse is a platform for exploring the rest of that space. It provides organizations, communities, and institutions of any size with a configurable governance engine. Participants can vote directly, delegate their vote to trusted individuals by topic, or operate under any hybrid arrangement their group defines. Delegations are revocable, topic-specific, and transitive. A direct vote always overrides a delegation. In this model, traditional representative democracy is not the norm -- it is an edge case: the configuration you get when delegation is forced, universal, non-specific, and irrevocable for a fixed term. Votiverse introduces two structural innovations. First, a governance awareness layer -- a built-in system that monitors the delegation network and delivers contextual, progressive-disclosure reporting to participants at the point of decision. Second, a prediction-tracking accountability layer. Proposals carry falsifiable predictions. Outcomes are recorded. Over time, the platform builds a collective memory of what was decided, what was promised, and what actually happened. Together, these layers transform voting from a momentary act into an ongoing process of collective learning. This paper formalizes the governance model, situates it within existing work on liquid democracy and participatory decision-making, addresses known failure modes, and describes the architecture of the platform. The core platform has been implemented and released as open-source software. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20863 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Votiverse: A Configurable Governance Platform for Democratic Decision-Making Macrini, Diego Computers and Society Multiagent Systems Democracy is not a single mechanism. It is a space of possible configurations -- a spectrum stretching from pure direct participation to full delegation of authority. The systems we live under today occupy a narrow band of that spectrum, chosen centuries ago under constraints that no longer apply, and rarely questioned since. Votiverse is a platform for exploring the rest of that space. It provides organizations, communities, and institutions of any size with a configurable governance engine. Participants can vote directly, delegate their vote to trusted individuals by topic, or operate under any hybrid arrangement their group defines. Delegations are revocable, topic-specific, and transitive. A direct vote always overrides a delegation. In this model, traditional representative democracy is not the norm -- it is an edge case: the configuration you get when delegation is forced, universal, non-specific, and irrevocable for a fixed term. Votiverse introduces two structural innovations. First, a governance awareness layer -- a built-in system that monitors the delegation network and delivers contextual, progressive-disclosure reporting to participants at the point of decision. Second, a prediction-tracking accountability layer. Proposals carry falsifiable predictions. Outcomes are recorded. Over time, the platform builds a collective memory of what was decided, what was promised, and what actually happened. Together, these layers transform voting from a momentary act into an ongoing process of collective learning. This paper formalizes the governance model, situates it within existing work on liquid democracy and participatory decision-making, addresses known failure modes, and describes the architecture of the platform. The core platform has been implemented and released as open-source software. |
| title | Votiverse: A Configurable Governance Platform for Democratic Decision-Making |
| topic | Computers and Society Multiagent Systems |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20863 |