SO VOTE

consensus that scales

An open-source decision-making platform built on a simple belief:

giving people a direct, meaningful voice in decisions that affect them reduces conflict, improves coordination, and leads to better outcomes.

Not just voting on outcomes — but shaping how decisions themselves are made.

One person, one vote
8 billion lives.

Binary polls and one-off votes don’t scale to real human complexity.

Large groups need ways to express nuance, surface disagreement, adapt over time, and still move forward together.

Solve small-group consensus first

Learn, adapt, and repeat.

Focus on building a general system for collective decision-making that works in small groups

Then scale to larger, more complex communities.

Consensus not unanimity

In So Vote, consensus is a state where:1.Enough people have participated2.Sufficient agreement has emerged3.Less than half the population objects

Consensus is maintained, not locked in.

Decisions can evolve as the group evolves.

Core Requirements

The qualities we need in the system to meet the challenge

A Solution

So Vote models decisions as living objects that groups can propose, shape, challenge, and refine over time.
Instead of voting once on a fixed question, participants interact with shared subjects that evolve through structured input.

How It Works

The Cast

Building blocks that combine to produce a flexible and scalable voting platform.

The Subject

The core unit of decision-making.

A subject represents something to be decided - a proposal, rule, value, or outcome.

Its behavior is defined by its subject type. (see here for an initial list of subject types)

A subject:

1.

Starts inactive

2.

Becomes active once its criteria are met

3.

Remains active as long as the group continues to support it

4.

May change result over time without restarting the process

Subjects can feed into one another - for example, one subject defining the engagement threshold for another.

The User

An individual participant whose identity is verified by the host or wider community.

The Group

A purpose-oriented container for users and the subjects they collectively decide on. E.g. a book club, a cooperative, an event organiser, etc...

Subjects can be shared between groups on different hosts allowing specialist groups to provide materials to other groups.

For Example:

A group focused around inclusive behavioural standards could agree on a code-of-conduct (CoC) which is then adopted by another group.

Updates to the CoC would be automatically propagated to adopting group. The adopting group can choose at any time to change the source of their CoCs or they may decide to adopt a custom standard internally.

The Vote

A user’s input on a subject.

The form of a vote depends on the subject type.

For example:

text for text subjects

rankings for ordered lists

numbers for numeric subjects

etc.

Votes are positive expressions of intent or preference. Objections are covered below by Rejections.

Rejection

A universal safeguard.

Any subject - regardless of type - can be rejected by a simple majority.

A rejected subject is marked illegitimate and becomes inactive.

This prevents the system from being captured by:

unreachable thresholds

unfair rules

structurally undemocratic decisions

Authors of a rejected subject can simply create a new subject in a form that has wider appeal

No rule is above the group (except this one).

Association

A relationship between subjects.

Associations allow subjects to influence or reference one another.

What an association means depends on the subject types involved.

Influence Example:

A Percent subject feeding into the engagement threshold parameter of another subject

Reference Examples:

A Comment subject associated with a target subject

A Conflict subject associated with two or more subjects deemed incompatible