Imagine if elders of Native American community voted on a YouTube videos or Digg stories.   Clearly, we'd have a VERY different set of stories that made it to the top. :)  So a reasonable question to ask is: can we integrate popularity and expert opinion in a seamless spectrum that includes everyone but avoids the tyranny of the majority?

That's the question Brad DeGraf's Smartocracy is exploring.

In a traditional poll, every person gets one vote; as a result, least-informed voters get same influence as the wisest amongst us.  In a dynamically distributed democracy, an ad-hoc group is empowered with proxies from uninformed representatives to accomodate a pool of users with fluctating degrees of participation.

A third alternative, though, is a trust-driven process for network based decision making -- Proxy Vote.  So let's say you have 100 coordinators of CharityFocus.  Each is given 10 proxies to give to others, within or outside of the existing network.  And iteratively, each new member is also given 10 proxies to give to others they invite.  At the time of a vote, each participant will have a precise number of votes equal to the number of invitations they received.  In the figure here, you can see that I-circle has most votes because it has five incoming arrows.  Essentially, you bias the votes based on network reputation and trust.

In offline networks, the "edges" aren't always so easily pointed in one direction.  Developing trust in person is a complicated process.  But in niche, online networks, we can perhaps simplify domain-specific trust.

Coming to think of it, we're already implementing a variant of a proxy vote with the help of our alternative currency -- KarmaBucks.

Smile Groups has 5541 members, growing linearly; KarmaBucks helps measure reputation in that gift-economy setting.  The only way to get KarmaBucks is to be gifted them -- when someone likes a story they read, they can give upto 4 smiles to it, each resulting in a gift of 1 KarmaBuck to the author; similarly, when a member posts a comment on a story, a gift of 2 KarmaBucks is made to the author.  With those KarmaBucks, you can either make purchases from the gift-economy "Smile Store" or you can gift it to others.  Friendships are made when you gift KarmaBucks, and your online reputation is measured by the gifts you've made.

"Wisdom" in this system, though, is predicated on a combination of various metrics: KarmaBucks received for stories (relevance), KarmaBucks gifted and number of friends (weight), gifts received (reputation/proxy-votes).  And then, in our kindness contest, for example, we informally weigh the smiles (votes) by voter's wisdom.

It would be an interesting exercise to do proxy-vote cascading, which would include everyone in a network despite power-law (few people doing major of activity) usage pattern.  (And in fact, we're thinking of implementing this in our upcoming  Be-The-Change Bank network.)