Is there an assurance-contract website in work?

Is CollAction kind of what you had in mind? Wikipedia also mentions PledgeBank which closed down in 2015 but still has a site with all the archived pledges at www.pledgebank.com. Not sure but I don't think either of these sites allow versions of assurance contracts that use financial contributions.

I wonder what a good binding mechanism might be for crowdaction sites in general, because once the quorum is reached you still have to get everybody to go ahead and perform the action. Any thoughts?

A site based on dominant assurance contracts would also be interesting. It might be a bit more like Kickstarter, in that maybe the entrepreneur initiating the DAC can market and popularize the action, and be responsible for the action happening when/if the quorum is reached.

I’m working on a project like this called https://spartacus.app/

It will use assurance contracts and conditional anonymity to solve Moloch-like coordination problems.

The goal is de-risking recruitment and organizing for any project that can only make a difference with a group effort, like workplace organizing, whistleblowing, open letters, parallel institution building, breaking "tragedy of the commons" bad equilibria, formation of clubs, and anything else that needs a critical mass of participants to make an impact. It's especially relevant for initiatives that would benefit from covert organizing in the early stages, due to retaliatory risks.

The overall ethos behind the project is to fight preference falsification and facilitate a more honest, democratic culture where everyone "puts their cards on the table".

I'm looking for beta testers, UX/UI experts, and Product Managers to provide feedback and/or get involved. Happy to chat with anyone. DM me here or at https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus

Someone built the minimum-viable tool, but it was very bare bones and not well publicized.

http://actuator.herokuapp.com

(I think someone, maybe Eliezer? offered something on the order of $200 to build it, which was enough get the basic thing built but not fully invest in it. It does seem like something someone should offer more money and/or time to build. I think it requires an actual well-specified "inadequate equilibrium to escape" ("leave Facebook" doesn't solve anything you haven't coordinated on where you're all going next)

Hi all, just discovered this discussion through another post [EA · GW] and thought some of you might be interested to know we're currently building a collective action platform for academics: Project Free Our Knowledge

The basic premise is the same as Collaction (who I think are doing great things) but targeted more at collective action problems in academia (of which there are many). In general, any researcher can propose a new behaviour they want to see their peers adopt (generally an open science practice of some kind), put it out to the crowd, and then when the critical mass is met everyone carries out the action together. The project is still in its infancy (haven't actually reached the target threshold on any campaigns yet), but I'm hoping in time that we can grow the community and host ever-larger campaigns to reform academia.

I agree with the view expressed here [? · GW] that collective action between institutions could be a real game-changer, but also think that academics themselves have a lot of power to reform academia -- we just haven't been organising effectively to put that latent power into use. E.g. in the case of journal publishing, we could be supporting new journal systems through collective action, which would 'kickstart' their reputation/prestige (which depends entirely on the content we provide them) and allow individuals to transition their value from legacy systems to these new systems without risk to their careers. Impact factors roll around every two years, and in the meantime, a public display of support for progressive journals/systems would be a strong signal to universities to update their hiring procedures to reflect this.

But having said that, I do think that the ideal solution to this problem would be a combined, multilevel collective action across both researchers and institutions at the same time, e.g., researchers agree to support alternative venues at the same time as institutions agree to reward those venues moving forward. Hopefully this is something that our platform could evolve to cover, but in the short term we're focussing on researcher behaviours because those seem like the simplest and most tractable way to create change.

Any and all feedback welcome! :)

I created this Facebook group to for coordination and crowdfunding on EA and LW related projects: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LWCoordination/