Quadratic Voting in the Classroom
John Dewey felt that education environments should be democratic, in order to give a democrat nation it’s best citizens. This made me consider informing my educational philosophy with my latest thoughts on democracy. Recent events in the US have made me consider alternatives to “first past the post” voting systems, and “non-proportional representation”. To me, these are USA voting processes that could be improved to make our nation more democratic.
So, what did this mean for my virtual reality galleries for students, with a cryptocurrency driven auctioning system for the best gallery spaces?
Initially we tried making group decisions about the gallery space. Would it be a building, a natural gallery like a park, or something abstract like a tunnel of light? Hearing everyone’s voice on the matter was quite challenging, and making group decisions on those ideas was even harder! Simple shows of hands didn’t work well because we had too many options and each student usually liked more than one option.
I found inspiration on an article from Vitalik Buterin called “Quadratic Payments“. In it he specifies some voting techniques that I found quite attractive, and genuinely feel would be an improvement for a democratic voting system. Thus, in class, we used Quadratic Voting! This is a system of voting where you get multiple votes, but must pay an increasing amount for each vote. Each student got to spend 10 nano, and 1 vote cost just 1 nano, 2 votes cost 3 nano, 3 votes cost 6 nano, and 4 votes cost 10 nano.
Check out my Google Sheets Quadratic Voting Template (disclaimer, I made this during class, it’s not fantastic, but got the job done). First, we recorded our votes on this sheet (I know, it could benefit from being anonymous). Then we calculated how many nano each student spent on their votes, and they sent that back to our class wallet. Someday maybe we’ll use the Bitcoin Lightning Network and Satoshis, but for now it’s all nano.
I wanted to embed the votes into the transactions, and I think I could have done it by making a wallet for each vote, but I wasn’t sure how to enforce the increasing cost of each vote into the transaction. Maybe some type of app could help with this?
I also think a Quadratic Microsoft Forms would be very useful, so that this style of voting could be used as quickly and commonly as a show of hands, embedding it into the thinking processes of my students. Hit me up @JamesLearns on Twitter if you have any recommendations!
