We have a clear goal: to allow more people to be happy when making group decisions.
How are we going to do that? By facilitating access to quadratic voting, a methodology created in academia and popularized by the Radical Xchange organization. Concordamos is the tropicalized version of this tool, adapted to the needs of Brazil and of the Global South.
In short, we want people to celebrate the idea of holding a vote and making group decisions.
Concordamos allows people to vote in a different way, emphasizing what they want the most. At the same time, this methodology accounts and compensates for outliers, so that each poll will successfully indicate the group’s most agreed-upon priorities.
What results is a democratic process that better represents everyone. Minorities and majorities are better accommodated, and even those on the fringes have a greater chance of being noticed by the others.
Our tool has tropicalized the quadratic voting methodology, which was designed to promote more consensual decisions.
In our usual voting method, like in general elections, for instance, there’s always one single winner. This method is fantastic, but it has its limitations when it comes to discovering other things, such as the group’s specific priorities, and not just the opinion of the majority.
With Concordamos, we chose to do things differently. We distribute the same number of votes (credits) among people, but we allow them to vote more than once for whatever options they like the most. This comes with a cost, however: the more votes you wish to cast for the same given option, the more credits you need to spend.
Since the voting is “quadratic” (that is, you can vote more than once for the same option, but at an increasing cost), we have eliminated the risk of falling into a “tyranny of the majority”, which often eclipses the diversity of the group’s preferences. At the end of the vote, what really matters is how many people prioritized each option via this consensus-building mechanism.
Do you like it? Want to know more? Click here and read about our voting methodology in greater detail.
