IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020 - 56

Relevant Expertise Aggregation (following [7, p. 146ff.]).
Suppose a community has to make a decision about a bridge
crossing a river. The decision about the bridge might take into
account, inter alia, financial, architectural, environmental, and
social considerations. There might be several options: leave
the bridge as it is, repair the bridge, rebuilding (repurpose) the
bridge, remove the bridge altogether.
The process is as illustrated in Figure 2. To address the given
issue (?), the relevant factors are divided into domains, the
domains are weighted, and expert testimony sought on each

Issue

domain. The number of expert votes for each option in each
domain are multiplied by its weight, and summed across all
domains. The final scores are input into a decision procedure
that either determines the final choice (in non-democratic
regimes) or helps guide the final choice (in democratic ones).
There are several issues to be taken into consideration: for
example determining the domains, their weighting, and the
policy options. Some of these might require (meta) deliberation
as well. For full details of REA, see [5], [7].

Domains

Weighted

Expert Ballots

〈(o1, vW1), (o2, vW2), ..., (on, vWn〉

〈(o1, vX1), (o2, vX2), ..., (on, vXn〉

〈(o1, vY1), (o2, vY2), ..., (on, vYn〉

〈(o1, vZ1), (o2, vZ2), ..., (on, vZn〉

Final Score

d ∈{W, X, Y, Z )

Score(oi) =

Σ vdi × Weightd

FIGURE 2. Process of relevant expertise aggregation.

quadrants of indignity that can bring about systemic collapse: exploitation, brought about by excessive tax and
excessive control (tyranny); stagnation, brought about
by inadequate tax and excessive control (no resources
for top-down policies, no freedom-to-maneuver for bottom-up initiatives); devaluation, brought about by
excessive tax and inadequate control (a system providing benefits without responsibilities is destined to fail);
and fragmentation, brought about by inadequate tax
and inadequate control (e.g., a weak state without a
monopoly on violence produces factionalism or warlordism). This plane defines the space in which to
locate systemic configurations and evaluate their trajectories, and identifies the acceptable boundaries in
this space.
The second component is to apply ideas of procedural justice to the evaluation of institutional configurations,
and locate them within this space. Procedural justice is
generally concerned with fairly, accurately, and efficiently
evaluating procedures and the actors enacting those procedures. It has been used, or example, in dispute resolution to determine the trade-off between "adequate"
participation in the process and the "accuracy" of the
outcome, and in public health, to determine the costs
and benefits of the authorities imposing decisions on the
populace. The procedural justice framework for evaluating self-organizing electronic institutions proposed in
[21] tried to metricate three principles: the participation

principle, i.e., the purposeful activities in which actors
take part in relation to governance (not just voting); the
transparency principle, i.e., the amenability of procedures to be subject of investigation and analysis to
establish facts of interest; and the balancing principle,
i.e., the proportionality of relative benefits and burdens.
For each principle, a number of metrics were proposed,
for example, the participation principle was measured by
empowerment, inclusivity, representation, and consultation metrics.
The third component is to apply ideas from metric
spaces, as used in the specification of dynamic normgoverned multi-agent systems [22]. The idea is to use
the framework of procedural justice to identify an
institutional configuration as a point in the ZoD, and
then either to implement meta-rules on the movement
in that plane, or to evaluate the trajectory of the configuration in that plane. These meta-rules could, for
example, prohibit movement from one configuration
to another if it exceeds a certain "distance" (d), or
prohibit movement to a particular configuration altogether if it lies outside the boundaries of the ZoD (see
upper left quadrant of Figure 2: dashed transitions are
impermissible, either because the resulting configuration lies outside the ZoD, or the distance exceeds d).
Alternatively, observing the speed and direction of a
configuration's trajectory might trigger reflective
deliberation that a lters it s course before the

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JUNE 2020

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2020

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