Decisionmaking

Decisionmaking models are important to getting things done in organizations.

Democratic decision making is based collecting the opinion of a voting populace and deriving a decision from those votes. The decision to be made is typically yes-or-no on some issue, picking one choice from many, or picking several from many. 

Better decisions can be made from better voting data. Expressing opinions about the available choices by ranking them (1st,2nd,3rd,...) or rating them (on a scale of 0-100 or another scale) is vastly superior to voting only for a single favorite choice. There are a variety of ways of counting ranking or rating votes including Instant Runoff Voting, Virtual Round Robin (Condorcet), and others. Voting theorists don't agree which one is best but do agree that there are a few generally best that work much better than the currently prevailing single vote method.

First steps at getting people used to these modes of decision making can be taken with online tools for running better polls. A standalone online tool for better democratic decision making is BetterPolls.com. Ideally such polls will be integrated into wikis, blogs and other online communities.

Electorama Wiki is a wiki maintained by a community of amateur election methods enthusiasts. They have details and debates about a variety of methods for counting votes.