From cities to nations to online communities, our ability to govern and self-organize has become a central bottleneck. As the complexity and stakes of global challenges increase,  we need better processes for understanding our shared reality and acting on shared values. 

This talk introduces a framework for collective decision-making that can be translated from philosophy into code. We’ll outline five essential steps—sense-making (meaning), forecasting (prediction), values assessment, decision-making, and action—and explore software tools that can bring greater legibility, rigor, and accountability to group deliberation. We'll share both existing tools and speculative concepts—potential starting points for projects at the Philosophy to Code hackathon the following day.

Blake Elias is a Cosmos Research Fellow; SWE at Google.