Ethelo

Ethelo

Industry	Public Engagement
Founded	2011; 13 years ago (2011)
Founder	John Richardson
Headquarters	Vancouver
Number of locations	4
Products	Technology
Website	ethelo.com

Ethelo is an algorithm for group decision making and an award-winning B Corp certified software technology platform. Ethelo has been used by more than 150 government organizations, primarily in Canada, to engage the public in democratic budgeting, planning, policy and other official decision processes. It has also been used by various types of organizations for internal decision-making.^[1]

Ethelo is named for the word ‘intention’ in ancient Greek and based on the philosophy of John Rawls, specifically the importance of fairness in social decision making. Ethelo incorporates decision factors such as scenario analysis, influence, fairness, and buy-in into the decision making process. Ethelo provides a decentralized alternative to polls, surveys, elections and other traditional methods of gathering input from stakeholders to make decisions.^[2]

Technology[edit]

Ethelo is a patented multi-attribute decision algorithm. It combines multiple decision parameters such as options, issues, criteria, constraints, influence, and fairness to develop a space of potential scenarios. Those scenarios are then evaluated and ranked according to the aggregated analysis of participants. The architecture of the Ethelo algorithm is set out in the Ethelo White Paper.

The size of the scenario space is exponentially larger than the size of the attribute space and the scenario evaluation required to solve the Ethelo algorithm is an NP-Complete problem. Therefore Ethelo uses an NLP solver developed in partnership with the University of Waterloo. The algorithm is designed to find outcomes with high average support and low variance in satisfaction among participants - a form of “optimized consensus” for large groups.

Ethelo is an extension of morphological analysis into complex multi-stakeholder decisions. It is compatible with and a complement to processes such as conjoint analysis, quadratic voting, the Monte Carlo Method and decision trees. It incorporates a novel approach to liquid democracy using trust networks.^[3]

The Ethelo algorithms were granted a US patent in 2017.^[4]

History and Organization[edit]

Ethelo has its roots in PartyX, a nonpartisan activist group created in 2011 to advance new ways of doing democracy using internet technology. Ethelo founder and Ashoka Fellow John Richardson created PartyX after leaving Pivot Legal Society, which he also founded.^[5]

Richardson established Ethelo to develop technology to advance the goals of eDemocracy, and empower people to solve society’s hardest problems through direct participation in civic self-governance. The Ethelo algorithm was developed by Richardson to enable fair outcomes in complex multi-stakeholder negotiations.^[6]

Ethelo’s first major use case was PartyX’s BC Mandate campaign, during the British Columbia election in April 2013.^[7] Using Ethelo, several hundred British Columbians collaborated to evaluate more than 200,000 combinations of policy positions from all the political parties. The result was a cross-party political platform that would receive a fair distribution of support from voters across the political spectrum.^[8]

Over time PartyX evolved into eDemocracy Network and its sister technology company, Ethelo Decisions. Ethelo and eDemocracy collaborate to engage citizens and provide Ethelo technology to governments for group decision-making on public policy issues.^[9] Ethelo is also used internally by organizations for internal decision making. In 2019, Ethelo Decisions acquired Citizen Budget,^[10] Canada’s leading participatory budget simulator for municipalities. The eDemocracy Research Foundation, a registered Canadian Foundation, was created in 2019 to support research and public education in the area of digital democracy.^[11]

Democracy Services[edit]

Ethelo provides a hybrid suite of consulting and digital services, primarily for local government and public agencies, who wish to undertake democratic public engagement processes.^[12] It has also worked with Indigenous communities, cooperatives, private companies and NGOs. Those services include the technology platform and also the recruitment of large representative panels. The largest group of participants to engage in an Ethelo process was 18,000 participants.^[13]

Ethelo processes span a broad range of different decision types. It has been used for city budgeting, participatory budgeting, policy development, bylaw reviews, zoning decisions, official community plans, transportation plans and capital projects such as community centres. It has also been used for private decisions including granting, investment, strategic planning, conflict resolution, risk assessment, product design, property management and employee agreements.

Climate related processes comprise a large component of Ethelo’s work. In October 2019, eDemocracy Network used Ethelo to launch the world’s first Carbon Budget platform,^[14] which has been used by local governments to achieve democratic mandates for GHG reduction targets. Ethelo has also been used for clean energy plans, woodlot preservation, water conservation, waste treatment and environmental master plans.

Ethelo was named a Standing Offer Supplier to the Canadian government in 2020 with a “Reliable” security rating.

Awards and Recognition[edit]

In 2018 Ethelo was a finalist in the Global Grand Challenge Awards by the Singularity University. It’s Time, a public consultation project on congestion pricing for Metro Vancouver conducted using Ethelo, received the 2019 Gold Prize in digital engagement, awarded by the Canadian Public Relations Society, and the 2019 Core Value award from the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2).^[15] Ethelo was named the world’s leading digital democracy platform by the Solonian Democracy Institute in both 2020 and 2021.^[16]

In 2021 Ethelo became a Certified B Corp, and was named “Best for the World” in Governance.

Media Coverage[edit]

See: Ethelo in the News. Ethelo processes have also been covered in many local newspapers.

The Future[edit]

The Ethelo algorithm will be made publicly available through an Application Programming Interface under an Affero Copyleft GPL. Ethelo has developed an implementation for Ethereum and is currently working with several DAOs on decentralized governance systems. It is planning an eDemocracy token release at an unspecified date.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Official website
• Ethelo on Facebook
• Ethelo on Twitter
• Ethelo on LinkedIn