Q: What's it called? Got a good title/subtitle?
A: Thresholdware: Software to Empower Citizen Action

Q: Can you give a one-sentence description?
A: Thresholdware: a "social capacitor" securely aggregating individual intentions/commitments, revolutionizing bottom-up fundraising &citizen activism

Q: Sounds powerful. Can you tell me more, in greater depth?
A: Thresholdware is software which allows citizens to coordinate intentions and actions on a mass scale. It works by securely and privately storing individual commitments, and then putting the aggregate of those individual commitments into coordinated action when a specific critical mass or threshold has been reached. These can include financial transactions, such as fundraising commitments, or "action transactions'" such as strike votes, product boycotts, civil disobedience, provisionally joining a union, etc.

Fundamentally, Thresholdware allows a network of users to register and commit to intentions which can be carried out successfully only when a predefined, mutually agreed upon tipping point is reached. Thresholdware is a powerful, transformative social technology, in that it acts as a social "capacitor" that stores the charge of social change until enough energy has built up to accomplish a social goal immediately and rapidly. This ability to leap over the obstacles to change has the effect of reducing the risk of failure, minimizing the effort needed to make change happen, reducing financial and legal risks for individual citizens.

The simplest example is fundraising, where a $100,000 project is built from many small donations. Thresholdware allows users to rack a $50 donation onto their credit card,, with the knowledge that it will not be processed until/unless enough donations arrive make the project a success. This eliminates the risk of your donation disappearing into a black hole due to insufficient funds raised: every donation is actualized in the real world; donors confidently know their contribution will make a difference.

However, the applications of thresholdware goes well beyond the economic realm. As detailed elsewhere (google "thresholdware site:economicdemocracy.org) Thresholdware can be designed to facilitate nonviolent responsible actions while pooling and minimizing individual cost and risk, enabling otherwise impossible breakthroughs.

Q: What problem(s) does Thresholdware address?
A: Attaining --and maintaining-- financial stability is very difficult for grassroots civic groups/projects; more generally, the world faces a Democracy Deficit. Our world, increasingly globalized, hightech, fast-paced, accelerating, faces unprecedented challenges from Climate Destabilization to Peak Oil; yet the internet has been underutilized as a means for facilitating bottom-up, decentralized, yet coordinated actions. Both principle and pragmatism argue in favor of harnessing the fuller potential of the internet to empower citizen engagement at the grassroots individual/community level. As a matter of principle: to further the democratic ideals whose arc curves from the Enlightenment through today and beyond.

As a practical matter, the world faces increasing divides between the Haves and Have-Nots, but also between an ever-increasing technological level, and society's social/moral level which is often dragged by pre-21st century institutions whose slowness reacting to Climate and other challenges, arguably endangers human survival.

Q: If Thresholdware became a reality, who would benefit the most and how?
A: Democracy would benefit, as would any citizen in any country worldwide, and any community, with access to this open source free software. As outlined above and further detailed in the url, benefits from this disruptive technology people worldwide include more readily reaching consensus, raising funds for projects, and taking part in collectively agreed upon civic actions.

Thresholdware partially levels the playing field, making it easier for the decentralized, less wealthy, and bottom up, to have larger roles in a world still dominated by the centralized, the wealthy, and by top-down institutions/organizations. It would help everyone --including the latter groups and institutions-- by giving humanity a new tools for more rapid decentralized responses in a world wheren sudden, nonlinear disruptions occur more frequently, in which predicting/averting them, or responding quickly enough, is often not possible for traditional institutions if they go at it alone.

Q: What initial steps would be needed to get Thresholdware off the ground?
A: A modest financial investment, sufficient for the initial programming design and implementation of Thresholdware as an open source, free software (OSFS) project put into the public domain and in the hands of OSFS community with a portal for easy two-way interactions with broader public worldwide. With very modest resources for on-going development and maintenance by volunteers. Possibly helpful: additional resources in the form of legal expertise: drafting of legal forms necessary for a binding commitment "to have this charged to my card if [threshold condition is met]" would ensure the software would be launchable as an initial pilot demonstration with a participating institutions and community groups. Attainability within 2 years is easily possible since this is a software development project, with a modest number of development (and implementation) hours to be funded. The impact would be permanent, the reach: worldwide and free to any community/group.

Q: What would the optimal outcome look like? Could success be measured?
A: Measuring worldwide democracy isn't easy and without time-travel, neither are comparisons with how much civic engagement the world "would have had." Nevertheless, metrics for success are straightforward: milestones include first complete version of software; worldwide disctribution; first non-financial actions launched via Thresholdware; financial/legal setup and first use of Thresholdware as financial 'capacitor' to fund a project; over time, increasingly sophisticated software enhancements will increase democracy online and offline (seamlessly compatible with face to face and sotware collaboration tools) improving frequency and quality of civic and community actions and projects, and powerful new way to put such grassroots projects on more solid financial footing. Impact would be deep, broad and worldwide, and is urgently needed in this globalized, high-tech, rapidly evolving world facing critical dangers, in which centralized top-down responses are increasingly insufficient at keeping up with exponentially accelerating disruptive change in technology, weapons, and ecosystems.

Submitted under the Nick name DemocracyUnleashed to Project 10 to the 100 Best Ideas contest.