Social cohesiveness is necessary for collective action to address crucial crises such as climate change, war in Europe and the Middle East, and threats to democracy. Synanim is a technology that facilitates such cohesiveness by tapping into our powers of empathy, creativity, vision, and skill at communicating, while sidelining factors of inequity, such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, occupation, and social status. It is an efficient, effective means for guiding human moral values and concerns toward consensus by enabling thousands of people to participate online.
 

How Synanim Works

Synanim guides participants toward consensus by building best ideas upon best ideas as determined by the participants themselves. The creative process leaves participants feeling valued for their input and inspired by their experience. In a short period of time—an hour for most participants, Synanim yields effective actions and solutions built from shared perspectives grounded in core, collective moral values.

To begin, participants login to the Synanim waiting area. At the start time, they are randomly and anonymously assigned to groups of six. Working synchronously but individually, they are asked to type a response to a question and submit it within a time limit. They are then presented with all responses from their group and instructed to pick the entry that best reflects their group’s overall sentiment (their own or someone else’s text). Their selected entry auto-populates in their text entry area to work on for the next step of refinement.

Behind the scenes, Synanim tracks selection choices and computes a score for each participant. It does this in two ways: entry score (the number of selections an entry received) and vote score (the number of other selection choices that match each individual’s selection). 

The vote score measures empathy to group values and dampens the impulse to selfishly select one’s own entry without regard to its worthiness. For example, selecting one’s own entry when no one else does would produce one point for their entry and one point for their vote. But if everyone else in the group selects another entry, this other entry would gather five entry points for its author and five vote points for each of the five group members who chose it. Leaders of small groups are notified immediately after the final documents are submitted and invited to join the next tier of small groups at a predetermined time. If they are unavailable, Synanim goes to the next highest-point participant until a leader is available to represent the group in the next round, so all groups are represented. 

Synanim’s largest project to date engaged more than 13,600 people. In six, one-hour sessions, participants produced a single consensus document and chose a leader to present it. It has capacity for over 45,000 participants.