Meritocracy
Every system that pools opinions has to answer one question: whose opinion counts, and how much?
Count everybody equally and you get the crowd, which can be flooded by anybody with a budget. Count only the credentialed and you get the same small group of people who produced the situation the movement exists to fix.
The movement's claim is that collective intelligence beats both — but only if influence is earned and visible. So the trusted group is not a club, a rank, or an appointment. It is a ladder with published criteria that citizens climb by doing verifiable work, and how loudly somebody is heard moves with their climb.
The ladder
New -> Identified -> Contributing -> Established -> Steward
Each rung has published criteria. Promotion is audited, and so is demotion.
Merit is a number, not a badge
Every citizen carries a merit score on 0 to 100, derived from the same evidence the ladder already uses. Inside the trusted group, a citizen's vote is weighted by it.
The ceiling
merit weight = 1 + lambda x ( merit score / 100 ) lambda = 1.0 by default
At the default, a maximally-meritorious citizen's vote weighs twice a just-admitted one's. And no more.
That ceiling is the most important number in this area. Two-times is enough to reward a decade of work and far too little to let anybody own an outcome. An unbounded merit weight is how a meritocracy becomes a hierarchy in about three years — which is the failure mode of every institution the movement is arguing with.
Pages in this area
- The trust ladder — five rungs with published criteria, climbed by doing work anyone can check.
- How merit is earned — the six inputs to a citizen's merit score, and why each one is hard to fake.
- The rules that keep it honest — seven rules that keep a meritocracy from turning into an oligarchy.
Where to go next
- Qualifications — the area before this one.
- Trust Scores — the area after this one.
- Take Action — what to actually do with this.