VotaVox Summary.
VotaVox collects opinions from voters around the world on issues that are meaningful to them, which we call Votes. We invite people of every nationality and belief system to cast their vote on these issues, and we work hard to make sure we don’t bias the outcome in any way. We then aggregate the results of the Votes and present them to "people in power" (the people in relevant decision making positions), making them aware of what our voters think they should do. It isn’t formal democracy, but it is the next best thing... a way of empowering people to have an impact on their world, both locally and globally.
How to use VotaVox.
Using VotaVox is easy. Here are three easy steps to start you on your way:
- 1 - Search for topics that interest you. Click on a channel or a topic to review the Votes listed, or type a key word into the search box.
- 2 - Start Voting. Once you have identified one or more Votes of interest, click through and start voting. If you are not registered yet, you will be prompted to register. You can review posted videos to help inform your voting decision.
- 3 - Analyze the results. Once you’ve voted on a topic, you will instantly see the total results of the votes to date. Click on demographics to see the VotaVox Orb, which shows you demographic breakouts of each Vote in the context of all other users and their voting records. Be sure to click “show me” in the VotaVox Orb so you can see where your voting record is compared to everyone else’s.
Once you get the hang of it, you may find lots of Votes that interest you. Vote on as many as you like. You can set up notifications to keep you informed of the progress of any Vote and you can share each of them with your friends via email, Facebook or other social networking sites.
Feel free to propose new Votes you think should be on VotaVox, but are not yet represented. To post a new Vote, it must be:
- 1 - Unbiased in its language (think Wikipedia)
- 2 - Forward looking (not about the past).
- 3 - Actionable (someone could do something about it).
- 4 - Targeted (you provide the name of at least one specific person to be influenced by the outcome).
As we present our findings to decision makers we will post them in the blog. We’ll also be sure to post all responses from decision makers too.
Why we created VotaVox.
VotaVox is a passion project. It was born out of a belief in the fundamental commonality of humanity. Despite the abundance of contrary evidence, we share much more than we like to believe. We share the same needs – shelter, sustenance, stability, love. We share the same wants – comfort, freedom, appreciation, recognition. We share the same world.
Our world is shrinking at the speed of Moore’s Law, bringing us all into direct proximity, virtually and literally. We all impact each other, more today than ever before. We are more than interconnected we are enmeshed, sharing not just common needs and wants, but a common fate.
But this commonality is not homogenized; our magic is that we remain unique in our human collectivity – each voice distinct, each mind thinking for itself. In this combination of billions of independent, diverse minds, we have tremendous power, and harnessing this power for our collective benefit is our most pressing mandate.
Any of us can change the world. VotaVox is a tool to enable our individual and thereby our collective empowerment. By engaging your own mind you engage the minds of others. By speaking out you are heard and understood. By participating you force others to action.
How VotaVox works.
VotaVox is an empowerment tool. We enable people to impact the world around them by having their collective voices heard in a meaningful, quantifiable, direct and transparent way.
We are agnostic and do not take positions on issues, and we try to ensure that all Votes that go live on VotaVox do not reflect any bias.
Our social contract with VotaVox users is that we will take the outcome of each and every Vote and deliver it to the appropriate decision maker(s). The decision makers will know how many people voted and their collective demographic profile. Because the people who vote on VotaVox self-select, our results are essentially a combination of a poll and a petition. They represent the perspectives of a cross section of real people, not massaged statistics, who care enough about topics to have their voices heard – on all sides of the issue. The impact of this combination – real people on all sides who care enough to have their voices heard – is powerful. And because we can demonstrate demographically who is voting and how, decision makers can quantify the risk they take in ignoring the input they get from VotaVox users.
This is how we leverage technology to influence those in positions of power.
This is how we change our world.
The VotaVox Business Model and Your Privacy.
VotaVox is designed to be a self-sustaining entity. To do that, we will provide research on our users. We will always protect this data with the highest level data security and uphold the privacy of each and every user (to see our privacy policy, click below). At every point, your privacy will be fully protected. VotaVox’s ability to analyze, project and define trends and political policy while protecting your identity makes it possible to influence local, national and global debates without compromising your right to keep your views and your identity confidential.
To meet our expenses, VotaVox will work with a variety of partners, including the following:
Advertisers. You’ll notice that we’re offering advertising on the site. Our objective over time is to improve the quality of advertising by leveraging the data we learn about our users to offer more and more targeted ads. This should ideally be a win/win/win for everyone involved. To advertise on VotaVox, send an email to eli@votavox.com with "advertise" in the subject.
Media Partners. You may also start noticing VotaVox Votes embedded as a widget on other websites. Along with offering interesting/sticky content to media partners, we will be offering them the ability to learn more about their users by sharing aggregate data with them on users who register with VotaVox from their site. Media partners want to enhance their targeted advertising and we again should deliver a win/win/win/win scenario. To become a media partner to VotaVox, send an email to eli@votavox.com with "media partner" in the subject.
Opinion Analysis. In serving as an advocacy tool, VotaVox is capturing significant data on all of its users. The aggregate data is very useful to many organizations/ companies who want to learn more about how people view their world, and we will be enabling partners who subscribe to our service to analyze the data without knowing who each person is. This protects your individual privacy, but leverages our data to help others learn more. To become a subscriber to VotaVox, send an email to eli@votavox.com with "data subscription" in the subject.
Data Visualization. The VotaVox Orb is a unique data visualization tool. It was created by a team of ridiculously smart people with pedigrees from MIT, Stanford, Princeton, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Bell Labs and the US DOD to name a few. Companies with lots of data can use it to understand better their own customers. To learn about licensing the VotaVox Orb, send an email to eli@votavox.com with "Orb license" in the subject.
About the VotaVox Founder.
I am Eli Halliwell and I am the founder of VotaVox. The changes we’ve seen in our world in the past decade have been astounding and have huge implications for life as we know it. Technology now enables one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one communication in a way that makes our world very small and has the potential to bring us closer together. I believe in the collective wisdom of humanity, and my hope is that VotaVox can be a tool to enable large and small communities of people to solve collective problems peaceably by influencing people in power.
My background: I studied public and international policy as an undergrad at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and, since college, I’ve worked on Wall Street, earned an MBA, started up several companies and run a few companies as General Manger or CEO. I took a year off starting in the fall of 2008 to develop VotaVox, and I’m excited to see it in action. I live just outside of New York City with my wife, two small children, a dog and three chickens.