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Data & Policy - a peer-reviewed, open access journal at Cambridge University Press - is pleased to partner with the Computational Governance and Majoritarianism (CoGMa) Workshop at the University of Cambridge for the second year. This partnership will lead to peer-reviewed proceedings in the journal.

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The 2022 Computational Governance and Majoritarianism (CoGMa) Workshop will be held in Cambridge on November 3, 2022 at 2pm. Remote access will be available for presenters and attendees. Please see here for more information.

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In these workshops, we invite researchers to explore majoritarian assumptions built into the design of computer systems. Proceedings from the workshop are published in special editions of the Data & Policy: a peer-reviewed, open-access journal at Cambridge University Press. 

About 

Existing consensus systems are designed with implicit majoritarian assumptions. The commonly used term in consensus literature for a small group with dissenting opinions is adversary. This is particularly problematic when viewed through the lens of recent proposals to move governance structures to, for instance, blockchain-based systems which have majoritarian assumptions built into their design and operation.

There are some protections provided in social, political, and commercial governance structures for those with dissenting opinions via a system of minority rights, protected freedoms, and other checks and balances. If we are to design computational systems that meet the requirements of real-world institutions, we need to ensure that we preserve or improve upon the protections offered in existing systems. Majoritarian consensus gets in the way of achieving this goal: in their ideal instantiation, a set of nodes (the majority) have all the decision-making power while the remaining nodes have no ability to cause those decisions to be renegotiated. This fundamental problem is further exacerbated in other computational systems (e.g. centralised systems), where the issue is often obfuscated by wrapping the computational system in layers of rough human consensus.

Existing institutional protections are far from perfect, highlighting the difficulty of the problem, but this reveals more acutely the current lack of research into this area on the computational side. 

This workshop aims to raise awareness of the issue and seeks answers to some fundamental questions about computational governance. 

Questions we are interested in:

• What are good measures for majoritarianism in a governance system?
• What can technologists learn from other systems of governance?
• What advances in computer science would be required for computational systems to be useful in important affairs like human governance?
• Conversely, are there technologies that policy makers can use to improve existing systems?
• What might historical governance and legal protections look like from a computational point of view?
• What does current computational governance look like through the lens of philosophy, political theory, or legal theory?
• How can legal protections be incorporated into computational systems, and how can unwanted legal risks to those systems be mitigated?
• What do human rights (and perhaps non-human rights) look like in the digital domain?

The answers to these questions lie at the intersection of fundamental computer science, policy making, jurisprudence and human rights. We invite submissions on the theme of Challenging Majoritarian Assumptions in Computational Governance from all these domains.

Important Upcoming Dates

All deadlines are 23:59:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12)

• Outline submission deadline: October 8, 2022
• Rebuttal period: October 13-20, 2022
• Author notification: October 22, 2022
• Full paper submission to Data & Policy from 30 January, with final deadline 28 February, 2023

Submission and Review Process

To participate in the CoGMa workshop, authors are expected to provide an outline by October 8^th. This will be assessed by the workshop organisers with decisions sent on 22nd October.

Thereafter authors have the option of participating in a special collection on computational governance in Data & Policy, a peer-reviewed, open access journal at the interface of data science and governance, published by Cambridge University Press by submitting a full paper to the Journal from January 30^th 2023.

The full papers will be reviewed Data & Policy system, overseen by the Guest Editors, who will obtain two reviews per paper.

Authors participating in the workshop interested in submitting to Data & Policy are encouraged to familiarise themselves with the Instructions for Authors in advance of submission to the journal. We anticipate that interested authors will develop their workshop papers into full research articles, but the Data & Policy team can be contacted dataandpolicy@cambridge.org if you have any questions.

Note that the journal provides LaTeX and Word templates to assist authors with the structure of papers. Data & Policy asks all authors to provide a Data Availability Statement with the submission and encourages, but does not require, authors to make underlying data and replication materials available via an open repository.

The final set of articles will be presented on a curated page on the Data & Policy website, with an introduction from the Guest Editors.

Submission Links

• CoGMa workshop instructions
• CoGMa workshop submission form
• Data & Policy Instructions for Authors
• Data & Policy submission site

Guest Editors

• Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers (University of Cambridge)
• Dann Toliver (TODAQ)
• Hazem Danny Nakib (University of Cambridge)
• Carlos Molina-Jimenez (University of Cambridge)