Consensus decision making can lead to much better results than majority voting. If done right, it finds strong compromise options benefitting all stakeholders rather than just a mere half of the participants.
vodle is based on how participants evaluate their options – whether anytime from home or in a physical meeting. Our smart algorithm identifies options’ consensus potential and winning probabilities in real time as participants’ evaluations evolve towards consensus.
vodle gives everyone the same effective power even in controversial situations or if some participants act strategically. Still, no participant can delay a decision. With vodle, all participants have incentives to consider all others’ preferences.
Pose a question, set a decision deadline, list some first options, maybe add some descriptions and links, then invite your participants!
As a participant, just give each option a “wap” from 0 to 100. You can change your waps and also add further options at any time until the deadline.
As a participant, watch in real-time how all options’ consensus potential and the resulting winning probabilities evolve. Adjust your waps to promote potential consensus options you like.
Using a simple but smart algorithm from the science of fair voting rules, vodle picks the winning option based on all participants’ final waps.
Setting up a poll just takes a few minutes...
vodle is brought to you by a small but enthusiastic team of scientists and volunteers who believe that fair & efficient group decisions are at the heart of a healthy democratic society.
It was mainly developed at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and is hosted on its servers.
As we are committed to keep vodle free for everyone, we still need further help. If you are a nerd, creative, influencer, scientist, philanthropist, activist, politician, friendly alien... who believes in the future of fair & efficient consensus making and want to contribute in whatever small way, just contact us!
Jobst devotes part of his paid time and much of his spare time from his day job as a mathematician at PIK to develop the methods and algorithms at the core of vodle.
Marius has used Design Thinking and interviews with user groups and decision experts to improve vodle’s look & feel.
Adrian contributes his Information Systems background to help vodle become everyone’s favourite group decision tool.
The web app is generously hosted by the Oregon State University Open Source Lab independently of PIK
Then we’d like to talk to you about developing a “moderator” version of vodle that you can test during some workshops. This way you make the consensus formation process for your participants more efficient and save valuable workshop time!
Whether you sell cars, holidays or event tickets, your products might be bought by a group of people rather than only by a single person. You can help your customers choose the right product or variant for their group from your portfolio by partnering with us! At the same time, you help us testing a new exciting feature: We’d like to add a “choose with vodle” button to any webpage on your site that contains a list of items to select from, taking users to a vodle poll for that same list of items.
Please help us nerds to find the right channels and words to make vodle the standard way of making group decisions!
Just see our up-to-date backlog issues on github.
As we have no funds for buying much server time, you can help increase vodle’s availability. Just run a small couchdb on your server that vodle may use to exchange data between users. Using docker, you can easily contain it and restrict its resources so that it does not interfere with your server’s main function or impair its safety.
Inclusiveness and accessibility is very dear to us and we’d like to offer vodle in as many languages as possible...
We are confident that we find just the right thing for you to contribute if you send us a short message...