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Welcome to the Information Rating System Wiki.

PeerVerity is on a mission to combat disinformation by empowering individuals with tools to share and rate information. The project described in these pages is a peer-to-peer ratings system. Given the overwhelming quantity of online information, and the ease with which it can manipulate its audience, we seek to develop a better means to qualify, filter, and analyze it. The basic idea is that by using a network of users, and aggregating their opinion, we can more accurately (and quickly) assess information and make better decisions from it.

The system will allow users to create networks of other users who, in turn, have their own networks. Therefore the system can be several levels deep. A question can be asked (eg should the Fed reduce interest rates?) and folks on the network would answer it in a privacy preserving manner. An aggregator would collect the answers, compute an average (or some other aggregate calculation), and return the result to the person asking the question. The questioner can assign trust levels to individuals in their network and use these in the aggregate calculation. This system, as described, is personal in nature and can be viewed as a Subjective Ratings System (SRS).

Some people on the network may choose to be public and allow anyone to link to them for their opinion. Therefore, there will be private nodes, who remain unknown to all but the nodes they choose to link with, and public nodes who are known to everyone.

We anticipate that like-minded people will join together to form communities and create a variant of the public SRS, known as a Community Ratings System (CRS). This ratings system will enable a voting system which will do a better job of understanding people's needs and allow them to participate in policy-making. In this manner, we anticipate a direct democracy where members themselves would vote on policy issues, pass laws, etc. The technology behind the ratings system would make direct democracy a practical and efficient mechanism for public participation. The CRS might also establish organizations and recognize experts who can help provide policy information in a public manner. Such organizations might then form the implementation arm for substantive policy decisions.

There are other important aspects of the ratings system. The software and its algorithms will be open to all. Users and communities will be able to tweak the settings of current algorithms or come up with new ones of their own (eg for aggregation). The software will include features for debate, an important part of investigating the truth of contentious issues and making policy in a direct democracy. It will also include a robust package of socio-economic simulation tools, based on engineering simulation. These would allow communities to study policy options in detail from a rational, unbiased perspective. Through the software, ordinary people will have the tools to understand the truth and select an optimized choice from many options.

We thus see the formation of a “ratings-based society” (RBS) which can transform our current atmosphere of misinformation and dysfunctional governance. It is hoped that doing so will allow all members to benefit from a new consensual reality where high quality information is the norm and which complements rational decision-making.