Ethelo is one of the world's leading digital democracy technologies, and has been used by hundreds of cities and other public and private organizations to make group decisions. Ethelo's strength is its ability to find broadly supported outcomes on even controversial issues such as climate planning and budgets. Ethelo Under the hood is a unique decision engine, which takes inputs from hundreds or thousands of people to search a space of potential outcomes, finding solutions which maximize the fair distribution of satisfaction. This talk will dwell on the role of mathematics and technology in emerging forms of digital democracy and of collective scenario analysis in particular as a new approach to the challenges of democracy.

Biography: John is an entrepreneur, mathematician, lawyer, technologist and change agent dedicated to the emergence of a new digital democracy. He is the founder and CEO of Ethelo, and the inventor of its unique algorithms for collaboratively solving complex group decision problems. Ethelo was named the world's #1 digital democracy platform in 2020 and 2021. Ethelo is the founding organization of eDemocracy DAO.

In 2001 John founded Pivot Legal Society, which conducts strategic litigation on behalf of marginalized communities. John built and led Pivot for ten years, and it has become one of Canada's leading human rights organizations. During that time, he also led the establishment of Hope in Shadows, an annual photography contest and street calendar whose model has spread around the world as My World. In 2021, John invented SeaBrick, a floating, interlocking block made of compressed kelp fiber covered by an impermeable, bioplastic shell. SeaBrick is a massively scalable carbon sequestration strategy.

A globally-recognized human rights leader and innovator, John was awarded an Ashoka Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurs in 2005.