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Spartacus.app: Overcoming Inertial Barriers to Collective Action Through Anonymous Coordination
webSpartacus.app is a coordination platform using assurance contracts and temporary anonymity to help groups like AI company employees safely organize collective action, directly relevant to AI governance and whistleblowing coordination.
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Summary
Spartacus.app is a software platform that combines assurance contracts with temporary anonymity to help individuals overcome collective action problems. It allows users to make provisional commitments that only become binding when enough others join, protecting early movers from retaliation. A key use case is enabling AI company employees to safely coordinate around safety concerns.
Key Points
- •Combines assurance contract framework with phased anonymity: identities only revealed when campaign reaches its goal, protecting early movers.
- •Designed to transform dispersed or suppressed preferences into coordinated collective action, inverting the individual cost/benefit calculus.
- •Directly applicable to AI safety whistleblowing scenarios where employees fear retaliation for raising concerns about dangerous AI development.
- •Built on a prior ACX 2024 grant ($17K), MVP launched June 2024; seeking $80K for 9-12 months of continued full-time development.
- •Explores both non-profit and for-profit commercialization paths with a focus on high-impact use cases in adversarial environments.
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Overcoming inertial barriers to collective action through anonymous coordination | Manifund
Jan
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09
2025
2026
2027
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The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20260209084423/https://manifund.org/projects/an-online-platform-to-solve-collective-action-and-coordination-problems
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Overcoming inertial barriers to collective action through anonymous coordination
Science & technology
AI governance
EA Community Choice
EA community
Global catastrophic risks
Jordan Braunstein
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Grant
$822raised
$80,000funding goal
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Introduction
This project builds upon the successful ACX 2024 proposal to create a minimal viable product (MVP) of a software platform called Spartacus.app designed to solve collective action dilemmas and coordination problems. Tetraspace and I were awarded $17K each to collaborate on it, and we succeeded! The MVP went live in early June. We're currently conducting closed beta testing in search of high-impact use cases.
I'm seeking additional funding to continue developing this project full-time and to extend our runway for another 9-12 months. Funds would be allocated to operational costs, compensating collaborators, and financing growth strategies (described below) to expand the user base, create a sustainable revenue model, develop case studies, and explore non- and for-profit commercialization options.
Project Summary
Unlike crowdfunding platforms, our primary value proposition isn't raising money but facilitating the formation of purpose-driven groups, organizations, and associations through a novel combination of coordination mechanisms. From there, a group can set goals that can only be accomplished through synchronous behavior. Our design principles focus on lowering the risk and raising the expected value of participation in the group formation process, especially in an adversarial environment.
Despite dissatisfaction with a state of affairs, a stable equilibrium can persist if each person in a system perceives the cost of action to outweigh the benefit to themselves. If successful, Spartacus can transform dispersed and/or suppressed preferences into a consolidated public entity capable of pursuing its interests with power and leverage available only through collective action, inverting the cost/benefit calculus. Where the isolated individual has no incentive to act, the indiv
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