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Congrats for your first post! I think it’s well written; I like the structure of „problem-proposed solution-possible issues“, you write short and clearly, and you stated what kind of input you want from the community.

It was useful for me that you provided the example of meat eating as a coordination problem. I would have found more examples even more useful for thinking about the potential applications where a coordination platform is among the most promising approaches (btw, I think for meat eating it is not among the most promising).

I like your idea, but I’m also worried about your 2nd issue: nobody will use it. It seems to me like people are just not motivated enough by being a part of improving the world. Meat eating seems like a case in point: there is already a veggie community you can be part of (at least in Germany in every bigger city) and the marginal impact you have doesn’t even depend that much on coordination. Still it’s a tiny movement.

I think it’s reasonable that you are trying to think about the landscape and bottlenecks of behavior change and coordination before moving to action. There is probably much more to learn. For example, I’ve read this short report about change platforms in the context of changing organizations, that seems to have some success stories and learned lessons that are also relevant for you. This might be a much more tractable pathway if there are smaller scale important coordination problems. https://​​www.mckinsey.com/​​business-functions/​​organization/​​our-insights/​​build-a-change-platform-not-a-change-program

I love this idea! Of course you’d want to test the demand for it cheaply. Maybe there is already a Kickstarter-like platform where you need to meet a minimum number of contributors rather than just a minimum total contribution (or a maximum contribution per contributor). Then you could just use that platform for a test run. If not among Kickstarter-like platforms, then maybe among petition platforms? Or you could repurpose a mere Mailchimp newsletter signup for this! You could style it to look like a solemn signing of a conditional pledge.

If there is such a platform, you could see if you can get a charity on board with the experiment, one that has a substantial online audience. (They’ll also be happy about the newsletter signups, though that should require a separate opt-in.)

Finally, you could run quick anonymous surveys of the participants: What did they do, and what would they have done without the campaign. Perhaps one after a month and one after a year or so. (It would also be interesting again to follow up after several years because of vegan recidivism, which usually sets in after around 7 years afaik.)

Maybe you can even do all of that without any coding.

I’m not sure about how much good outcomes that depend on individual actions could profit from better coordination, or how an app focused on that would improve the situation. But have you considered that, since coordination is not a good in itself, your app could be used for evil, too?

Just found this post through your response to Tom VanAntwerp on twitter. There’s a sequence of questions and posts on LessWrong made by me and a few others that’s about this topic. I suggest checking it out for ideas, discussion, and references to a few things that already exist (though they’re mostly agreed to be insufficient).

Perhaps also consider cross-posting this to LessWrong.

Maybe this app could be used for people to commit to consume a company’s products if this company makes some changes in its behaviour. So the company could maybe realise that the gain in new customers is worth the requested change.

I recall something exactly like you mention exists, but I can’t find it! I think its quite recent.