Research

I’m primarily interested in how social computing can be used to increase the fairness of political and economic decision-making.

As I begin my Ph.D. studies at the University of Michigan School of Information, I plan on researching how to design fair collective decision-making mechanisms for participatory budgeting, crowdfunding, and other forms of social finance. In particular, I’m interested in how the ability to directly delegate decision-making power to trusted experts affects participation and perceptions of fairness. My research seeks to help make political and economic institutions more accountable, transparent, informed, and democratic.

In the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech, I wrote my Master’s thesis about the rhetoric of online petitions, and how they often fail to represent the personal and collective identities of petitioners. To address some of the representational weaknesses of online petitions, I prototyped The Petition Archives, a website that collects, geocodes, and publishes personal email petitions to politicians, media personalities, and corporate executives.

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