I agree that better governance super important, fairly neglected, and plausibly tractable -- trying out better governance structures on Manifold specifically is a cause I would happily support. (I think getting it to work well on a larger scale eg a city would be good too, but I'd guess that iteration on governance would work better starting from a small group of highly bought-in participants)

Manifold's governance today can be viewed through a few different lens; in order of most to least relevant:

• Do-ocracy: Core team basically operates on "git push sets the rules"

• Startup: Founders are managers, each with a handful of direct reports; core team does most of the work together

• DAO: As an open-source, Discord-addicted group, we get a lot of information and sometimes actions driven by a wider set of Manifold enthusiasts

• Futarchy: vaguely we sometimes use prediction markets to ask questions and stuff

• Official: C corporation where shareholders (mostly founders, but also employees and investors) call the shots based on a vote

Some governance systems I'd be excited about attempting:

• Testing major decision points via futarchy (eg: should we allow cashing out to USD? fully turn over the decision to a prediction market, and commit to doing whatever the market says)

• Getting a robust bounties systems in place instead of task management; our current system is a mess anyways

• Reducing the experimentation cost of forking the Manifold product - if someone has an idea for a better UX or a better market mechanism, they could ideally be testing it in minutes and deploying it in an hour.

Cross-posting my comment on this from the EA forum:

The solution I've been thinking of is competitive governance: Allow total freedom for new systems of governance wherever land owners opt in to it. Then, people vote with their feet.

Founders can raise money with a vision for their own ideal society. If they can offer an attractive set of laws and regulations that citizens like, from tax policy, social safety nets, education, policing, etc., then they can grow as more move in or more land owners opt-in to those rules.

This is actually how businesses work. The crucial part is not the corporate governance structure of shareholders and boards of directors IMO. It's that 1. businesses have wide leeway to govern as they please and 2. customers opt-in to paying the business and employees opt-in to working there. If a business stops being effective, customers and employees can switch to a competitor.

The freedom to create and the freed to to opt in are an important features of many successful mechanisms. E.g. This is how Manifold Markets works. Anyone can create any question, and you opt-in to bet on it. If someone resolves a question in a way you disagree with, then you just stop betting in their markets. Vote with your feet.

Markets are the ultimate opt-in mechanism: you and another party mutually agree to a transaction. It works because mutual agreement is positive-sum, otherwise at least one side would decline the exchange.

Utilitarians most of all should approve these positive-sum exchanges. The world could do worse than apply this mechanism everywhere. And the one place it's very obviously missing is in governance!