What is Coseen?

A coordination experiment

Coseen is an experimental concept designed to test a different model of social and economic coordination between people that is not reliant on governments, corporations, or rigid institutions. Coseen is not a complete political theory, but a simple model that aims to be tried, observed, and iterated.

THE CORE INTUITION

At the heart of the Coseen idea is a belief that coordination between people works best when three conditions are met:

Individuals are not radically unequal in power.
Relevant information is widely available
Free-riding is limited (ie. it is hard to benefit without contributing)

In today’s societies or systems, these conditions are rarely met: information is concentrated, power compounds, and coordination between individuals depends on institutions that can either be trusted, regulated, or resisted.

Coseen tries to explore whether thanks to technology, we can make a different coordination pattern possible: one where ideas, preferences, and actions are continuously evaluated by individuals themselves, and not dependent on institutions.

The question Coseen asks is: What happens if ideas, values, and actions are coordinated through a market-like mechanism, without relying on centralized authority, secrecy, or fixed institutions? By “market-like mechanism,” we mean a structure where people express ideas, choose priorities and allocate resources in real time, and are rewarded for doing so.

Coseen is a concept for a coordination system where people would generate value by expressing ideas, evaluating one another, and trading goods and services - without a central authority directing the process. In essence, shaping outcomes collectively and without central decision-makers (unlike today, where most of such decisions are taken by governments or institutions).

STARTING WITH A SIMPLE PLATFORM

At the heart of Coseen is a platform with 3 roles that everyone can occupy:

Thinkers express thoughts, ideas, or proposals.
Doers act on ideas by turning them into goods, services, or projects.
Observers evaluate, select, and signal values.

The platforms runs in short cycles:

You write down a thought (ie. an idea, an opinion, a proposal..). It is anonymous.
You read a small set of others’ thoughts.
You select one you find interesting, important to address, or worth exploring. The author of that thought receives a payment.
You rate the thought on a simple scale, from dislike to like.
The cycle repeats.
No one knows who wrote which thought. Selection and rating are independent. Over time, patterns emerge.

This mechanism encourages the expression of thoughts that would otherwise remain unspoken, ignored, or socially costly. It also separates the value of an idea from the identity of its author.

Let’s take a very simplified imaginary scenario:

Say Jane lives in a village who does not have a centralized government, but where everyone is using the Coseen platform. Everyday, different individuals send some thoughts over. Jane opens the platform, and after she has shared her own thought, she sees 3 new thoughts shared anonymously by other villagers:

Thought 1: “We waste a lot of rainwater during the wet season. We should build a shared water collection system to prepare for the dry months” → Jane believes this is a very good proposal. She selects it and rates it high.
Thought 2: “Trust in the village seems to be declining in small, subtle ways.” → Jane disagrees with this and feels this is not a concern at the moment. She selects it and rate it low.
Thought 3: “The school needs a better library system” → This is not something that Jane knows much of, so she decides to not select or rate that thought

Those who shared thoughts 1 and 2 receive a payment (reward) regardless of the rating Jane gave them.

At the end of the month, it is noted that many people have also rated Thought 1, and high. This leads to a plan for a collective water collection system.

FROM PLATFORM, TO MARKET & REAL WORLD

The same participants also buy and sell goods and services in a traditional sense.

Money can be earned in two ways:

by expressing thoughts that others repeatedly select (as described earlier)
or by selling goods and services to people who have money.

These two domains are connected:

If many people focus on expressing ideas but only few focus on producing goods, prices rise. This makes production more attractive.
If production dominates and ideas become scarce, expressing thoughts becomes more rewarding.

No central authority enforces balance or decides “who should do what”.. Prices and participation shift until an equilibrium emerges.

In this system, money is issued through peer selection. It is not created by rulers, extraction, computation, or institutional credit. It is created when people select ideas, thoughts or proposals they find valuable.

THE BIG WHY BEHIND COSEEN

Coseen is designed to handle cases where pure competition (ie. how our societies work today) fails.

Recognizing invisible work

Participants can share the gains from a thought with another person. When a thought is selected, part of the reward automatically goes to the designated recipient.

For example, Jane can decide that 1% of all the rewards she gets for the thoughts she shares will go to her neighbour, who helps the elderly around the village. This allows people to acknowledge work that is essential but hard to price directly: care, support, maintenance, presence...

Limiting harmful activities

Some thoughts can lead to actions that affect others. When an idea is proposed as a basis for action, participants can support or oppose it. If opposition outweighs support, the activity cannot proceed in its current form. The proposer can revise the idea to address concerns and submit it again.

For example, if someone in Jane’s village shares a proposal regarding the recycling plant, and a majority of individuals rate it negatively, then the activities of the plant must cease or be redesigned.

This creates a continuous feedback loop where externalities must be explicitly considered.

Allocating scarce resources

When multiple popular ideas require the same limited resource, priority is given to the higher-rated proposal. Scarcity (ie. the fact that resources are limited) is resolved through collective preference, not negotiation behind closed doors. This differs from many current systems, where scarce resources (such as water, land, labour) are typically allocated through ownership, hierarchy, or institutional authority.

Values as data

Every selection and rating contributes to a continuously evolving profile of preferences.

Each participant has a profile. The community as a whole develops shared norms. These profiles are not fixed identities but dynamic patterns.

When conflicts arise, decisions can consider:

the community’s overall norms,
and the specific value profiles of the participants involved.

Judgment shifts from rule enforcement to mediation. Instead of universal laws decided in advance, context-sensitive resolution becomes possible.

Let’s look again at Jane’s village. Say that a conflict arrises:

A group of people organising late-night parties with music. Some complain that the noise makes it hard to sleep.
Instead of applying a fixed rule (“noise after 10pm is banned”), the platform looks at value patterns.
This year’s data shows that villagers consistently prioritize quiet evenings. The parties are therefore limited to earlier hours.
5 years later, a similar conflict arises. However, the data now shows the village’s preference patterns have shifted and more individuals consistently support social and communal activities. This time, the party is allowed until later.

The boundary of what is acceptable changes over time, reflecting evolving collective values rather than permanent rule or laws imposed from above.

What Coseen is and isn’t

Coseen is not a claim about human nature. It is not a finished system. It does not assume perfect rationality, harmony, or altruism. It is a coordination prototype: a deliberately simple mechanism designed to explore how ideas, values, and actions interact when participants evaluate one another directly.

An early version of this model already exists as a working mobile app, currently used for structured conversations and collective decision-making in educational and organizational settings.

The next step is to test, critique, and refine the model together.

OPEN QUESTIONS & INVITATION

Coseen is intentionally incomplete. It is not presented as a finished system, but as a coordination mechanism that raises a number of concrete, unresolved questions: questions that can only be explored through use, experimentation, and critique.

At the center of the experiment are four open issues:

Popularity and value: If value is created through peer selection, what happens to difficult or unpopular ideas? When does popularity help bring good ideas forward — and when does it silence them?
Strategic behavior: If people are rewarded for their thoughts being selected, how will they adapt? What kinds of manipulation might appear? Which are limited by the structure itself?
Re-emergence of power: Even without formal authority, influence can accumulate. Who becomes influential over time, and how visible is that process to everyone else?
Limits of scale: Does the system work the same with 100 people as with 100,000? What improves with more people, and what starts to break?

These are not theoretical questions in the abstract. Each is tied to observable behavior: what people write, what they select, how value flows, and how norms evolve. As people use the system, it generates the data needed to evaluate its own assumptions.

Coseen can be read in many ways: as an economic experiment, a learning environment, a governance prototype, or a social mirror. None of these interpretations is privileged here. What matters is whether the mechanism enables new forms of coordination.

If you are interested in exploring these questions, by participating, critiquing, simulating, or extending the model, you are already part of the experiment.

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