Lending the Decision Engine
For the first quarter of 2014, the shareholders of KmikeyM governed someone who was not Mike Merrill. They voted on a seventeen-year-old’s education, his travel, and whether he should look for a girlfriend. Sixteen votes were held about him, and he agreed in advance to abide by all of them.
He is the only person other than Merrill the system has ever been pointed at, which makes this the project’s one real test of whether it is a method or just a life.
Why it happened
The proposal is unusually candid about its own motivation. By late 2013 things were going well: a company started at the shareholders’ direction was employing six people, and a 735-day relationship contract had been ratified. Merrill’s account of the problem is that stability had left him with nothing to ask.
“The current stability in our life, which evidences the wisdom of the shareholders, has left us without important questions to pose recently, and so our wonderful ‘decision-making engine’ has lain idle.”
So he proposed lending it out. Jackson G., a Portland software developer who had dropped out of high school, was seventeen and, in the proposal’s framing, full of questions he could not answer alone. He would post at least two questions a month and do what the shareholders decided.
The second reason is the one that matters. Merrill wrote that succeeding would demonstrate the system worked beyond his own life, and drew the conclusion plainly:
“If Jackson holds this post successfully, we may demonstrate the possibility that even our own death would not have to be the end of KmikeyM.”
The stated risk was equally plain: a seventeen-year-old now held the stock price, and if he ignored the shareholders, even years later, it would damage it.
The enabling vote passed on 30 December 2013 with 84% in favor.
What they decided
His education. Shareholders voted that he should get his GED, at 74%. Five college classes were then offered, with the two highest scoring to be audited: a video studio course on structures and strategies took 82%, a critical theory seminar 81%, and English composition 74%. Marketing and branding came last at 30%.
His independence. Asked whether he should get a driver’s licence, they said no, at 22% in favor. The proposal had disclosed, in a line that reads differently now, that management had given Jackson a ride home on a few occasions and that he lived kind of far away.
His personal life. They were asked whether he should stop actively looking for a relationship and concentrate on professional development. They voted yes, 60%. The proposal noted this was a real request for advice and had not been easy for him to ask.
Where he should live. The largest question was whether he should leave Portland for at least a month, somewhere with a stronger academic culture and a recent history of upheaval. That passed at 98%, and six cities went to separate votes. Berlin won at 97%, with Reykjavik close behind at 91% and London at 77%. San Francisco was rejected at 2% and New York at 0.4%.
The full record of all sixteen is in List of Votes, grouped under the parent vote.
What is not known
Whether any of it happened.
The record holds what shareholders decided and nothing about what followed. Nobody wrote down whether he got the GED, audited the classes, went to Berlin, or took the advice about his personal life. The experiment that was meant to prove the system could outlive its subject has no recorded result at all.
That gap is not specific to him. It is the same defect Project Bankruptcy surfaced four years later: the votes of this era were written without any statement of what completion would look like, so almost nothing from the period can be marked finished or abandoned. It is simply more conspicuous here, because this was the one vote sequence whose entire purpose was the outcome.
A note on naming
He is given here as Jackson G. He was a minor at the time, he has since changed his name, and he is not easy to find under either. This wiki treats that as an opt-out.
He was named in full in the press at the time: Robert Ham profiled the experiment for the Portland Mercury in 2014, under the title “Crowdsourcing the Future.” That article is the public record and a reader who wants more can start there. It is cited without its subtitle here, because quoting a headline that carries the name would undo the point of not using it.