I’m introducing an important new concept to NationBuilder: branches.

The purpose of the three branches of U.S. government (Executive, Legislative, and Judicial) is to provide checks and balances to ensure that none of them have too much power. We’re ripping this off and sticking it in NationBuilder, so you can organize different constituencies with different goals into their own branches.

For example, a corporation might have Management, Employees, Shareholders, Customers, and Partners branches. A government might have Politicians, Citizens, Employees, and Diplomats.

In a company, shareholders care primarily about the stock price going up, while customers want more value (cheaper prices), and employees want higher salaries. By separating them, it provides a way to balance these different interests, and build your nation on a solid foundation.

I’m thinking that each priority page will have a separate ranking for each branch, so you can see that a priority is #5 amongst customers, #55 amongst employees, and #155 amongst shareholders.

There will still be an overall ranking in addition to each branch’s ranking, but what if there was an optional feature to weight each branch equally (or even with different percentages). So if you have 4 branches, all the members of each branch get 25% of the vote, regardless of how many people are in the branch. This could work well if you were trying to balance the interests of a company that has 100 employees and 100,000 customers. It wouldn’t be fair to let the customers completely dominate the agenda.

I’m working on this actively right now, so please weigh in with your thoughts and ideas, either in the comments here, or on the priority at NationBuilder.