Sam Arbesman, a scientist and author, curates lists and catalogs on research organizations, education models, and tech culture, and wrote The Half-Life of Facts.
Commenters praise his catalogs, such as the Overedge Catalog of new research organizations and his list of lists, and link his half-life of facts writing.
> How many cities would we need to add together to get to roughly 50% of the population?
While this is an interesting question, it's not the one that we should ask:
Instead, what is the lowest number of flights a candidate needs to take to visit a majority of the voters' nearby area? If the candidate can drive for under three hours to arrive at another area, the trip does not qualify for a flight.
See these links for the map visuals supporting this line of reasoning:
http://www.arbesman.net/blog/2011/02/02/the-city-states-of-america/
and
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for-america.html
A popular vote system decreases the number of flights substantially compared to the EC system, and would make much of the US utterly irrelevant in a national election. The EC system was created to prevent this from happening.
Also, flights are a proxy for overall campaign spending. A popular vote system would reward spending on the most populous visits and (compared to the EC system) penalize visits to the least populous areas.
Perhaps, you may enjoy this collection - "The Overedge Catalog: New Types of Research Organizations" [1].
I think it has quite the variety, and may help you distill a broader sense of where things are headed (and find people to reach out to).
[1]: https://arbesman.net/overedge/
I've been exploring the landscape of new types of research institutes/organizations, with a catalog of my findings here: https://arbesman.net/overedge/ I'm happy to discuss the possibilities for research orgs, so please feel free to reach out.
Love this project. Author has made some other great lists / directories in the past:
https://arbesman.net/listoflists/
My favorite being this list of interesting shaped schools and learning organizations: https://arbesman.net/newlearning/
Not to mention how easy it is to forget the historical track record of science being overturned by better science: http://arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/
There is a excerpt from chapter 1 of the book at the authors website.
http://arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/