The Problem:
The CAs role is very complicated. On the one hand, it needs to be precise, detailed and careful in order to provide the community the best insights needed to make the right decisions about the use of our common funds. On the other hand - every one can be a CA, without pre-condition, permission, job interview or professional qualification.
In order to keep this role permission-less and open for all without compromising on the outcome, clear, well documented and accessible guidelines are necessary. And as the project catalyst community grows this need become more urgent. Today, those guidelines are spread on many platforms - google docs, different web sites, gitbook and other, and the discussion around them spread even more on different social media platforms - discord servers channels, telegram groups, forums etc. Many of the conversations are happening at zoom meetings that are almost impossible to follow and keep track of.
The Solution:
Consenz is an agreements building platform (funded in f7) that allows large number of participants to take an active part in discussions and document editing.
By using consenz to create (v)CAs roles guidelines we can widen the circle of participants in the process and create a collaborative, effective and focused documents without creating too much noise. This will also reduce the effort and work needed from the IOG team to coordinate and implements changes offered by the community.
The following discussion-features make Consenz unique, compared to other platforms:
- Instead of an endless and chaotic thread of comments, there is a focus and a product to the process: A document that can be discussed and edited by the participants and reflect their agreements.
- There is a voting system that allows the users to express their opinion without adding noise to the discussion.
- The voting system also creates a method to deal with conflicts and determine which opinion has the majority of participants' agreements.
- Those agreements are separated from the noise by a simple algorithm that determines which section received enough support and can be added to the document automatically.
The process on consenz creates a "micro-democracy" system - an option to discuss the details of a draft by many users without limiting it to a small group of representatives. Consenz combines elements of - and is inspired by - liquid democracy, direct democracy, deliberative democracy and sociocracy.
The Project Status
Since 2018 we have been building a prototype of consenz (until lately it was available only in Hebrew) and in 2020-2021 we have completed a proof-of-concept phase. The app prototype has been used by diverse groups for different purposes in Israel, among them:
- Schools' teams used Consenz to create teaching guidelines during the covid19 restrictions.
- Unorganized protest movements used Consenz to create demands lists.
- Environmental organizations and activists used it to collaborate with government and municipality workers to create plans for dealing with the climate crisis.
Now that we have funded by the catalyst community we have started to design and build the MVP of the platform that will be used by DAOs and other communities and organizations.
As a start, consenz could be used as tool by the CAs/vCAs and the wider project catalyst community to create a coherent guidelines and other needed agreements and documents in a collaborative and transparent manner, and as a ongoing process that will evolve and allow the community to keep improving the assessments and scoring processes.
In the near future consenz could help to accelerate the decentralization of project catalyst by allowing the community to participate with the IOG team in process improvements and parameters adjustments.
KPI for the first year after the launch will include -
- Participation - Number of CA/vCA registered
- Participation - Number of other community members registered
- Products - Agreements/documents that will be created on the platform
Consenz trying to solve the problem of too many platforms by offering use of a new platform. This could create a situation of low participation.
To avoid this problem we plan to:
- Engage the community in co-design sessions to include them in the UX/UI design process. This will help us make sure that the platform really answer the community needs and is well suited for the use case. We will do that with our partners at the "social design academy" project - https://socialdesignacademy.io/, Fund 6 funded proposal.
- Research for future development of API, bots and bridges between social apps like discord, telegram and other and consenz platform to onboard new users and relevant content form the places where discussion is happening now.