Please describe your proposed solution.
The Problem
Forming consensus in large groups and communities by using online channels for communication can be a very elusive process. The default strategy is to put decisions to a vote, but this raises questions such as - which decisions? How to frame and write the proposals and their details before putting them to a vote? Who can take part in voting? How should we calculate influence power? What is a sufficient quorum? etc.
Putting too many decisions to a vote will create voter fatigue and harm participation and engagement. Putting too little will create centralization of control. If we wish to build decentralized human systems and organizations we have to solve these huge challenges.
Our Solution
The Consenz Agreement Building Platform was built to allow an open, transparent and accessible way for participation in decision-making processes. The platform allows continuous participation in drafting agreement documents that can be used for different aspects of governance processes.
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 clear structure to the content: comments are attributed to a specific section and function as arguments for or against it; sections are attributed to a specific topic; topics are attributed to the document.
- 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’ agreement.
- These agreements are separated from the noise by the "consensus meter" - an algorithm that determines which section received enough support and can be added to the document automatically.
The platform's core logic is based on allowing the users to suggest improvements to an agreement document by publishing edit suggestions to the sections of the document. Then other participants can discuss these suggestions, and express their approval or disapproval of the suggestion by voting on them. Improvement suggestions that will stand in an approval threshold will be added to the draft automatically. The approval threshold is dynamic, and adjusted to the number of participants and to the consensus level that was reached so far, as shown in this diagram:
The process on Consenz creates a “micro-democracy” system – an option to discuss the details of a proposal by all members of the DAOs community 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
This proposal is a continuation of our Fund 7 proposal - "Agreements Building Platform".
The funding for our previews proposal was used for building an MVP version of the Consenz platform, that you can see and use here - app.consenz.io.
You can read the F7 proposal completion report here and watch its close-out video here.
This proposal will be also a continuation of our previews work for establishing a theoretical ground for the Consenz technology, which was done in collaboration with Photrek, Wolfram Alpha, IOHK and QA-DAO on a paper for reviewing Delegated Representation in Project Catalyst Governance. You can read the results of this work here.
For the MVP version of the Consenz we have developed a preliminary version of the "consensus meter". You can read about the consensus meter here, and check its simulator here, (a work that also awarded third place in the DAOs hackathon of milkomeda).
Now we wish to invite researchers, open source developers and the wide Cardano community to take part in improving and optimizing the algorithm.
Our intention is to build a tool that will be:
- Publicly owned
- Trustworthy
- Transparent
For it to be used in different governance and decision-making process by the Cardano community and by communities that are part of the Cardano ecosystem.
We also have a few funded proposals from fund 8, still in progress.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
This project can bring practical implementation to an important theoretical discussion that is most relevant to the Cardano ecosystem, spatially as we are moving ahead into the Voltaire era.
The Consenz platform can be used in this project as a playground for experimenting with different voting methods and decision-making algorithms on real-life issues, and by that to help validate theoretical work, with collaboration between open source communities, software engineers and researchers from diverse disciplines and academic backgrounds.
The challenge that is at the core of Consenz is also of interest to the scientific community. In particular, in Artificial Intelligence – most specifically in Computational Social Choice (see, e.g., https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~haziz/comsoc.pdf) – researchers are interested in designing algorithms and protocols that enable groups to collaboratively make decisions and create content. In this context, the challenge of collaboratively creating text documents is a challenge that is relevant to the scientific community at large and for which the Consenz solution and approach are of great value.
As an open source project it can be a hub for advanced thinking, publications and research, with practical implications that will be used for improving governance processes, decision making and communication in the Cardano ecosystem, the Crypto industry, traditional government agencies and more.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Main KPIs:
- Number of researchers taking part in the project
- Number of publications that will mention the Consenz platform and the consensus-meter
- Number of scientific outlets in which the Consenz platform and the consensus meter is mentioned (e.g., presentations in academic workshops and conferences
- Number of developers
- Number of forks of the project's main branch
- Number of pull requests for the project's main branch
- Number of commits
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We will update the Project Catalyst and Cardano Community on the progress and outcomes of the Consenz project in all available channels:
- After Town Hall breakout room: We find these opportunities to be the best way to engage face to face the members of Catalyst, show our work products and get feedback. We have already hosted a few sessions and workshops on ATH breakout rooms (#1, #2, #3, #4), and we plan to initiate and host more in the future.
- Consenz GitHub account for tracking the progress of our developers' teamwork - <https://github.com/consenz-io/>
- Twitter account: This will be used to engage with the wide Cardano/ADA holders community - https://twitter.com/consenz_io
- Other channels:
- The project youtube channel - were will upload team meeting recordings and other updates.
- The Consenz website
- We will use Medium to publish and/or refer to scientific papers that we will produce
- Existing project catalyst community channels, such as Telegram groups, discord channels, forums, etc.