Please describe your proposed solution.
Problem Statement:
Governance and decision-making are made mainly by two methods: discussion and voting. Discussions allow the participants to express different opinions and perspectives and to take into consideration the pros and cons, the benefits and the risks before decisions are made.
But discussions are not scalable. Discussions create noise, and when there is too much noise, it is hard to identify the signal, i.e., the relevant data that contributes to the process.
In decentralized organizations, governance is being made by voting on proposals on-chain. The focus on proposals leaves outside wider policy challenges that are relevant to the community, such as process guidelines, community code of conduct, monetary policy, etc. Discussions are usually disconnected from the voting process and spread on different platforms: twitter, google-docs, telegram, discord, reddit, github, and others.
This situation makes the decision-making process ineffective and creates a risk of getting decisions that are not in the best interest of the community and its members. Also, it may discourage many members from actively participating in the process.
Our Solution:
Consenz is a platform that was created to address those problems and offer a proven solution.
The platform's core logic is based on allowing the users to suggest improvements to an agreement document by publishing edits to the section 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, as shown in this diagram:
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 aggregating only section versions the received enough support on the document draft.
The process of 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.
However, it is very difficult to accustom the users to a new platform, great as it will be. People want to engage with others, and to start onboarding participants to a new, and first empty, channel, is very challenging.
To address this challenge we are going to initiate a few strategies: Marketing, Direct and active outreach for users and communities, and - building integration between the Consenz platform and other platforms and channels, to go where the users are and bring the unique way of getting things done to them.
This proposal funding, if approved, will be used for building a set of integration between the Consenz platform and other channels and platforms that are used for discussions and document editing, including:
- Telegram
- Discord
- Github/Gitbook
- Discourse
By creating bots and plugins for these platforms we will be able to bring the benefits of the Consenz platform - i.e., productivity, focus, efficiency, and scalability - to the places where the conversation is happening now.
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.
We also have a few funded proposals on fund 8, still in progress.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The challenge description specifies these goals:
> Products & Integrations focuses on the following areas:
- Creation or improvement of different products that provide value to the Cardano community and wider ecosystem.
- Integrations with other existing services, products, and protocols that improve the end-user experience. This could mean giving the user more options or making something easier to use that benefits the wider ecosystem.
And these types of proposals:
- Social media
- Mediation
This proposal is for creating and improving an existing product (the Consenz platform MVP version) built using funding from Catalyst.
This product has already been proven as having the potential for providing value to the Cardano community by creating a better way to discuss, agree, and form consensus around relevant issues.
By integrating other existing services and products such as social media channels and text editing tools. we will be able to leverage the tool that we have built and bring great value to the community.
As for integration with the Cardano blockchain, in this proposal, we are focusing on delivering UI for community discussion with integration with other web2 applications. However, deploying on the Cardano blockchain is an important part of the project roadmap.
We are planning to do so in the future by:
- Allowing authentication using wallet connect at first and DIDs/SSI later
- Ratifying agreements documents that were drafted on Consenz by voting on-chain
- Reaching out for partnerships with other projects that are building voting tools on Cardano, such as Clarity, ADAO, Summon and others (with some we are already in touch) for leveraging the potential of collaboration of our technologies
As you can see in the project roadmap, it is divided into 4 layers, the third layer (the "Trust Layer") include on-chain components:
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
We will use this Potential success metric (as mentioned in the challenge brief) to measure the success of this proposal:
- Social media - Total number of users, number of meaningful interactions
Specifically:
- Number of new registered users that arrived from social media integrations
- Number of shared items of user-generated content from Consenz to social media channels
- Engagement with those items (likes, comments, shares)
- Use of the product of the Consenz process on social media and other channels
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 this opportunity to be the best way to engage face to face the members f 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: This is a great way to track 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
- Medium (to be activated soon)
- Existing project catalyst community channels, as Telegram groups, discord channels, forums etc.