In order to make sure that new legislation will be beneficial for the greater good and for the long term we have to give attention to the details, get professional input - from lawyers and other policy expert - together with feedback and comments from the general public (in our case - ADA and other crypto currencies holders). By doing so we will increase the chances of pro-crypto legislation to receive the needed support and to be approved.
Wide participation is the key for achieving it. Large number of participants and wide diversity that they will represent will make sure that different perspectives will be taken into consideration in the legislation drafting process.
But technically it is almost impossible if we keep using the current tools that have been used by the community. Google doc is not scalable, github is not user friendly for the non tech audience, voting tools give only a low resolution solution (approve/deny a whole document) and discussions platforms like reddit and other social media platforms produce way too much noise.
Our Solution
Consenz is an agreements building platform (funded in f7) that allows a large number of participants to take an active part in discussion and document editing.
By using consenz in legislation drafting we can widen the circle of participants in the process and create a collaborative, effective and focused product, while keeping it professional and without creating too much noise.
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' 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 been 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 organizations.
By using consenz in the process of creating bills and proposals for local, state, national and even multi-national institutions we will be able to improve the chances of those bills and proposals to get the needed support and been approved because of the following:
- Reduce potential objections: Incorporating a wide number of participants from diverse range of populations and communities in the drafting of proposed legislation from the start of the process will increase the chances that the needs and concerns of those communities will be taken into consideration. This will reduce the risk of discovering in retrospect that a proposed bill may harm potential allies and raises objections that can jeopardize it's chance to be approved.
- Create cross political parties coalitions: Many good legislations proposals are rejected even though they can get a wide support because of automatic objections from some political parties and representatives that are the rivals of the legislation proposers. By using consenz in the process we can invite people from different political parties and ideologies to cooperate and create coalitions that overcome these automatics divisions.
- Involve professional and non-professional participators: One of the main features of the crypto eco-system is the potential to break down the current structure of hierarchy that give unfair advantage to some professional groups. In crypto everyone can be a banker, a broker, a trader, a money maker, a policy shaper. While this is good for defi and DAOs, lobbying and legislation require a different approach as it needs cooperation from the legacy institutions, politicians and regulators. Using consenz platform in legislation and lobbying process will allow to bring together both professional participants as lawyers, politicians, lobbyist and policy experts, and the non-professional participants from the wide crypto communities to discuss, create agreements and produce drafts and bills in a trustworthy manner, while keeping it at the highest professional level without alienating the general public from the process.
Opening the process of legislation drafting may be vulnerable to trolling, bots using and other harmful activities.
We plan to mitigate this risk by creating a community driven moderation system that will encourage trustworthy participants to identify and report those bad actors without using centralized censorship.