The challenge
When People are excluded from the decision making process their chances to improve their live are very low. Creating a governance systems that are transparent, open and inclusive can pave a pass towards improvements in many aspects of life.
Institutional corruption can be reduced by implementing and practicing public participation in decision making processes. To do that in large scale we need decentralized tools that will be efficient, secure, user friendly and trustworthy.
Our Solution
Consenz is a tool that open a way to address large crowds, get their advice, and listen to their ideas without being overwhelmed with noise. It does this by focusing the discussion on one document that has been edited by all users, in a democratic manner. The users can vote for alternative text suggestions, comment on them, and publish suggestions of their own. The process is based on an automatic algorithm that calculates the level of consensus that the document as a whole achieved during the discussion.
Consenz is designed to
- Increase democratic values in the daily work of the political system and other organizations
- Amplify the voice of communities from different socioeconomic backgrounds in policy shaping that impacts their life
- Give a powerful collaborative tool to civic society organizations
Consenz has been used in public participation processes by municipalities and NGOs in Israel, and by doing so helped to create the processes of decision making to be more efficient, more transparent, while widening the circle of citizens that choose to take part in them.
Our solution offers a simple and intuitive application that gives users a new way to express their views on matters that impact their lives, and gives policy shaping institutions a new way to hear the public and respond to them.
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.
Many poor nations tend to suffer from governmental corruption. Democratize decision making in those countries from the top (current government institutes) down is almost impossible because of inherent corruption in those institutes.
By providing a bottom-up solution for decision making for communities and local level agencies we can contribute to encourage a new culture of managing the common goods that may, eventually, create a long term impact on the national level.
More on the connection between corruption and poverty see:
- Negin, Vahideh and Abd Rashid, Zakariah and Nikopour, Hesam (2010): The Causal Relationship between Corruption and Poverty: A Panel Data Analysis
- Ina Purwantini Rahayu, Tri Widodo (2012): THE CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CORRUPTION AND POVERTY IN ASEAN: A GENERAL METHOD OF MOMENTS/ DYNAMIC PANEL DATA ANALYSIS
Opening the process of decision making 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.