For most DAOs and blockchain communities the main method for decision making is based on the formula of one coin/token = one vote. This way of calculating influence power does make sense for the business and financial paradigms, as It considering the risk at stake by the voters and give them voting power accordingly.
But we wish to see the impact of the blockchain technology goes beyond the business and financial paradigms - towered communities empowerment, political radical change and novel ways for human communication and collaboration. This is why we need a wider range of decision making methods and influence power allocations, like the use of quadratic voting (1) and/or other methodologies which enable broad consensus building in decision making
To achieve this goal digital identity is necessary. While one coin = one vote depend only on the ability of the voter to hold a private key (using wallet app), other voting mechanism requires ways of identifying the voters in order to make sure that they don't use their power more then once, impersonate others or harm the process in other ways.
It is a huge challenge to do that in a decentralized, private and secure way, and we wish to address it by researching the potential of Atala PRISM technology on real life use cases of decision making that require human identity verification.
Our plan is to do that on consenz platform.
What is consenz?
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.
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.
Consenz can be used as a test field for exploring different voting mechanism based on DID By creating few modules of decision making methods and implanting them on different use cases on the platform.
For example, a DAOs community can use one coin = one vote on its treasury use proposals, while for implementing change on its constitution the method will be one person = one vote, and for process changes it will set a reputation based delegation system etc.
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.
Read more about coin voting:
(1) <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/340657>
(2) <https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/08/16/voting3.html>
Implementing Atala PRISM DID on consenz platform can became useful for improving governance processes of DAOs on cardano and other chains.
This could also help mitigate DAOs organization with current regulation demands without compromising on decentralizing or users privacy.
The technical complexity of this proposal are yet unknown. We may discover that it require development work that is out of this proposal scope.
Our strategy to overcome this potential problem by collaboration with other teams and individuals of the community that are working on complementary solutions. We are and will continue to outreach other projects, to know what they are building and to tell them about our work, and look for ways to work together.
This is a learning process, and by knowing our place in the emerging eco-system we can be a part of a holistic set of solutions without the need to build it all by ourselves.