Please describe your proposed solution
Part One: Introduction
In the U.S., only 20% of citizens participate in local elections, with just 10% influencing policy decisions. This low engagement leads to policies that neglect wider community needs and result in inefficient public spending. Low trust in governmental processes further reduces voter turnout, intensifying the misalignment between governmental actions and community needs.
Building on efforts to increase civic participation, SIM (Social Impact Marketplace) enhances trust and transparency in local economies by leveraging a decentralized think tank model. Through the Cardano ecosystem, staked funds are used to ensure greater accountability and drive impactful change. Social impact bonds on this platform are funded by staking protocols and executed via smart contracts by analysts who develop data models for local policy evaluation. This generates extensive economic data, organized into a publicly accessible ontology for tracking and analysis.
SIM enables local businesses, citizen data professionals, and community members to directly influence and assess policy, fostering a decentralized and community-driven decision-making process.
Staking entities might include:
Local Businesses: Observe direct benefits from efficient public spending.
NGOs: Advocate for social equity but are often unaccountable.
Citizens: Desire effective tax spending.
Political Lobbyists: Seek impact evaluations to contest policies.
Cities: Address citizen demands to improve accountability.
Part 2: Cardano Solution
Our platform leverages the Cardano blockchain to create a decentralized, localized think tank that manages civic data and social impact bonds that power civic data analysis, transforming how communities handle economic data transparency and social impact evaluation. We integrate blockchain through projects like "Decentralized Funding Transparency Protocol (DFTP-core)", “NuNet”, and "DataToken", which ensures immutable records and secure data transactions.
Core Features:
Smart Contracts: Manage lifecycle of social impact bonds, automating fulfillment conditions to enhance accountability.
Enhanced Security and Data Integrity: Utilizes Cardano’s robust security features to protect sensitive economic data, ensuring it remains accessible only to verified stakeholders.
AI-Driven Decision Tools: Employs artificial intelligence to evaluate community projects' potential impacts, providing stakeholders with predictive insights into opportunity costs.
Community-Centric Engagement: Incentivizes local participation in data analysis, promoting community-driven economic solutions and fostering stakeholder engagement.
SIM seeks to reduce barriers to local economic development by driving civic data transparency and reducing information barriers that are detrimental to a thriving local economy. Our decentralized app (DApp) strives to help townships and local economic entities that want to see more effective public spending and public-private partnerships. Here’s how we plan to implement this visionary project:
Decentralized Data Ecosystem: Utilizing the robust Cardano blockchain, we ensure that a community’s socio-economic data is immutable and fully transparent. This foundational layer of trust is crucial for stakeholders (e.g. businesses, developers, city officials, lobbyists, citizens) who require assurance that data integrity is maintained without compromise.
Smart Contracts for Governance: By embedding smart contracts in our system, we automate the management of social impact bonds. This means that social impact investments are only released when agreed-upon conditions are met, which aligns incentives and ensures that projects meet their developmental milestones before additional resources are allocated.
Advanced Analytics Powered by AI: Our platform leverages cutting-edge artificial intelligence to analyze vast datasets and provide predictive insights. This allows local governments and stakeholders to identify high-potential projects and assess the potential impacts and costs of inaction, driving more informed decision-making.
Engagement and Collaboration Tools: Recognizing the value of community input, our solution includes interactive tools that facilitate stakeholder participation in the decision-making process. This platform feature ensures that the voices of local residents are not only heard but also acted upon.
Comprehensive Project Management: To streamline implementation, our platform offers an integrated suite of project management tools. These tools support the organization of workshops, orchestration of stakeholder interviews, and the systematic collection and analysis of data. The aim is to foster collaboration and ensure that projects progress smoothly from conception through to completion.
Open Source Commitment: In line with our commitment to accessibility and innovation, the platform’s framework is open source. This allows for continuous improvement by a global community of developers and ensures that our system can be adapted and adopted by other townships, thereby multiplying its impact.
By integrating these elements, our platform not only promises to enhance economic data transparency but also transforms how local governments engage with and serve their communities. This approach empowers townships to harness technology for sustainable development, setting a new standard for civic engagement and governance.
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ORIGINAL PROPOSAL:
Social Impact Marketplaces: Localized Platforms for Community Engagement
Written by Johannes Plambeck, M.Sc. Regional Science, Cornell University
Introduction
Community building occurs when individuals in a region are empowered to organize themselves around common needs. These include addressing discrimination in the workplace or in lending practices, school facilities, career development, affordable housing, social services and sanitation for the homeless, or city contracts. Ideally, the community proposes measures that create a “social impact” in order to address the needs of its members.
As more members of the community take part in this process, common awareness develops around the community’s interests. Nevertheless, communities may not act in a way that are truly representative of all their members, especially if special interests enjoy disproportionate influence. This process wherein individuals lose social equity - the quality of life experienced in their communities - to special interests has broken the way we ideally imagine ourselves living together in America.
Municipalities have a responsibility to ensure that individuals are involved in community building. But individuals also have a responsibility to demand sincere engagement from their municipal officials. Information transparency holds municipal officials responsible and is the essence of a bottom-up approach to local governance - or “agile governance”. This article proposes an internet platform that can raise community awareness around local issues in the most transparent manner possible. Citizens can use this platform to propose and vote-on “social impact” projects that matter most to their communities. Municipalities may interact with community builders on this platform, creating a marketplace for community-driven projects. The result is platform assisted “deliberative democracy”.
This proposal seeks to identify what an effective deliberative democracy platform looks like. What attributes does it have and what kinds of information need to be given to users in order to engage them as citizens? How can the platform ensure that its user base is representative of the community, regardless of age, race, or social status? A tool like this will be extraordinarily powerful, requiring safeguards to prevent its misuse by special interests. With greater adoption, this platform will package local infrastructure needs into social impact proposals that municipalities eventually finance.
A Common Marketplace of Ideas
By themselves, local community builders drive social impact in their immediate localities. Their efforts are noticed by city planners and integrated into regional plans that are administered from the top-down. Often, planners choose to develop programs with objective evidence of economic impact that can stand up to legal scrutiny. Take for example the Denver Council of Regional Government’s “Complete Streets” initiative, which sought to collect local street safety proposals and merge them into a comprehensive database for regional planning. Regional plans try to be all inclusive, but often heed to the loudest voices. Enter: participatory planning - an attempt to bottom-up localized planning.
Localized planning is not without its hurdles. Take for example a local initiative around affordable housing led by neighborhood counselors. Housing prices are municipal in scope, so an effective local initiative would require neighborhood counselors to look beyond their own fiefdoms. Local efforts may be stifled by a lack of synchronization. A platform could be offered to the local neighborhood counselor that embeds local issues in a regional scope. Neighborhoods would then be aware of shared incentives they have with other neighborhoods in their municipality. Consequently, they could coordinate their efforts when approached by planners and city officials, which could yield better outcomes for the city as a whole. A platform like this would provide local community builders with competing models to draw inspiration from for their own initiatives.
In the same sense that American progressives cite Canada or Sweden in advocating for medicare-for-all public healthcare, exposing community builders to ideas and perspectives from other neighborhoods could lead to innovation in municipal policy making.
Imagine a common marketplace where community builders propose and vote-on ideas that have a social impact. These proposals can overlap and compete with one another on this marketplace to help community builders reach consensus. For those already involved in community building, this marketplace helps introduce new ideas into the discourse. For those not already involved in community building, the marketplace brings them up to speed with the latest proposals put forth by the more politically active members of the community. A marketplace makes it possible to uncover the opportunity costs of competing proposals that intersect geographically or complementary proposals that do not. If a broadly popular proposal is not pursued by the city, citizens can hold them accountable for ignoring them.
A municipality therefore has an incentive to study where these interests originate and where they receive their support. They also study how these interests overlap in order to identify policies that lead to equitable economic outcomes. For example municipalities currently determine how much their communities might support affordable housing developments by using questionnaires, visiting disparate community events, or hosting city led forums. The community participants are often disproportionately privileged however, generally skewing older, wealthier, and whiter. This could result in the municipality concluding that there is less support for affordable housing than there actually is. A common market for community interests would yield a more accurate picture of both neighborhood and citywide opinions around affordable housing.
A common market of interests cultivates information transparency by cutting down the amount of research it takes to become aware of the needs of the community. When community builders are armed with knowledge, they can confidently engage municipal planners at city council, rather than the other way around. Agile governance emerges from this well-informed public. Take for example a case where a property developer wishes to rezone an area from single-family to multi-family. That developer goes to city council to present their case, but is unaware of affordable housing advocates with similar interests. Both parties go to city council to present their case for multi-family zoning, but their arguments are defeated by pro single-family zoning special interests (e.g. “Not in my Backyard”). Their common interest could have raised social equity had they been aware of one another. A common market of interests makes it possible to asynchronously communicate demonstrable need to other community stakeholders at city council.
A Marketplace for Local Engagement
I term this awareness “social impact intelligence” (SIMI). SIMI is the essence of “deliberative democracy”, which involves members of the community in their community’s participatory planning process. Deliberative democracy is touted as a potential tool for cultivating greater trust between community members and their local governments. Platform-assisted deliberative democracy is a path to more representative community engagement. Similar tools such as Facebook Community Pages or NextDoor.com have failed to create deliberate democracy. Instead, these forums have devolved into insular echo chambers of discourse. Unfortunately, special interests like “Not in my Backyard” thrive on these platforms and can easily stifle loosely organized community interests, such as affordable housing. SIMI emerges when it is possible to compare and contrast interests that face a community. This is an analytic process that enables healthy discourse between competing interests and is served in what I will call a SIMI platform.
Our current social media has yet to elevate insular forums into a locally integrated and standardized space. In this framework, only the loudest voices can be heard across the social network. For example, corporate “astroturfing” - or the misrepresentation of community interests by special interests - can misrepresent local voices. What if the “volume” of a voice was amplified by its proximity to the locality and by the local reputability of their proposers? If this were the case, local citizens could parse local proposals from regional or national ones.
A marketplace of local community projects would in this framework originate from the locality itself. The resources that fulfill the projects would also originate from the locality, but achieve scale economies through local partnerships. Each proposal on a local marketplace might raise resources through the issuing of social impact bond proposals. The social impact bond would pay-out a combination of interest payments and results, equal to the opportunity cost of neglecting the problem being solved by the impact bond. The SIMI platform would match the “supply” of resources (NGO’s, concerned citizens, volunteers, etc.) with the “demand” for resources (project proposals on the local marketplace). Incentives would need to be given to the supply-side, perhaps through gamification, monetary reward, tax-breaks, and reputation-building. The result is nothing short of greater community engagement.
Project Outline
I believe that the mission to build greater-community with deliberative democracy is pertinent for building a more inclusive society. Mass society has given rise to this notion that the voice of the individual is worth less than it has ever been. But I believe that we can use technology to determine how to make engagement fun and informative. A platform like this need not be centralized but rather duplicated across localities. Moreover, its administration and technical maintenance would be decentralized. Nevertheless, its creation would still require a multidisciplinary team: in the technical realm, we would develop cloud infrastructure to host data science applications, a geographic information system, and a front-end interface. In the non-technical realm, we would engage councilors, community forums, cities, mayors, and nonprofits.
As mentioned above, the platform serves community builders with a marketplace of social impact bond proposals. Each proposal on this market originates from a community builder or is inferred by machine-learning applications on the platform’s discourses. In other words, the platform applies machine learning to classify discourse subject matter. In machine learning, this process is known as “labeling”. The platform translates a labeled discourse into a “suggested” social impact bond proposal, which contains geographic and thematic information. For example, a thread about “homelessness” (i.e. the label) will contain geographic information that locates the problem on a map; it also contains thematic information that might indicate for example a sanitation issue. As more discourses are ingested from disparate forums, the platform’s map of social impact proposals grows.
The platform also models sentiment around labels. Whenever a thread off of a forum is ingested, a word-cloud model is trained around a label and expresses the sentiment surrounding a topic/theme. For example, take the theme ”Bicycle Lane”. The word-cloud model in the context of “bicycle advocacy” might include phrases like “safety” or “C02 reduction”. Sentiment is central to the problem of consensus building because it helps community builders contrast opposing interests. As consensus develops on the platform’s marketplace, users evolve into community stakeholders that inspire greater community engagement and deliberate democracy.
Safeguards must however be put in place to guard against spoofed user accounts. “Doxing” for example occurs when malicious users act as other users at the neighborhood level. “Astroturfing” occurs when malicious users over-represent a community at the neighborhood level. Whereas astroturfing can be controlled by weighing user input according to reputability and gamified engagement, doxing is a problem that may only be solvable with identity verification. Both problems however are prerogatives in ensuring a successful platform.
Closing Remarks
This proposal is a roadmap for achieving deliberative democracy and agile governance. The SIMI platform takes what people have learned from their communities and gives it back to the community. It educates citizens on how local government works and empowers them to influence it in a way that is engaging, accessible, and transparent. Newly agile local governments would strengthen the confidence and trust that citizens have in our democratic institutions, helping to reverse the current trends of disengagement and polarization. It is my greatest hope that this project will change the way we do democracy in America.