Please describe your proposed solution.
I’ll explain how our solution will work with one example of social structure, while the mechanism is similar for any other. Moreover, different social structures interact, but this can as well be considered as one social structure, but from the other perspective. I’ll briefly explain how later in the text.
*Note: the whole text could be completed with numbers, math & game theory tables, but for it to be more adopted to non-technicians, I decided to use metaphors and qualitative examples.
Let’s pick the Proposal Assessment process as an example, where Proposal Assessors are trying to evaluate Proposals in order to simplify voters' work. In Your Justice, Catalyst will create a special organization with such attributes:
- values of this social structure (impact to the ecosystem, transparency, justice in the selection process, etc.)
- rules, based on values and explaining which actions in the role of PA are welcome, which aren’t, and as well how much they are welcome or not
- rating scales, driven by actions (through rules) measuring the efficiency of each PA
- There are other roles that need to be involved in the process: validators to verify that actions really took place (in case when everything is written on-chain, validators may be replaced with smart-contracts triggers), judges to resolve disputes. Many other roles may be created and customized as well, but it’s a bit offroad for this text.
Now let’s set for simplicity, that reputation of a person is based on how he evaluates proposals such that: he gets a reputation for giving high marks to proposals that finally got funding or low marks to eliminated proposals, and loses it for doing the opposite. So, informally speaking, the rules can be summarized to “Evaluate Proposals giving high marks to good ones”, which will already create good incentives for PAs, which combined will lead to a better computed output of this whole social structure.
While the output is good, there's still a place for disagreements. I’ll consider one type of them: when PA wants to state disagreement. Reasons for that may vary from “I evaluated this correctly” to “this proposal is a gamechanger and the majority of PA’s have mis-evaluated it”. Any of those may be taken into a court – another core feature of Your Justice.
Court’s main purpose is to resolve disputes. Courts may be customized, replacing judges with jurors, or requirements for proofs, or many others. The classical court process is the following: PA files a case about an “unfair rating change” that happened to him. He fills in the information about how it happened, states his claim and provides his proof. In this situation it may be a text with reasoning, or he can invite experts to argue for his position. Qualified judge considers all the materials and makes a verdict, if it’s positive – the reputation of the Case creator gets restored. Furthermore, other processes may be triggered by positive resolution of a case (in accordance with rules!): for example, “if one has proven in court that application A needs better marks, than (1) all the PAs involved should read the materials of the case and (2) application A must be reconsidered”.
In the real world different social structures interact, like in the given example there is a funding process as a whole, but it can also be considered as a product of, let’s say for simplicity, three stages: application stage, assessment stage, voting stage. Each of these may have its own entity in YJ, but also, they may interact. For example, the number of voters necessary may depend on the degree of consensus from the assessment stage: Catalyst may redistribute resources to increase efficiency. Degree of consensus may depend on average Assessors’ reputation, which itself will count experience and work quality. In short, if there is an agreement across experienced Assessors, not many voters are needed to validate this. The other example may be the following: those assessors with the highest reputation may be invited to participate in methodology work in Catalyst, letting the whole system benefit from the implementation of YJ reputation in Assessment process.
The implementation of reputational layer will start a chain reaction:
- First Assessors, whose intentions are the benefit of the Cardano Ecosystem, will try to compete for rating, trying to evaluate honestly, without fear of being misjudged.
- The competition has started, and now not only ideologically aligned assessors, but all of them, will be incentivised to evaluate honestly.
- After a couple of rounds, the average quality of assessment will increase dramatically.
- This will create a better output for the whole social structure.
Given mechanism may work for any correctly balanced rule-reputation pair, letting communities of any size achieve their goals and benefit as a whole.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Centralized reputation is as usual very vulnerable in the center. The center can do in favor of itself, not the citizens or community. Another problem is that centers may be under-qualified, so the balance may be bad even in the case where intentions are bright. Governments across the world are already creating social ratings, all being bad in a different manner. Smaller examples are taxi drivers, or graduating students, or visa applicants. Problems differ from one solution to another, but in common they all have:
- Lack of transparency: formulas are not visible
- Lack of humanity: everyone is considered a robot
- Lack of competition: usually only one party is a stakeholder
- No options to appeal or at least to know what needs to be done better
In Your Justice we are addressing all of those.
Another point is that we are aiming to increase the quality of interactions, so the potential impact is not an improvement of some part of the ecosystem, but improving it as a whole. Making every interaction more predictable may start a chain reaction of thousands of good interactions, which itself in the horizon of years lead to a skyrocketing of the ecosystem. As we know from evolution theory, even 1% of an advantage repeated many times leads to explosive growth.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
- Verification & Unique Identity problem is the most important. For communities and ecosystems with own verification we are good, for further spread we will need to integrate solution
- We will not get enough money to do our work since we are an infrastructure project. By some luck, under current market conditions it may even be more advantageous to us.
- World's demand for justice is much lower than we feel it is. This is not critical for the project, but critical for scaling to planetary size. If this is the case, we still will make niches better and fairer places to live, which we know with certainty includes many ecosystems and societies.