Please describe your proposed solution.
Multi-stakeholder organisations such as representative democracies, local authorities, smart cities, NGOs, cooperatives, associations, DAOs, and multinational corporations, must engage with diverse communities of stakeholders in order to take decisions that enjoy widespread acceptance and consensus.
This is exceptionally challenging when diverse communities of stakeholders with conflicting interests are asked to provide views, or advise - on complex issues that require specialist knowledge (e.g. selecting among a number of investment opportunities, managing commons, deciding on policy or strategic direction, etc.) due to stakeholder lack of specialist knowledge on the subject of deliberation and zero or low incentives to participate in deliberations.
A "citizen assembly" is a well-tested method for a facilitated deliberation among a group of citizens in order to decide on an issue. Although "Citizen Assemblies" (or "citizen juries") have been shown to deliver an excellent way to engage with diverse communities and enhance trust in public and private governance, setting up and running a citizen assembly is currently very costly and inefficient due to the complexities of selecting a truly representative sample of citizens, educating them on the subject under deliberation, incentivising and facilitating their deliberations, and enabling consensus on potentially polarising issues.
Our solution ("Voxiberate") delivers an end-to-end software platform for multi-stakeholder organisations to set up Citizen Assemblies quickly, efficiently, and at low-cost. To do this we are applying advanced AI techniques, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), to enable the fair selection of a citizen group from the wider community; clustering and aggregating citizen dialogues and analysing their deliberations; a learning feature to provide necessary information and knowledge so that citizens can have high-quality deliberations on complex issues; as well as various features for onboarding citizens and facilitators, managing communities, and executing deliberations that lead to voting on proposals. We have already built the first iteration of our MVP where we have implemented the core features of our solution, as described.
We now wish to further develop our solution as a decentralised app on web3 whereby we:
- ensure citizen anonymity and security via DID/Wallet login;
- deliver transparency and auditability of deliberations and votes by recording votes on a blockchain or on a permaweb/decentralised storage;
- leverage a native utility token to incentivise "good civic behaviour", encourage citizens towards consensus and away from polarisation, and provide opportunities for civic and community leadership to those who deserve it;
- integrate a middleware for DAOs to release funds via deliberations on Voxiberate ("voxiberations");
- pilot our solution to use cases whereby citizens can delegate to other citizens the authority deliberate and vote on their behalf (liquid democracy/ delegated voting)
Ultimately, we envision our platform ("Voxiberate") as a decentralised application on Cardano that enhances participatory democracy across nations, regions and cities; but also supports agile corporate governance, whereby all stakeholders, including employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, local communities and others, collaborate in collective decision-making and in the crowdsourcing of ideas.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Our Proposal aligns with Cardano's social mission. Like Cardano and its global community, we too aspire to make our world a better, kinder and more inclusive place where everyone has a stake - and a voice! - in shaping their destiny. At Voxiberate we believe that the decentralisation of the web is a historical opportunity for communities across the world to self-organise and create new social and economic value. But for this vision to take place, and for Cardano to be adopted by the wider society, we think that it is necessary to introduce concepts and well-tested practices from political science in the governance of decentralised communities. We think we can contribute towards this goal by further developing Voxiberate, our deliberation platform for setting up and facilitating citizen assemblies on web3.
Voxiberate is the "deliberation layer" on web3. Such a layer currently does not exist. DAO member communications and deliberations take place in not-fit-for-purpose messaging platforms (Telegram, Discord, Twitter, etc.). The absence of an effective and efficient deliberation layer is one of the main reasons why so few members engage actively in the governance of their DAOs.
We therefore think that Voxiberate will be extremely useful to current and future Cardano projects - and indeed to all DAOs that support democratic decision-making in public, as well as private, governance. Voxiberate will enable scaling up and ensuring the trust of DAO communities, and the wider adoption of web3 and Cardano by nations, regions, cities and society at large.
More specifically, we will develop and/or integrate the following decentralised features:
- Voting process, as fraud-proof way of voting and/or a verifiable audit trail
- Our VOX utility token, whereby citizens are rewarded for good civic behaviour and earn reputation points
- Login with DID/wallet to deliver citizen anonymity and security
- We will work closely with Catalyst Swarm - and with other Cardano communities too - to integrate tools and techniques that they have developed for community management, particularly in vote delegation as well as integrting a middleware for DAOs to release funds via "voxiberations" (deliberations on the Voxiberate platform)
With regards to the Dapps, Products and Integrations Challenge, our product aligns with the Challenge's goals because we will provide a very powerful Dapp within the broader Cardano ecosystem, that introduces the voice of citizens in participatory democratic governance. Sustainable prosperity can only be effected through the active participation of citizens and communities in policy and decision-making. Our proposed solution aligns with the Dapps, Products and Integrations Challenge, as we will build an application that will drive wider adoption of Cardano by empowering nations, regions, and cities to set up citizen assemblies quickly, easily and at a very low cost.
More specifically, we aim to support the following KPIs that align with the Challenge:
• Participation and/or partnerships between Cardano and other international organizations
• Number of countries using Cardano in governance
• Number of Dapp users, registry accounts, transaction volumes
• Dapp development and implementation
• Dapps impact on social/financial inclusion
• Dapps impact on economic development
We plan to communicate the outcomes of our project via several channels, including social media channels, blogs, and conferences. We will engage with the wider Cardano community and will offer our product for pilot testing to community projects.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
The team has already worked successfully together over many months, and we have already developed the first iteration of our MVP that includes the core platform functionality (front end and back end), and the core AI Engine and algorithm. Because of this we have already de-risked much of the project, since we will be entering the project as a seasoned team with a product that we can demo and pilot. Nevertheless, there are two risks that we must address:
Risk 1: Identifying the appropriate Cardano integrations. To ensure that we meet the project plan timeline and deliver on our goals we must conduct in-depth research on the best available integrations in the Cardano ecosystem for DID/Wallet, decentralised storage, middleware for DAOs to release funds via voxiberations, within Month 1 of the project. Our preliminary research has identified a number of tools, such as Cardano CLI and maybe atalaprism for DID/wallet login, but we need to conduct further research to assess maturity, complexity and availability of appropriate technologies.
Mitigation strategy: We will partner with the Cardano community to help us quickly identify the appropriate integration tools, SDKs, and strategy for Voxiberate. We have already partnered with Catalyst Swarm and we will engage further with others in Cardano as well.
Risk 2: Ensure that the "voice of the customer" guides product development. Given that Voxiberate's end users will be citizens in various countries, regions and cities, it is important for our success that the Dapp meets their needs, as well as that we communicate clearly to them the benefits of using a decentralised application for democratic deliberation. Unless we include perspectives from end users throughout the product development process Voxiberate will not live up to our vision.
Mitigation strategy: (a) We will assign to a member of our team (Luiza Romero) to be the "user advocate" with responsibility to ensure that our end users are represented in the development process; (b) Luiza will compile a "Voice of the Customer" plan on Month 1 which will include practical steps for mitigating Risk 2; this plan will be executed during Months 2 and 3; (c) Voxiberate is already partnering with Miami City and we will use this partnership to continuously engage with citizens and community leaders in Miami so that we may include their perspectives into our development effort. This engagement will be part of the "Voice of the Customer" plan