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Hey there!

At Adagov.org, our mission is to help Cardano community solve collective governance by putting the proposal pieces together.
You see.. Proposal 1 + Proposal 2 + Proposal 3 does not equal Governance.

We want to take the great ideas put together by the community to from a single cohesive solution using design.

Natural collectives like bee swarms, fish schools and termite colonies rarely allow a single individual or elite group to make decisions for the group. The Queen Bee doesn't lead the hive to a new colony, the honey bees do, after a vote guided by merit.
Natural collectives have had millions of years to get this right and participate around a set of principles to get a cohesive outcome. We have a small window of time to transition from tribal hierarchical thinking to collective swam intelligence.

We aim to build an idea meritocracy.

What is an idea meritocracy?
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An idea meritocracy is a governance system where good ideas are curated by its members and rewarded.

We can design it to act as:

• a support system that asks people what their problems and aspirations are.
• a platform for policy ideation where anyone can earn a wage for engaging with governance.
• a gamified education system that can provide members numeracy, literacy and critical thinking skills
• a way to recognise experts using engagement, qualifications and certifications.
• a sentiment market to invest in teams where projects of value are selected to deliver reliably.

In addition we believe for the best ideas to surface, we should do this in

• in a non-partisan and non-ideological setting
• with constructive structured discussion through analytics and science
• and free flow idea expression through crowd-sourced media, art and reporting

Its possible to build such a system by combining solutions we already have today. In fact we've already started....

A Case Study
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Ray Dalio is the best hedge fund manger of all-time. He uses believably-weighted decision making at Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedgefund in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXbsVbFAczg

A User Story

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Current State
Belayene an Ethiopian coffee farmer lives in Bonbe county. His day involves walking to work so he tells his wife to make sure to look after the cows. He has been a coffee farmer for seven years. As soon as he wakes up in the morning he washes his hands and eats breakfast. Growing coffee can be difficult but once you drink it, it gives you a new energy. He takes his tools to work and then works till noon harvesting plants. He takes a coffee break, visits his cows and feeds his workers. He takes the coffee break to walk he collected to the washing station. A local broker takes the fruit to the processing plant. He'll earn just $1 USD/day for this effort, while an average cup will fetch close to $4. Note: There are an estimated 15 million people directly or indirectly involved in the Ethiopian Coffee Industry. Only a fraction of the profit goes back to the country. Most of the profit is shared by distributors and middlemen.

Future State

Belayene an Ethiopian coffee farmer lives in Bonbe county. His day involves tending to his cows, a livelihood he really loves. He grows coffee too but since Cardano arrived his working hours have changed. The local coop is now able to regulate their sale price and hes been able to earn a wage that will cover his living expenses for the year. Good thing too, the recent heat has made the industry more unstable on the demand side. He could scarcely recognise himself. Besides he didnt need to deal with that stuff any more…with the coop negotiating better rates in the online market the local community had been doing well, demand was going to stay high for a while. Belayene reaches his cows and having checked in on them, lays down in the shade. "They're easy today" he says as he sits in the shade. He starts up an English language game on his phone. It has him translating weird ideas from English as practice exercises for a English course. When he got phrases right he'd be able to collect trust points. He smiled … almost 300. That would let him bid on some community initiatives in the area… perhaps solar for the coop? His phone lights up with the next phrase to translate: "Buy an Ethopian Telecommunications Network". He laughs, "Crazy Adans" he murmurs to himself, tapping away on his touchscreen.

Why?
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Behavioural Economics: People are not rational, but in a well understood way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpev-Lb0EAg

The World Is Volatile

Global events have pulled back the curtain on the decision making capability of present governance systems and organisations. There is plenty of opportunity on the table in volatile times but there is also large risk of cascading negative effects. These are hard for any one person to get right.

To Create Value

Investment only succeeds when you bet against the consensus. To take advantage of opportunities in the market means the Cardano community must have a strong sense of group coordination and judgement when making decisions.

To Support The Species

Solving governance is a big ask. A complex system needs to not just be designed, but protected against narrow framing, mental accounting to train in numeracy, statistics and grown from a simpler working system. The hardest challenge we can achieve is agreeing on a common message.

Why Our Team?
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We believe that this is the best use of our skills, time and resources. Our Ikigai.
We hope to be a Community of Interest for Cardano Governance and coordinate around strong community principles and peer-reviewed science.

How do you know what to do?
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Our role as System Engineers is to combine fields to create a magnifier result. Our members are also professional designers and developers:

https://youtu.be/E6U_Ap2bDaE?t=228

We believe it is possible to combine ideas in fields like anthropology, UX design, behavioural economics, psychology, game theory, neuroscience, optimisation, decision theory and machine learning… all fields with significant advances formalised in the last two decades .. and apply them to this problem and sub-problems.

What Problems?
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The exponential growth we have experienced has presented us with more misinformation, more choices, less time and fewer directions.

Our community's capacity to cope with size is a function of how quickly we can onboard, upskill and persude new members to understand and share community values vs. implicit values of new voters. Otherwise the "Diamond hands" folks may take us to join the DAO one way or another.

Our ability to find and verify truth in the sea of information and work together in with a common value system will break down unless we find a way to manage and curate information more consistently and take optimum action.

What can we do?
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The problems we face are those of scale.
Our ability to coordinate and ability to find consensus as a species is of critical importance.

Once population reaches a certain size, hierarchical leadership structures become monolithic and are prone to compromise as the decision makers loose awareness of the impact of their changes on others.To solve this we can look to natural systems which are able to coordinate large populations seamlessly.

In the study of Swarm Intelligence, we find that natural collectives have some common shared principles:

Extensibility

Members are seamlessly aggregated with freedom of inclusion.

Resiliency

Members are removed, the system must self-heal and continue to function with freedom of withdrawal.

Awareness

Members are aware of their surroundings and abilities with freedom of communication.

Autonomy

Members operate as an autonomous individuals with freedom of choice

Solidarity

Members look to autonomously complete new tasks inline with the community objectives.

But unlike natural collectives we have a few things working against us:

• We haven't formed organically - so we need to organise.
• We don't behave rationally- so we need to debias our decisions.
• We're naturally tied to individual incentives - so we need to be clear about transparency.
• We're a pretty diverse bunch - so we need to engage in universal design.
• We exist in many physically separated spaces at the same time - so we need to promote empathy.
• Unable to convey emotion and sentiment over the internet - so we need to design for well-being.

Pre-Mortem: What would failure look like?
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Scenario 1 (Most Likely)

• This proposal may go overlooked, but hey, we're still learning.
• We'd adjust our proposal and presentation and try again next funding round.

Scenario 2

• We fail to communicate the need to the community pull together the best pieces under a unifying set of principles.
• We'd try to refine our communication and produce a more cohesive presentation for the next round.

Scenario 3 (Least Likely)

• We succeed but are unable to sufficiently engage the right teams.
• We'd attempt to pull components together, donate development time or build open source components toward this goal.

We believe consequences of this experiment in governance will be long lasting.

Roadmap:

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Fund 4 Scope: We will get setup.
[In Progress] Create channels of communication in line with that of Project Catalyst.
[In Progress] Test the appetite for a Working Group / Community of Interest.
[In Progress] Begin onboarding projects that genuinely share the same principles and values.
[Ongoing] Create Signup: join.adagov.org
[In Progress] Workshop One:
[Vote Permitting] Establish understanding of high level group constraints, wants and needs.
[Vote Permitting] Take advantage of corporate/ team discounts to provide groups with tooling
[Vote Permitting] Subdomain projectname@adagov.org and limited hosting to project / proposal teams.
[Vote Permitting] Establish a members agreement that would state basic rules of engagement.
[Pending] Update our communications for visual engagement.
[Vote Permitting] We may provide endorsements / guides for interoperable or cooperating projects in F5.

Fund 6 Aim: We will create solidarity around a unified reference design that we can explain. (may change)
To this end, we aggregate various design suggestions proposed into a single cohesive collective intelligence workflow including multiple debiasing components. This proposal only includes scope for the construction of a reference design only.

[Vote Permitting] End-state vision around the capabilities of our governance system.
[Vote Permitting] Support Proposals that intend to look at conforming design elements.
[Vote Permitting] Current state progress.
[Vote Permitting] Strategy to grow.

Fund 8 Aim: We will create freedom of communication around two or more working group projects. (may change)

We'll look at creating interoperability

[Vote Permitting] Establish interoperability requirements.
[Vote Permitting] We will index and substantiate influencing ideas and research.
[Vote Permitting] We will onboard proposals that implement these capabilities and agree to proposals principles.
[Vote Permitting] We will coordinate design reviews.

Funds
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The nominal requested funds are to support teams and members in the working group with the following needs in the F4 Stage of this program:

Fund 4: Pricing
[Self-Funded][Done] Project Domain and Hosting (Approx $100/y)
[Self-Funded][In Progress] Development of Swarm Governance Training Program for 100 hours @ $20p/h ($4000)
[Self-Funded][In Progress] Project Tools for Teams (x1) with Members (x1) each for a total of 3 seats. ($350 / 2yrs)
[Vote Permitting] Project Tools for Teams (x5) with Members (x5) each for a total of 25 Licences. ($2500 / 2yrs)
[Vote Permitting] Proposal Support (Advise, Peer-Review, User Stories, Integration Support) for 100 hours @ $20p/h ($4000)
[Vote Permitting] Project Integration Support (Advise, Peer-Review, Integration Support) for 100 hours @ $20p/h ($4000)

Monetisation

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We have holdings in ADA in order to vote.

We do not wish to monetise the work involved in the project.

Unless funded or contributed from our side, all other funding provided will be strictly used to cover time and project resources.

Components

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A few of the main components of governance include:

• A opt-in values and principles alignment system.
• A system to promote awareness, emotion and empathy through conversational design (@nielskijf).
• A system of working groups centred around communities of interest that can represent minority/unrecognised groups.
• A system of collective idea and strategy generation and prioritisation (@kenricnelson).
• A process to responsively and scalably curate, moderate and debias ideas, proposals, projects and policy.
• A process for reward sharing with the community to increase engagement and efficiency of the system.
• A process for feedback sharing within the community to increase trust and efficiency of the system.
• A system to develop deep insight sharing and drive informed voting that includes
• A place for creative arts and persuasive communication
• A place for data driven analysis on the basis of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
• A federated debate system that provides timely and tangible policy outcomes (@calliefionaburrito)
• A sentiment market for making that rewards those who get predictions correct.

Cardano Integration

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We aim to platform the above workflow on the Cardano stack to leverage recent technical achievements:

• Integration into Voltaire based voting.
• A policy / project generation system integrated with the existing Cardano Treasury model.
• An integrated rewards structure introducing concepts such as Proposals NFTs and Network Trust tokens.
• A Prediction Market for Sentiment, Delegation of Vote.
• Implicit rewards and simulation to promote contribution, engagement and accurate crowd-sourced analysis.
• An approach to generating data-driven policy justification integrating smart contracts and oracles.

Benefits:
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The program will offer the following benefits to the Catalyst community:

• Training program for complexities of governance design.
• Vetting program to support team in conforming to proposal requirements.
• Advisory on collaborating projects to assist members to vote.
• Advisory on collaborating proposals
• Support tools to platform these projects and get them started.
• Subdomain and limited hosting.

Scope:
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We are confident all community contributions to F4 of merit will be invited.
Where its not possible to incorporate these ideas, we will frame further questions to the community for discussion.
If the questions are adequately-substantiated the cooperating development group will include them in the overall design.

Summary:**--------------

We believe the key to Cardano's long term success is the effective generation and selection of targets, policy and value creating projects.

To be able to generate consensus most reliably, *we need to unite in a value around objective truth.*
To this extent we need to focus on creating a community of interest that can peer-review each other around swarm intelligence. Specifically, on-boarding, supporting project members and integrating to projects with philosophies compatible with this program.In later stages we aim to build a reference design for our end state that incorporates community suggestions and creates a frame for further discussion and contribution.

Vote:
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Cardano is founded on equity, dignity and opportunity.
In this process we need to intelligently and emotionally design to ensure against the effects of individual human bias. We do this through implementing a cohesive solution architecture. These requirements are critical to the security of the governance, generation of effective policy and productivity, growth.

TLDR;
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Every time a cryptocurrency forks a community fractures around a set of principles. That hurts the network capability and slows the network effect.

We'll put proposals that work together, together so that the Cardano community can improve the probability of getting a holistic solution to governance.

Our Friends:

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Voltaire Assistant (Co-creation)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Voltaire-Assistant-Co-creation/340811-48088

Diversify Voting Influence

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Diversify-Voting-Influence/340657-48088

Meta-Memory (Formerly Federated. Debate)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Meta-Memory-Fmrly-Fed-Debate/340284-48088

These are great projects!

Even if you don't choose to support us, please support them.