The Future of Democracy

Governance is failing humanity, but there exists the potential to overcome the world's greatest challenges through digital disruption.

A truly collaborative digital democracy ecosystem that's easy to participate in and generates the best solutions for all involved.

Number of projects and initiatives engaged and participating in co-design.

Number and size of partner organisations onboarded into platform trials.

Number of active users brought onto platform trials.

Expected transactions generated by platform integration.

Diversity of nationalities and cultures of groups involved.

Back Ground

The time is now for an integrated platform that lays the ground for the future of a decentralised digital democracy, effectively augmenting our collective intelligence.

The aim of this challenge fund is to empower collaborative projects, initiatives and organisations such as DAOs, not-for-profits, cooperatives, mutual societies, community associations, and campaign and advocacy groups with the tools they need to achieve their goals through a unified portal.

By providing democratically minded individuals with a comprehensive suite of problem solving, solution forming, policy planning, decision-making and financial tools through just one interface, common aims can be better realised collectively.

Through integrating the best open source and distributed apps currently available into a one platform solution with a single sign on, democratic processes can be run as a cohesive whole instead of fragmented disconnected parts.

The goal is to onboard a diversity of grass-roots democratic organisations across multiple sectors and communities, growing users organically through a focus on common causes that transcend jurisdictions. Think globally; act locally.

When the platform is fully functional and a critical mass of users is reached, the intention would be to switch to targeted engagement with existing local government policy processes and electoral systems, building up from there to regional and then national level, fostering voting public understanding and trust along the way.

The long-term strategy is to allow communities to self-organise without explicitly needing representatives, and to stand independent candidates elected to act on the collective “will of the people” until governance systems can be reformed into a coordinated, distributed democracy.

This is the seed for a parallel system of democracy that seeks to shift the status quo and bring about a reformation of democratic governance into one that is digitally driven, deliberative, decentralised and fit for the 21st Century.

F8 Challenge setting voters and proposers should recognise that globally there are over 10 million not-for-profits, 3 million co-operatives, plus many millions more unincorporated groups, clubs and associations worldwide that use democratic processes to manage trillions in transactions and assets:

https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/facts-and-figures

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/02/03/2168791/28124/en/Global-NGOs-and-Charitable-Organizations-Market-Report-2020-Market-is-Expected-to-Decline-from-255-705-9-Million-in-2019-to-253-336-3-Million-in-2020-Forecast-to-2030.html

The Challenge Brief

There are currently no integrated toolkits that allow democratic organisations to function via a single sign on. While the enterprise and small business market demands are partially fulfilled by many vendors with scalable solutions, the not-for-profit sector, community groups and civil society organisations have to make do with stitching together various open source tools and paid software to try to achieve their organisational goals.

None of these tools make it easy for members of these organisations to collaborate and make good decisions, or provide visibility and accountability over their finances to members and stakeholders.

This Challenge proposal aims to establish the ground work to build this needed platform. The diagram of system components attached to the challenge brief isn't meant to be a final design, just a pastiche to show the complexity of what could be included as the ecosystem evolves.

Given the nature of creating complex ecosystems on limited budgets that not-for-profits need to run, we have really decided to emphasise "Challenge" as explained in the following 3 requirements:

Requirement 1 - Integration Work

There are 3 integration components that should be included in proposals submitted to this fund:

1) A democratic component that involves the use of the Cardano blockchain.

This could be a dApp or app focused on voting mechanisms, ideation facilitation, consensus-building processes or tokenomics frameworks for rewards schemes, participatory budget tracking and accountability etc. However, the key requirement is that it must make use of the Cardano blockchain to be eligible.

2) Integration of at least one more democracy related app produced by a different proposal team or vendor.

The second app could be another Cardano based dApp but there should be flexibility in this to encourage collaboration across projects and find out what difficulties exist when trying to integrate apps from different suppliers and technologies other than Cardano.

The integration should see the 2 apps share data or workload to implement a solution.

Examples would be an ideation tool passing data to a voting system, a voting system passing the result to a payments system, an identity management system passing registered voters to the voting system, a DAO builder that verifies participation via an electoral register lookup, an AGM tool that can display the proposals via a video conference and allow votes to be collected in real time and so on. Limitless options!

3) Use of a single sign on to allow users to access features in both apps.

There should be no need to hold multiple passwords or to login to different apps. It might be obvious where the boundary of a system is due to interface changes, but it should work as seamlessly as using a single app.

Stretch goals to stand out and impress voters:

1) Make use of Atala Prism as part of the single sign-on solution to handle user credentials.

1a) Allow place based participation credentials for non-governmental organisations.

1b) Support electoral constituency credentials for government institutions or organisations related to government administration areas.

2) Formally collaborate and pair up with other proposal submitters to extend the range of applications that are integrated rather than duplicating applications. The perfect results would be 4 or more proposal teams delivering a suite of 8+ applications using 1 single sign on solution.

3) Use of distributed storage and compute for hosting apps such as internetcomputer.org, IPFS, nunet.io, threefold.io etc. (There is an F8 proposal for a Cardano Decentralised Storage solution).

Requirement 2 - Community Onboarding

There have been many attempts at digital democracy apps in the past but none has really managed to inspire the population at large and gained significant use.

Proposers should bring in at least 2 distinct organisations as test participants. This is to ensure the integrated tool set gets real world feed back as part of a Beta Test / User Acceptance Test. Each organisation could be a small not-for-profit, an online community such as Catalyst, or even a large cooperative if there's a valid use case for them.

Proposers can decide if they want to incentivise this participation by including in their proposal an ADA grant to not-for-profit organisations for use of their time. They should also ensure compliance with any local tax or crypto legislation.

Getting new democratically oriented organisations onboarded and versed in multi-signature wallet use and decentralised technology should be seen favourably by voters, so the size and reach of organisations should be assessed when voting on proposals.

Stretch goals:

1) Recruit partner organisations across multiple continents instead of 1 country to be able to test with groups from different cultures and languages.

2) Again formal collaboration and pairing up with other proposal submitters would allow a wider user community to be involved in evaluating the range of applications that are integrated.

Requirement 3 - Cost Constraints.

Instead of developing new apps and dApps this challenge is focused on integration by using existing solutions. To add a layer of difficulty the challenge fund budget will be limited to $150,000 and the maximum proposal size will be limited to $37,500 to get a minimum of 4 integrations. More if teams can keep costs lower.

Stretch Goal

The lower the proposal cost the more likely it will be accepted by the voting community as value for money does count. That said, do not sacrifice quality!

About Us

Panacea is an informal group of professionals collaborating together through common interests spanning emergent technology, new potentials for democracy, and new forms of decentralised organisational structure.

Our driving force is the recognition that current socioeconomic, political and financial institutions adhere to forms of governance that are no longer fit for purpose and do not represent the best interests of the vast majority of people. Instead, they are used to wield power, exert control and concentrate wealth in the vested interest of the privileged few.

We have developed an approach that could stimulate the grass roots adoption of distributed governance tools and processes, which when integrated effectively with decentralised finance could eventually replace the established order with one designed to encourage cooperation and collaboration instead of competition and domination.

The challenge fund size is purposely kept small to produce a limited number of prototypes in F9 with further proposals planned for F10.