When People are excluded from the decision making process their chances to improve their live are very low. Creating a governance systems that are transparent, open and inclusive can pave a pass towards improvements in many aspects of life.

Institutional corruption can be reduced by implementing and practicing public participation in decision making processes. To do that in large scale we need decentralized tools that will be efficient, secure, user friendly and trustworthy.

Our Solution

Consenz is a tool that open a way to address large crowds, get their advice, and listen to their ideas without being overwhelmed with noise. It does this by focusing the discussion on one document that has been edited by all users, in a democratic manner. The users can vote for alternative text suggestions, comment on them, and publish suggestions of their own. The process is based on an automatic algorithm that calculates the level of consensus that the document as a whole achieved during the discussion.

Consenz is designed to

Increase democratic values in the daily work of the political system and other organizations
Amplify the voice of communities from different socioeconomic backgrounds in policy shaping that impacts their life
Give a powerful collaborative tool to civic society organizations

Consenz has been used in public participation processes by municipalities and NGOs in Israel, and by doing so helped to create the processes of decision making to be more efficient, more transparent, while widening the circle of citizens that choose to take part in them.

Our solution offers a simple and intuitive application that gives users a new way to express their views on matters that impact their lives, and gives policy shaping institutions a new way to hear the public and respond to them.

The Project Status

Since 2018 we have been building a prototype of Consenz (until lately it was available only in Hebrew) and in 2020-2021 we have completed a proof-of-concept phase. The app prototype has been used by diverse groups for different purposes in Israel, among them:

Schools' teams used Consenz to create teaching guidelines during the covid19 restrictions.
Unorganized protest movements used Consenz to create demands lists.
Environmental organizations and activists used it to collaborate with government and municipality workers to create plans for dealing with the climate crisis.

Many poor nations tend to suffer from governmental corruption. Democratize decision making in those countries from the top (current government institutes) down is almost impossible because of inherent corruption in those institutes.

By providing a bottom-up solution for decision making for communities and local level agencies we can contribute to encourage a new culture of managing the common goods that may, eventually, create a long term impact on the national level.

More on the connection between corruption and poverty see:

Negin, Vahideh and Abd Rashid, Zakariah and Nikopour, Hesam (2010): The Causal Relationship between Corruption and Poverty: A Panel Data Analysis
Ina Purwantini Rahayu, Tri Widodo (2012): THE CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CORRUPTION AND POVERTY IN ASEAN: A GENERAL METHOD OF MOMENTS/ DYNAMIC PANEL DATA ANALYSIS

Opening the process of decision making may be vulnerable to trolling, bots using and other harmful activities.

We plan to mitigate this risk by creating a community driven moderation system that will encourage trustworthy participants to identify and report those bad actors without using centralized censorship.

[FEASIBILITY]

In order to provide this tool for the use of communities and governmental agencies such as municipalities and other of the purpose of public participation in decision making, we plan to:

Reach out for officials and public service workers and get them to use our tool for better engagement with the public they represent
Involve NGOs and social movements that need better ways to communicate with the public and with the decision makers
Enable support of different languages in the platform

Cost breakdown:

Build a landing page and web site that will address the relevant audience: 1,600 USD
Create videos to explain the needs that consenz answer and how it does it: 1,800 USD
Adjust the platform for different languages and translation: 7,000 USD
Design and Implement necessary improvements at the UI/UX: 12,000 USD
Manage content - 6,000 USD

Total: 28,400 USD

The Team:

Consenz is partner of ADAgov.org, Software Development Cooperative. Funded F3, F4, F5.

http://adagov.org

Consenz founder and project manager: Aharon Porath, a techno-social entrepreneur. Since 2011, Aharon has been involved in a few tech and non-tech ventures to develop consensus-based decision-making methods and platforms for distributed public participation goals.

Aharon has 6 years of experience as a project manager of web platforms and apps, among them - "Open Committee", a web app that enables environmental activists, NGOs and citizens to participate in the decision-making process of Israel's planning department, funded by the government's Israel Innovation Authority.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aharon-porath-90158962

Social UX Advisor: Niels Kijf. Niels (Master Digital Media Design, Oxford) is a digital design innovator pur sang . He started the Social Design Academy to deliver UX 3.0 education. Our current software design is still targeting the individual, yet web3 is designing shared experiences for groups, a fresh new field that needs a new educational program. Levelling up UX into Social UX is one of the SDA missions for 2022.

https://socialdesignacademy.io

Design and Development: Sofi is a software cooperative that provides solutions for municipalities, universities, startups, well-established companies, entrepreneurs and NGOs.

The coop model relies on decentralized, consensus-based decision making, as well as total influence and wage equality for all present and future members.

https://www.soficoop.com

Product Manager: Roy Golan. Sofi Coop co-founder. Civic participation & collaboration tools enthusiast since 2012.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-golan-490069a2

Community Manager & Business Development: Ofry Erlich. Sofi's business development director. Political activist with exepertise in political parties campaigns & internal processes.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ofry-ehrlich-470862119

UI/UX Designer: Tzur Sherzer. After managing a big design department, Tzur has joined the team as a lead designer, and is dedicated to the challenge of making the advanced deliberative democratic discussion interface accessible for people from all communities and backgrounds.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tzursher

Software Architects and Developers: Aviran Katz, Nadav Moreno*.* With vast experience from dosens of projects, Aviran and Nadav will be leading the development team, with the backup of the entire Sofi development department, as well as external developers.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aviran-katz-491163b3

[AUDITABILITY]

KPI:

Our main goal is to provide Consenz to the small governmental agencies around the world. We have already been contacted from some potential costumers as Tel Aviv municipality , , and we hope to start onboarding them as soon as we finish developing and testing the MVP version of Consenz.

Success metrics will includes number of agencies using Consenz platform, and number of active users registered and returning.

At least 3 paying agencies/customers
With > 1,000 active user

Targets for 6 months after MVP lunch:

At least 10 paying agencies/customer
With > 5,000 active users

Success of this project will be that consenz platform will become the standard tool for drafting and creating agreements by communities, municipalities and government agencies.

Fund 6: "Consenz: A Virtual Parliament App" - not funded.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/367771

Fund 7: "₳GOV: Policy Registry" - not funded.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/380928

Fund 7: "₳GOV: Agreements Building Platform" - funded.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/380926

This is a resubmission of our F7 proposal for the Nation Building dApps challenge.

Other consenz Fund8 proposals:

For Accelerate Decentralized Identity challenge: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/396670
For Lobbying for favorable legislation challenge: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/397877
For Community Advisor Improvements challenge: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/397872

SDG Rating

SDG goals:

Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

SDG subgoals:

11.3 By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries

16.3 Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all

16.6 Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels

16.7 Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels

17.16 Enhance the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in all countries, in particular developing countries

17.17 Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

11.3.2 Proportion of cities with a direct participation structure of civil society in urban planning and management that operate regularly and democratically

16.3.3 Proportion of the population who have experienced a dispute in the past two years and who accessed a formal or informal dispute resolution mechanism, by type of mechanism

16.6.2 Proportion of population satisfied with their last experience of public services

16.7.1 Proportions of positions in national and local institutions, including (a) the legislatures; (b) the public service; and (c) the judiciary, compared to national distributions, by sex, age, persons with disabilities and population groups

16.7.2 Proportion of population who believe decision-making is inclusive and responsive, by sex, age, disability and population group

17.16.1 Number of countries reporting progress in multi-stakeholder development effectiveness monitoring frameworks that support the achievement of the sustainable development goals

17.17.1 Amount in United States dollars committed to public-private partnerships for infrastructure

Monthly report

March 16, 2023 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Summary

Over the last few weeks we were focusing on the launch of the MVP version of the Consenz platform, as part of our fund7 proposal - "Agreement building platform". Now that the platform is ready for use, our efforts are going towered onboarding users and costumers of different use cases. As this proposal is focused on providing the Consenz platform for the use of different organisations for public participation in decision making, we have start working on uploading agreement documents for the needs of the Israeli public (our home country), and specifically for the movement that is protesting against new legislation that will harm democracy. By that we will show how distributed communication technologies that are based on Cardano can help better governmental actions, while engaging with the public.

Evidence

https://app.consenz.io/legal-reform/active-agreements

Explanation

The link is for a dedicated group page on the consenz platform for the use of the Israeli audience for a discussion and agreement creation process for future legislation proposals. It is in Hebrew, but you can use google translate or other translation tools to read it content.

December 18, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Evidence

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1f7Gi7eErCZKfVSeS00f8Bak_1eXbjo6Q https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ICjCXMjh4Hc4_UOGKL3Iz57Lo3tOQvGO

Summary

The aim of this proposal is to provide the consenz - agreement building platform for the use of promoting public participation in decision making processes of governmental and municipal agencies. As we getting closer to launch the consenz app MVP, we have increased our marketing efforts by reaching out to relevant organisation and agencies to expose them to the capabilities of the consenz platform and its potential contribution to prompting public participation in decision making. As part of this effort we have met with a big NGO that works with the Israeli governmental social services on community building in 16 municipalities. By providing consenz to this organisation we will demonstrate how we can use blockchain based technology for engaging with public. We are in touch with other local and national agencies from other countries, and we will update on this progress as well.

December 18, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Evidence

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19tfX6o_PeuusvDHOtfs6GVn5wYkBRWBc https://drive.google.com/open?id=1StNyPr8nu7Y9AFZLyhVwiyKhvlXY8nSz

Summary

November 23, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Summary

This proposal is been developed alongside the consenz F7 proposal (700003). As we are adding new features and funcunalty to the consenz web app we are using the funding from this proposal to build support for different languages for it to be useful in different national states around the world, beginning in our home state - Israel. For that we are translating the consenz UI to both Hebrew and Arabic, and this translation infrastructure will be available for other languages as well. Hebrew and Arabic can be challenging from the UI design and development, because those languages text direction is going from right to left, unlike Latin languages that goes left to right.

Evidence

https://github.com/consenz-io/webapp/blob/main/frontend/src/strings/he.ts

Explanation

The link is to the UI strings translation file to Hebrew on the consenz github repository. We have used this file as evidence before, but you can compere it to previews versions in order to see that over the last month we have continue to add, change and improve it alongside the development of the consenz app UI.

October 23, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Evidence

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zc1zDJ5CLS24FpMObE4lL4IoPvTlZb9_

Summary

During the last month, alongside the progress of the platform UI development (as described on our 700003 proposal monthly report) we have been adjusting the platform for support in different languages and added a translation of the UI to Arabic. This required also enabling Right to Left text feature, that now is available in all of the platform pages, and will be implemented on future pages and features as well.

September 22, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Summary

This proposal completion is depended on launching an MVP version of the platform, that is planned for the next few months. In the meanwhile, we have continue working on a languages support of consenz website and the platform, for it to be useful in different countries beside English speaking ones. While our dev team is working on the platform MVP version, we are about to update the project website so it will be more fit to potential users of the governmental sector. For that we have added a new page for the site that addresses the issue of public participation by governmental agencies.

Evidence

https://next.consenz.io/organizations/

Explanation

The link is for the new page of our new web site that addresses the issue of public participation by governmental agencies.

August 21, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

Summary

This proposal is for providing the consenz platform for the use of public participation in decision making by governmental agencies. Our first funded proposal was for creating consenz for use of DAOs, the funding of this proposal is used for adjusting the project for the use of centralized organisations (including governmental agencies) as well.

Evidence

https://next.consenz.io/

Explanation

In the link you can see the next version of the consenz website. We have designed it to addresses traditional organization and agencies as well as DAOs. We have improved the graphic design and added pages that is more suitable for this potential users. Later, as we will launch the MVP version, we will add more features that are needed for this use case.

July 21, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: -

June 23, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: 03/31/2023

Evidence

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11M6k2mYWlKvSUgwirRNVkuTtO4ks3DXs https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AKywvhxERxVNEeoyFMeXBR-m0hBzMZTg

Summary

For this proposal we start creating framework for translating consenz platform for it to be used in different countries, and designing more pages to our web site for this new potential audience. You can track our progress using github - https://github.com/consenz-io/webapp/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+sort%3Aupdated-desc and dework - https://app.dework.xyz/consenz-1/board

May 22, 2022 Progress report

Status:

On track: No

Estimated completion date: 12/31/2022

Team

10 years of working with governmental officials and municipalities to build and promote apps for public participation in decision making

Aharon Porath

Website

https://github.com/wonderfloyd/Consenz/

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