Citizen Assemblies

A platform inspired by citizen assemblies that empowers and incentivises citizens to have AI-facilitated deliberations and reach consensus

G Zarkadakis (CEO) has PhD in AI and is the author of "Cyber Republic" (MIT Press) that proposes citizen assemblies to empower communities. A Alm (CTO) is an experienced web3 developer. L Romero is a blockchain GovTech expert. D Lazarou and M Nikoloudaki are AI experts.

[IMPACT]

Multi-stakeholder organisations such as representative democracies, local authorities, smart cities, NGOs, cooperatives, associations, 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 method for a well-structured and facilitated discussion 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 highly-polarised issues.

Our solution ("Voxiberate") is to provide 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 AI to enable the fair selection of a citizen group; aggregate citizen dialogues and analyse deliberations; an AI-powered learning module to solve for knowledge and information asymmetry at citizen level; an incentivisation mechanism based on a platform-native utility token; and an innovative algorithm for nudging citizen deliberations away from polarised opinion and towards consensus.

We see our product being used by DAOs in order to enhance member experience and participation, and to replace current means of member deliberation that are not fit-for-purpose and require a lot of manual work to aggregate and analyse members' views and opinions.

More generally, we see Voxiberate being a valuable tool in agile corporate governance too; whereby all stakeholders, including employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, local communities and others, collaborate in collective decision-making and in crowdsourcing ideas.

Our Proposal aligns with Cardano's social mission. Like Cardano, and its global community, we too want to make this world a better, kinder and more inclusive place, where everyone can have a stake - and a voice! - in shaping their destinies. At Voxiberate we believe that decentralization of the web brings enormous opportunities for communities across the world to self-organize and create new social and economic value. But for this vision to take place, and for Cardano to be adopted by the wider society, it is necessary to introduce concepts and practices from political science in the governance of blockchains. We think we can contribute towards this goal by developing a deliberation platform based on citizen assemblies.

This layer will be extremely useful to Cardano projects - and indeed to all DAOs - in scaling up and ensuring the trust of their communities, as we will provide a build-to-purpose system for member deliberations (instead of the currently available systems that are mere messaging services) 

Voxiberate will ultimately deploy a decentralized model of governance based on Cardano. More specifically, we will develop the following features on Cardano:

1. Voting process, as fraud-proof way of voting and/or a verifiable audit trail
2. Our VOX token, whereby citizens are rewarded for good civic behaviour
3. Login with wallet

With regards to the Nation Building Apps Challenge, our product aligns with the Challenge's goals because we will provide a very powerful tool to introduce 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 Nation Building Apps challenge, as we will build an application that enables nations, regions, and cities to set up citizen assemblies quickly, easily and at a very low cost.

More specifically, we align with the following KPIs of the Challenge:

• Proposers commercial approach and negotiation strategy with different Governments

• Participation of Cardano's Local Community Centers

• Participation and/or partnerships with other international organizations

• Number of countries covered, contracts signed

• Number of Dapp users, registry accounts, transaction volumes

• Proposers lead time on field research, 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 and conferences. We will engage with the wider Cardano community and will offer our product for pilot testing to community projects.

Our success depends on continuous experimentation with communities of users. As we are transforming political science methods into software tools we need to test our assumptions in an agile way. For this reason we will be applying a scrum methodology and organise our work in 2-weekly sprints. We will engage with users as early as possible, and for this we already have discussions with projects that are willing to work with us.

To be more specific, we are in active conversation with the City of Miami to help their City DAO make decisions on distributing funds acquired via the issuance of MiamiCoin by engaging directly with Miami residents and citizens. We are also in active conversations to acquire users and test our working prototype with South London Partnership, a sub-regional collaboration of five London boroughs, Croydon, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Richmond upon Thames and Sutton. We also exploring a pilot with a professional association.

We expect to engage with more people and projects within the Cardano community, particularly projects that have a DAO.

[FEASIBILITY]

Fast Prototyping - 3 months (6 sprints)

Deliverable: Basic functionality of Voxiberate that we can pilot test with a small group of participants. The functionality will include basic UI, onboarding users, an AI algorithm for selecting a representative group of citizens, voting, and basic AI facilitation for a citizen deliberation.

Budgeted "man-hours" for Fast Prototyping Phase: 816

Hourly Rate: $45

Labour Cost ($): 37,091

G&A (10%): 3,709

Total Cost ($): 40,800

Dr George Zarkadakis is Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Centre and the CEO of Voxiberate. He has >25 years’ experience in business consulting, media, marketing and communications; as well as in technology innovation as a founder, advisor, and investor in startups. He has held leadership positions at Accenture, Silicon Graphics, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and Willis Towers Watson. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from City University, and is the author of "In Our Own Image: will Artificial Intelligence Save Us or Destroy Us?” (Penguin 2015), and "Cyber Republic: reinventing democracy in the age of intelligent machines" (MIT Press 2020, with an introduction by Don Tapscott, author of “Blockchain Revolution”). He has been awarded a knighthood by France for his international work on the public understanding of science; is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; and a global thought leader on the future of work and democracy. He speaks English, French, and Greek.

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

Anders Alm has >20 years of experience as a software developer and entrepreneur, and is the CTO of Voxiberate. He is the founder of WAU I/O, a technology company that delivers customised web 3.0 and business software solutions to the international market, and an investor and Board member of e-sakafo, the leading food delivery service in Madagascar. Prior to that Anders has worked in various project management and product development roles with the Government of Norway, McAfee and Dell. He studied engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and is fluent in English, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.

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

Luiza Romero has a degree in Law. She has worked at EY for 11 years, in its global tax practice. In 2014 she became the driving force behind the design and implementation of six uniquely positioned tax data analytics solutions with a global scale, and worked with global innovation leaders on a variety of technology projects, mobile/web applications (TaxChat), AI and crypto (EY CryptoPrep). In 2018 she joined a blockchain startup as a product manager to help lead the financial audit and reporting industry transformation into its decentralized and real-time future. She is lecturer on blockchain at NYU. She speaks English and Portuguese.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/luiza-romero/

Dimitris Lazarou has an MSc in High Energy Physics from Florida State University, and a BSc in Software Engineering from Athens University. He has 8+ years of experience head of data science in successful startups such as Seez (second hand car marketplace in Middle East) and Careem (acquired by Uber for $3.1B in 2020). Prior to that he worked as quantitative analyst at Golden Water Capital (a hedge fund) and Signal Maritime. He is an expert in Machine Learning, Data Engineering and Data Warehousing. He speaks English and Greek.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitrios-lazarou-msc-378a0799/

Marion Nikoloudaki has a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Data Science from Athens University. She has 10+ years experience as a senior software engineer leading the development of complex CRM and gaming products. During the past two years she is a Board Advisor in Data Science and AI for a Pobuca, a UK startup specialising in Customer Experience, and Head of Data Science for SG-Digital, the online gaming and sports betting division of Scientific Games Corp. She speaks English, French, Greek, and Dutch.

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

[AUDITABILITY]

-Bitbucket commits

-Pilot testing report (published on Medium): it will include key metrics that we will test and results

• Final report (published on Medium): it will include description of features and functionality that we built

A prototype that can be pilot tested by a small community. We will set up a representative "citizen assembly" and will test the facilitated deliberation of a proposal. The Critical Success Factors that we will measure are:

1. Successfully reproducing the citizen assembly approach from the physical to the digital
2. Selecting a representative group of citizens from a wider group in a way that genuinely reflect the wider group's diversity
3. Successfully achieve broad consensus in the assembly on the issue under deliberation
4. Assess user experience and identify areas for further improvement and development

New project

SDG Rating

SDG goals:

Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere

Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries

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

Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

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:

1.4 By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology and financial services, including microfinance

1.b Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions

11.b By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, holistic disaster risk management 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

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

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