Getting Started with Democracy Earth

  Tools :   Ressources :     FAQ  

Who we are?

 

Democracy Earth is foundation based in San Francisco. That is backed by Y Combinator and Fast Forward.

 

We are a distributed team :

  • Santiago Siri who did the code base of Sovereign for the first release is based in San Francisco

  • Mair in charge of organizing communities and who lead the Colombian Digital Referendum lives in Buenos Aires,

  • Virgile in charge of European region and product devolpment is based in Paris

  • Louis in charge of conceptual blockchain aspect and constitutional law is also in Paris

  • And Cyprian who has contributed with design thinking is in Mexico

 

What do we do?

 

We develop an incorruptible governance tech for small and large communities.

We released our first software “Sovereign” last week with a first simple version with the following features :

  • Liquid democracy toolkit:

    • Voting & delegation of votes.

    • Ballots with multiple options.

    • Bottom-up system of proposals.

  • Transaction engine based on voting tokens (currently blockchain agnostic).

  • Mobile & desktop responsive UX.

   

What is our vision?

 

Nation state has become obsolete in the network society we live in. They are unable to tackle the network challenges we have to face (climate change, migrations) because they don’t operate at the right scale of governance. We think that the right scale is the Internet itself. At democracy earth we want to provide communities of any kind the mean to define their own shared sovereignty.

 

Why do you try to implement Blockchain?

 

In order for people to decide on meaningful topics on digital tools they must be 100% certain that votes and data cannot be corrupted or manipulated in any way and have to be able to verify that. We find that the only way to guarantee that is to register every transaction that happens on the app on the Bitcoin blockchain.

   

For geeks, for that we use 21.co micropayment system. You’ll find documentation and our API here : https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/micropayment

 

Imagen eliminada.

     

What are we going to accomplish at Medialab? (has to defined together but here is a first proposition draft)

 

Team:

 

Virgile - coordinator - vir@democracy.earth / +33 7 81 73 48 75

Mair - communities / political science - mair@democracy.earth

Rox - design thinking and communication: roxdelafuente@gmail.com +52(1)5542925860

Angeliki - system thinking and UX - angeliki.angeletou@gmail.com +43 6605797038

Juan Felipe - Script writing and political science -  jfsuareza22@gmail.com +34632440880

Claudia - designer and artist / interactive settings  - claudiaoliveira@protonmail.com +351 916945574
Vicente - developer (mentor) -

Lucas - developer (remote) -

Osiel - (remote)

Santi - developer (remote) - santi@democracy.earth

Mia - PHD student - political scientist: ambhaberer@gmail.com; 004915150643738

Luana Marinho - critical thinker - luana.marinho@gmail.com; +556199621730

   

1 st week

Technical kick-off :

  • Install test serveur (Vir + Vicente)

  • Bug reporting (Anyone volonteer) and solving (Vir + Vicente + Lucas)

  • Architecture study (Vicente + Vir)

 

Kick-off workshops :

  • Idea / Vision / Implementation

    • End of nation state ?

    • Shared sovereignty ?

    • Liquid vs delegative democracy ?

    • Incorruptible governance ?

  • Field of intervention and setting priorities (= choosing)

    • Art

    • Theory

    • System design

    • Technical

  • Action plan and task repartition

Virgile’s proposals

  • Bitcoin blockchain transaction writing with 21.co

    • Create hooks, endpoint on meteor app

    • Rework 21 python API

  • “Setup your collective wizard”

    • UX : user stories (define variables users will be able to play with), wireframes, mockups

    • Technical implementation

  • Analyse current implementation of liquid democracy feature

    • Identify pitfalls

      • One of the most critical reflexion we must undertake is about multiple vote ballots and vote allocation to users

        • Per default every user of the collective begins with a 100 votes. When all used the only way he can have new votes is receiving delegations. New votes allocations are not implemented for now and how they will be made can have huge implication (new propositions = new votes, new votes are allocated every month/week/month, etc.)

    • Propose improvements

      • UX : user stories (define variables users will be able to play with), wireframes, mockups

      • Technical implementation

  • Governance design

    • Identify variables a collective can play with when drafting governance rules (define majority, define quorum, how long a topic must remain open, how many people have to participate in the drafting etc…)

    • Try to draft a few general governance models (hard majority vs soft majority, European Union unanimity vs Presidential election majority)

    • Use work as input for “Setup your collective wizard”

    • Technical implementation

Talked in first meetings

  • Artistic setting on Democracy Earth key ideas (Shared Sovereignty, end of nation state, incorruptible governance)

  • Visual essay

  • Participatory budgeting

  • Pilot program (Mair)

    • How to design them?

    • How to autonimize voluntaries?

  • Manuel de estilo grafico

    • Colores

    • Fuentes

Bonus

  • Electron Desktop app

  • Blockstack, decentralized ID on the blockchain

  • Full Bitcoin node on raspberry pi with Bcoin

Tipo de post
Blog
Fecha de publicación
22/11/2016
Autor
Virgile-Deville