Empowering decentralized collaboration and decision making

Our society is facing the negative effects of Social Media as well as the erosion of Democracy and civic institutions. While everything is divisive and political, people feel like they can't have an impact on their society and have tuned out. This leads to social unrest, but also to a societal drift towards decentralization.

What if we empowered bottom up decision making and participation by providing a platform that enables communities to collaborate, vote and fund initiatives.

This platform provides flexible collaboration models in order to support various types of communities: From self organizing digital communities and companies to civic institutions and government. Let's bring democracy digital and create Civic Engagement for the 21st Century!

 
 
 

My role

Creator

 
 

The Problem

 

Social Media is broken

Business models of social media companies is to extract value out of users. Users don’t own their profile and their engagement doesn’t necessarly create value for themselves. It’s a passive relationship.

 

Institutions are eroding

Citizens have tuned out because they barely participate in the democratic process. They vote for a representative every other year and after that it’s the special interest groups that are calling the shots.

 

Decentralization is a driving force

Web 3.0 enables users to take ownership in their data and extract value out of applications but current applications are focussed on SW developers and are lacking user experience.

Let’s create a product that…

  • Provides more meaningful engagement

  • Decentralizes the decision making process

  • Optimizes resource allocation

 Concept Overview

The application structures around communities in which members can collaborate on initiatives. A community typically has a set of goals and wants to engage its members to work towards those goals. The way to organize the community’s work is through initiatives, which are proposals to take action on specific topics. The community can propose new initiatives, up/downvote and even fund initiatives so that the most popular initiatives can become the focus of the community and be implemented. Its members can actively work on the implementation of the initiatives which gives them the chance to earn money but more generally gain a reputation within the community.

The initiative based model allows community to focus on action and lets its members be a key piece in the decision making process. Ultimately, a community that successfully implements the right initiatives can become more valuable and share its success with its members.

Community Structure

 

 Customers

Target segments

 

 Example: Political Movement

 

Roadmap

Implementation

 I’m currently working on developing an MVP of the application with the following features: Basic lauyout navigation between communities and groups, Create and manage initiatives, vote on initiatives and user authentication. I’m using MongoDB as the database, Node / Express.js for the backend and React/Redux for the frontend. You can view the current state here:

https://github.com/elgrimpo/VotingReact