Digital Elections & Private Voting Workshop
This is the 2nd part of our Digital Democracy Day. Closed event for opinion leaders, decision makers and experts on democracy and blockchain.
Introduction
Rise of political extremism and isolationism, foreign interference in democratic processes, lack of active participation and low election turnouts show that modern democracy is far from perfect or secure.
As seen, journalism and media play a vital role in sustaining a functional and pluralistic democracy. However, important information is often powerless when it comes face to face with slow democratic processes.
This is why it’s important to test new ways of doing democracy. By trying different models in smaller constituencies or limited to narrow scope of decision making, we can learn valuable lessons. Knowledge and experience gained through these can lead to important improvements to democracy as a whole.
In 2014 in its whitepaper, Ethereum promised the possibility of DAOs and Liquid democracy. In 2024. DAOs are everywhere. From smallest, ran on multisigs to the biggest ones managing billions of dollars of value through amalgam of liquid democracy, bicameralism and even forking.
In this series of sessions, we will explore possibilities of conducting small scale democratic experiments for improving participation and decision making on local level. By learning about what is possible to do with Ethereum, we will try to design such experiments and prepare them for implementation by the local government.
Schedule
13:00 - Intro & Getting to Know Each Other, Circle (25 min)
13:25 - Presentation: "State of Private Voting" by Sam Richards, MACI (20 min)
Sam will present different tools for private voting and how MACI compares to them.
MACI was originally proposed by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum. It is imagined as a solution for improving privacy and integrity in decentralized voting.
13:55 - Presentation: “DAO governance models” by Doo Wan Nam, StableLab & MakerDAO (20 min)
StableLab is a leading participant in governance of dozens of DAOs, either as a delegate or working group member. Doo will present how different DAOs conduct governance, including voting on proposals and elections.
14:15 - Break, coffee and snacks (15 min)
14:30 - Workshop: "Digital Elections and Private Voting" (90 min)
In groups, participants will brainstorm ideas for digital elections which will implement private voting, liquid democracy principles and governance on Ethereum.
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