voting matters

Author: santisiri

README.mediawiki

@@ -143,19 +143,26 @@ Offline techniques such as ''adversarial counting'' are used in traditional elec
 
 Centralization of resources is the single point of failure in elections and is incompatible with democracy. Blockchains increase the defense of voting systems by enabling a shared resource that has scorekeeping as its main function while avoiding the need for central authority. This permits unprecedented designs of electoral systems: with a blockchain-based democracy every single voter can audit the votes without requiring any kind of access rights to specific infrastructure. By storing vote data in a blockchain rather than in private servers or ballot boxes, audit costs become abstracted and are turned into a guaranteed right for every actor. Voters are not just mere participants but also sovereign gatekeepers of the whole process. Every single one of them. This kind of transparency cannot be delivered by traditional electoral systems, analog or electronic.
 
-===3.2 Token.===
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+===3.2 Sovereign.===
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+The blockchain backend of [http://sovereign.software Sovereign] consists of a set of smart contracts that build the basic components for the governance of a decentralized organization. We intend this design to be as lightweight as possible and easy to implement on any programming language. This set of components help establish the boundaries of a decision processing machine enabling any organization become accountable to its members (and if public, to everyone).
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+Corporations and public institutions are prone to corrupt behaviour because decisions often happen in secrecy behind closed doors. When problems arise, ''decision laundering'' is a common practice aiming to accommodate causing facts after the consequences. Digital organizations that operate with distributed teams, using virtual environments, contributing ideas with open source methods have the advangtage of documenting their work throughout their whole process. In this sense, the open source movement has innovated on how can large groups can collaborate online but often relied on the voluntary contributions from those who support a project and lacked the means to reward efforts. In open source governance is still in feudal times, dependant on a ''benevolent dictator'' able to call the shots and allocate resources. With Sovereign we are aiming to provide the missing component by presenting a lightweight governance framework that permits all stakeholders of an organization participate in the decision process and enforce these through the use of smart contracts using cryptocurrency.
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+Previous attempts at building decentralized organizations have been attempted in the past. ''Distributed Autonomous Organizations'' (or ''DAOs'') aim to be blockchain entities constructed with smart contracts that entirely automate decision processes and aim to run without any kind of human oversight. The code itself is meant to be the ultimate arbiter, hence this organizations claim that ''code is law'' and can independently run on blockchains. But experience has taught that also ''bugs are law'': when German company [http://slock.it Slock.it] implemented the largest crowdfunded DAO in 2016 able to raise over USD 100 million, immediately after going live a hacker exploited the code taking advantage of a security hole in the smart contract of the DAO triggering a recursive call that sucked USD 55 million worth of ether out of the smart contract address controlling all funds. We believe there is a clear lesson to be learnt from this (and other experience in crypto) and it's the fact that the need for governance cannot be abstracted.
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+Voting matters: the neural networks carrying the accumulated experience of a lifetime each human carries in his or her own head is a fundamental resource for savvy decision making. DAO driven entities is surrendering the political frontier entirely to machines and it can become a risky path: financial markets already deal with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_crash flash crashes] and erratic behaviour from trading bots; Bitcoin's ongoing scaling debate between those who build its software and those who provide mining hardware suffers from the lack of a clear protocol for decision making. The vote is a fundamental instrument for collective decision processes that can help an organization move forward and brings highly qualified intelligence readily available on nature to participate on decisions that ultimately affect their interests. For this purpose we believe its fundamental to model a standard voting token that can operate with any blockchain based system.
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+===3.3 Token.===
 
 What differentiates a vote from money (or in broader terms: a ''political economy'' from a ''financial economy'') is that political currency is designed to guarantee participating rights under fair conditions to all members within an organization. Hence rather than a ''coin offering'' we will model our token allocation process as a ''rights offering''.
 
 Rights are not driven simply by holder self-interest but rather aim to satisfy overall legitimacy in the governance of an institution. A token granting participation rights has voting as its main function hence we will brand our token simply as VOTE. The VOTE token can be implemented using smart contract code across a variety of blockchains that permit [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness Turing Complete] scripts. Our design is blockchain agnostic in recognition of a computer science field still in its infancy where significant innovations remain to be detected. Nonetheless  we will develop and implement the first version of the VOTE token using [http://ethereum.org Ethereum] and take necessary steps to make our code compatible with emergent environments such as [http://www.rsk.co/ Rootstock's smart contract interpreter for the Bitcoin blockchain].
 
 In terms of UX, we have created [http://sovereign.software Sovereign]: a web and mobile application that is able to operate with blockchain voting tokens. It has been developed using [http://nodejs.org Node.js] considering javascript a language able to run on any kind of computing machine and with the greatest support from the open source community. We will use the framework provided by this development to help describe how VOTE tokens can help communities be governed.
 
-===3.3 Sovereign.===
-
-The blockchain backend of [http://sovereign.software Sovereign] consists of a set of smart contracts that build the basic components for the governance of a decentralized organization. We intend this design to be as lightweight as possible and easy to implement on any programming language. This set of components help establish the boundaries of a decision processing machine enabling any organization using these to become accountable to its members (and if public, to everyone).
-
-Corporations and public institutions are prone to corrupt behaviour because decisions often happen in secrecy behind closed doors. When problems arise, ''decision laundering'' is a common practice aiming to accommodate facts after consequences. Digital organizations that operate with distributed teams, using virtual environments, contributing ideas with open source methods have the advangtage of documenting their work throughout their whole process. In this sense, the open source movement has innovated on how can large groups can collaborate online but often relied on the voluntary contributions from those who support a project, lacked the means to reward efforts and governance depended on a ''benevolent dictator'' able to call the shots. With Sovereign we are aiming to provide a missing component by presenting a lightweight governance framework that permits all stakeholders of an organization participate in the decision process and enforce these through the use of smart contracts and cryptocurrency. Attempts at this have been modeled in the past: ''Distributed Autonomous Organizations'' (''DAO'') is a common concept within the blockchain communities.
+===3.3 Contracts.===
 
 The main contracts constituting a Sovereign organization consist of <code>Collectives</code>, <code>Members</code>, <code>Contracts</code> and <code>Ballots</code>.