Introducing Vocdoni + potential collaboration

Hello all!

I’m Ferran Reyes, from Vocdoni team. @wouter introduced me to Meet.coop last week and he told me that it would be great if I can present Vocdoni to the Meetcoop community. So here I am :slight_smile:

To put you in context, Vocdoni is an opensource project born with the aim of making digital participation easy and secure by building an anonymous, universally verifiable and scalable voting system using a technological architecture that relies on Ethereum, Tendermint, IPFS and zk-SNARKs, as well as in many other components designed by Vocdoni team. If you want to know more about our Open Stack you can take a look at our docs.

We built also a Platform (app/web) to interact with all this voting infrastructure (that is concieved as a common good in the blockchain, so it’s also accessible via API).

After taking a look at Meet.coop we believe that by connecting it with Vocdoni we would have a perfect software for ad-hoc voting in meetings, annual general meetings, events,…

Using merkle-trees it would be relatively easy to create ad-hoc censuses or tag existing members to create segmented censuses with the attendees (with a tag that indicates participation in a specific meeting). This would also solve the problem with digital voting and decisions where abstention matter (like supermajority requirements).

Then this census can be used to create voting processes using Vocdoni app or webpoll.

I’m looking forward to know more about your opinion on that and even organize a call if there is people interested :slight_smile:

I would also love to invite you to our Discord, where you can contact the Vocdoni dev team and be updated on the development:

Happy to support Meet.coop and join the community! :rocket:

3 Likes

Hey @Ferran, great to see you here! And I’m very happy that VocDoni decided to become members of meet.coop :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Yesterday I participated in part of your VocDoni session at the FESC, now continuing through your video recording. Happy to see that it worked for you.

VocDoni seems really interesting for cooperatives and other initiatives in need to vote online. In the past I have been against online voting in electoral processes, but the technology stack you are developing seems to be universally recountable / auditible.

Note that I value decentralised architectures and therefore I follow some DHT projects like Holochain and (more in the past) blockchain networks like ethereum, but I’m not at all following the details of Vocdoni tech dev.

For meet.coop and its members it maybe good to get to know some example usecases, like AGM’s that have used VocDoni. And possibly in combination with meet.coop - I think it can be a great complement.

There are members organising their assemblies over meet.coop, some of which have said so on this forum. Maybe it would be good to organise a dedicated session about that topic? I think there’s practical, technological, social and legal aspects that will need to be covered. And this is rather new for many coops.

1 Like

Hey Wouter!

Yes! Beside the Webinar you assisted we have been using Meet.coop for 3 community calls so far, and we’re super happy with it :slight_smile:

I think it would be great to have such a session between us. How you normally organize and propose calls like this? I think it would be great if I can introduce you our solution, our stack and see potential synergies to offer voting solutions to cooperatives (trying to touch different sides, as you mentioned, like technology, legal aspects and existing use cases).

Besides that, It would be cool if we can sign a collaboration agreement between Meet.coop and Vocdoni so you can freely use our platform for your internal governance without any cost :slight_smile: So you can play around and test the technology by yourselves.

Cheers!

thanks @Ferran and good to hear that VocDoni keeps on going strong :wink:

I’d say we can do such pilot with VocDoni at meet.coop, it would be good for meet.coop and the participating member organisations to have first hand experience with VocDoni as a robust voting solution, possibly in combination with meet.coop for asynchronous + synchronous decisionmaking processes.

Wrt a concrete session on online voting and VocDoni, we could do a thematic session in the community sessions we’re preparing for 2021(see working as a community thread). Other member orgs like May First Movement Technology also have their experiences in this field and it would be good to co-host a session with them, cc @freescholar

2 Likes

I just opened a vote on this here .

2 Likes

It says I cannot vote on the topic, but if I could I would vote YES. Thanks for posting that!

1 Like

thanks @freescholar for the support. In fact currently we run with the limited governance of ops members having decision power. Imho that’s a bug that we need to resolve. One cause is that we have still limited capacity to administer the user accounts properly, i.e. in the discourse forum we administer ops members in a dedicated ops category and a category for the circle membership. But we haven’t set up any provisions for keeping track of user members other than inviting the provided email address for each user member to the BBB server. We need to overcome these startup hurdles, and the SSO server will be one piece to resolve the puzzle.

Then we can start thinking of how we actually want the governance between multiple stakeholders to take shape. Vocdoni might provide a valuable service or at least pilot to try out some options.