Pilot with Vocdoni

[wouter]

Proposal

To participate in a pilot with Vocdoni, the online voting system. They recently became meet.coop members and are using our services for their meetings and webinars.
For meet.coop and our community it might be beneficial to participate in their pilot, so we can see how using meet.coop and voting at Vocdoni would work, possibly an interesting combination for general assemblies and online decisionmaking in general.

About Vocdoni: " 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 ."

If we want to participate in their pilot, we commit to try their tools and service, while getting their service for free. We sign a Memorandum of Understanding (draft MoU) , which basically covers that intent to try them out, no strings attached. @Ferran has promised to help us out Also they can be more flexible in the pilot dates if we think that’s necessary. Now it’s for the coming 6 months in 2021. If we vote in favour, @wouter will work out the MoU with Vocdoni/@Ferran.

Voting

• Agree
• Abstain
• Block

[osb]

More info on Vocdoni here: https://open.coop/events/open-2020-webinar-vocdoni-as-an-engagement-tool-for-cooperatives/

[benhylau]

Just to flag that this MoU does commit:

1. Meetcoop Operational Member capacity to engage in user research
2. Extend this service to Meetcoop’s “social base”, which in this case I would interpret it as our User Members

I think Meetcoop has a real need to better engage all members in our decision making, for example:

• Which features to bring in to code base has been brought up multiple times (e.g. mute button sound, mirroring camera be default)
• Working as a community thread

Vocdoni sounds like a possible tool to address our needs, and I also like the project and want to support their pilot. My estimate is at least 12 hours of Operational Member time to lead the pilot on Meetcoop side:

• To be main contact with Vocdoni
• Introduce the app into Operational Member use
• Organizing a pilot that invite our User Members

So I am voting +1 on the basis of mutual benefit and support, but we should only go ahead if @wouter or another member can commit to taking the lead on this as I think having clarity here is essential to a mutually beneficial pilot.

[wouter]

I agree that this pilot collaboration with Vocdoni will be especially interesting to use it for engaging our userbase, to enable our (user) members to vote on priorities for improvements, new features and so. In this sense it is a good match for the community development work we’re starting to envision in the “working as a community” thread, that fits nicely in the vision of both projects.

I’m happy to be meet.coop’s main contact with Vocdoni and work on this.