8 research outputs found
Measuring Stakeholder Agreement and Stability in a Decentralised Organisation
A decentralised organisation (DO) is a multi-stakeholder institution where
decision making is assigned to various levels of the organisation.
Decentralised stakeholders play an important role in the governance of a
decentralised organisation. The ability to measure DO stability will help
monitor the health of the organisation and acts as an early warning system for
disagreement and group exit, leading to its destabilisation/collapse. For
example, blockchain hard forks. We propose the organisational tension
quadrilateral to study agreement between stakeholders and build a tool based on
voting data (information as vote choices) to measure its stability. The
stakeholders are permitted to vote their choice into an electronic ballot box.
Here, each vote choice represents a measure of agreement. When voting ends,
this information is aggregated and used to build a metric for DO stability. To
the best of our knowledge, there are no similar tools available to measure DO
stability
Always on Voting: A Framework for Repetitive Voting on the Blockchain
Elections repeat commonly after a fixed time interval, ranging from months to
years. This results in limitations on governance since elected candidates or
policies are difficult to remove before the next elections, if needed, and
allowed by the corresponding law. Participants may decide (through a public
deliberation) to change their choices but have no opportunity to vote for these
choices before the next elections. Another issue is the peak-end effect, where
the judgment of voters is based on how they felt a short time before the
elections. To address these issues, we propose Always on Voting (AoV) -- a
repetitive voting framework that allows participants to vote and change elected
candidates or policies without waiting for the next elections. Participants are
permitted to privately change their vote at any point in time, while the effect
of their change is manifested at the end of each epoch, whose duration is
shorter than the time between two main elections. To thwart the problem of
peak-end effect in epochs, the ends of epochs are randomized and made
unpredictable, while preserved within soft bounds. These goals are achieved
using the synergy between a Bitcoin puzzle oracle, verifiable delay function,
and smart contracts
BBB-Voting: 1-out-of-k Blockchain-Based Boardroom Voting
Voting is a means to agree on a collective decision based on available
choices (e.g., candidates), where participants (voters) agree to abide by their
outcome. To improve some features of e-voting, decentralized solutions based on
a blockchain can be employed, where the blockchain represents a public bulletin
board that in contrast to a centralized bulletin board provides
availability and censorship resistance. A blockchain ensures that all entities
in the voting system have the same view of the actions made by others due to
its immutable and append-only log. The existing blockchain-based boardroom
voting solution called Open Voting Network (OVN) provides the privacy of votes
and perfect ballot secrecy, but it supports only two candidates. We present
BBB-Voting, an equivalent blockchain-based approach for decentralized voting
than OVN, but in contrast to it, BBB-Voting supports 1-out-of- choices and
provides a fault tolerance mechanism that enables recovery from stalling
participants. We provide a cost-optimized implementation using Ethereum, which
we compare with OVN and show that our work decreases the costs for voters by
in terms of gas consumption. Next, we outline the extension of our
implementation scaling to magnitudes higher number of participants than in a
boardroom voting, while preserving the costs paid by the authority and
participants -- we made proof-of-concept experiments with up to 1000
participants