Universal Basic Information: Mining the Renewable Public Good
As technology hastens life and the individual human has access to orders of magnitude more power and knowledge than previous generations, our governing systems should maybe start reflecting that. We are leaving behind the days of decision-making taking place behind closed doors. We are leaving behind the days of being coddled and protected from information that could cause general pandemonium, affect markets, and the like. As the sea changes, our data coordination systems are in dire need of a holistic revamp. So, to combat voter apathy, underrepresentation, uninformed voting, and information asymmetry, what if we incentivize ourselves to be educated and be engaged with a Universal Basic Information (UBI) Dashboard system that runs on the blockchain?
Non-magnetic Polls
Low voter turnout is a reflection of what we think of the societies that we live in. As mentioned in a previous article, in some U.S. cities’ local elections, there are less than 20% turnout rates. But even if we get people to the polls, voter turnout doesn’t mean anything if the vast majority of voters are blindly filling out ballots solely based on their party affiliation or based on what proposition their friends are voting for or what is recommended to them by the local newspaper.
Information asymmetry is an inherently difficult-to-quantify, silent problem that impacts most humans every day. If an individual feels conscious or subconscious tension that it is difficult to be adequately informed, that they are apathetic to what’s on the ballot (I have personally not voted due to these first two reasons many times), that their voice is not being heard, or that their vote doesn’t matter, the option to no-show becomes more salient, maybe even attractive, and the system becomes non-democratic. Through this lens, information asymmetry and low voter turnout are inextricably intertwined.
The world would look much different if there was equal access to information, but equal access is again only one piece of the puzzle. Openness of information does nothing if the public is not aware of where it is located, if it’s in too many locations for an individual to sanely navigate, or if it’s presented in unclear fashion. More importantly, the participants have to care enough to not only ingest the information, but to show up and effectively use the retained information in their voting. And even if you somehow found that extremely rare group of people that cares enough to participate, in our Age of Distraction and Instant Gratification, information-conveying systems need to be overly convenient to capture attention and be used in a meaningful manner.
The Town Halls of Illusions
Fortunately, we have these grand digital coordination and governance experiments called DAOs, where we can sandbox the hell out of these predicaments. A key asset that differentiates DAOs from traditional entities is the abundance of verifiable data flows. Combined with decentralization pillars and technological agility, DAOs give us the best foundation yet to attempt to build a democratic, information coordination system.
It all starts with the DAO dashboard. (Decentraland’s Transparency Dashboard is a great example.) With the speed, complexity, newness, and often high stakes nature of DAOs, current operational, directional, and community snapshots (centralized in location only) of the state of the DAO are critical for its progress. In order to meaningfully contribute, members should be using this information to create proposals, to vote on proposals, and as a way to triage or select what work or projects they should be engaging with for the greatest benefits of the DAO. Being current on the goings on is not a straightforward task, and DAOers know it can be overwhelming and easily lead to fatigue or burnout if not navigated in an efficient manner. But while dashboards serve as a collating and organizing tool for treasury data, transactions, proposal details, and project updates, they are a somewhat passive, disjointed experience. To use the DeFi parlance of our times, there is no built-in flywheel here.
Going back to our traditional political systems for a minute, our current iteration of voting is not “the voice of the people.” How many people do you know have gotten an initiative they created on any ballot? And if the process goes through a legislative body for approval, what percentage of these initiatives are blocked? Depending on where you live, the entire process is probably opaque, differs widely, and is more than likely arcane and particular. Due to these factors, voting has been reduced to citizens saying yes or no to a narrow list of items that has been centrally curated.
In addition, there is virtually no opportunity for feedback or checking the community pulse. There are mechanisms like approval ratings, but I nor some people I’ve asked have ever been surveyed. There are town halls, but most citizens have no idea where or when they happen, or the only time they’re able to go to one in their hectic lives is one they aren’t interested in. And if you’ve ever been to a town hall–especially one in a big city — the typical format and environment do not lend themselves well to nuanced conversations at any measurable depth. This is the subtle reality that has been boiling under the surface. Fortunately, as decentralization and blockchain continue to eat the world, DAOs can help shape a piece of the governance equation that has been missing: enabling voters to create and provide their own data, organizational structures, and nuanced feedback, making an ever-renewing stream of verifiable information and sentiment to and from the blockchain in a holistic manner.
So while we’re under the hood building this UBI Dashboard — our new public good — why don’t we implement decentralized data creation and community polling/feedback via smart contracts and prove their merits in DAOs, so we can use them at larger scales in the future? Obtaining the community pulse and the ability to synthesize it in a programmatic, verifiable manner can tell us what is important and urgent to DAO members while also creating novel functionality to lego the changes with anything that has an API/ABI, rendering the direction of the DAO as an emergent, automated property. Said another way, we can develop functions in our governing smart contracts to use the community data and sentiment provided to improve the DAO and its footprint.
This is all peachy and creamy, Armand, but this sounds like a ton more work and time for all involved for some hypothetical benefit. Assuming developers could even figure out this abstract, complex task, how would we get anyone to participate? Well, we pay them of course.
Not Your Daddy’s Information Mining
In an increasingly connected, fast, and complex world, our systems are simultaneously more robust and more fragile. It takes a lot to shake the balance, but when something averse happens, the ripple effect is loud and swift. In this environment, crowdsourced human brain capital becomes a most potent resource. And too, the value of engaged collective feedback/information goes skyward. With machine learning and AI continuing their breakneck pace, our systems are ever-hungry for heaps of data. Hearty, unfettered access to community information — again, raw system data and sentimental feedback — for both machines and humans means quicker and more coordinated responses in times of emergencies or unforeseen circumstances. With everyone’s finger on the community pulse, we all have the same baseline to work from and know what we each think about that baseline on a fairly frequent basis. There will be more arguing and deliberation, but everything is transparent and happening out in the open. It slows things down at the front, but once everyone is on the same page or at least in the same chapter, from then on, consensus theoretically happens faster and in a more thorough and fully realized fashion. This reduces transitory time, downtime, and time in heartache, which can directly be equated to monetary value and a very human degree of satisfaction in solving a problem together.
As a recent example, if in March 2020, we had all read this Imperial College of London report, the one that many world leaders used to make decisions on lockdowns, regardless of what you think about lockdowns, people could have made much more informed financial, health, spiritual, and societal plans, if they knew we would be in a pandemic state for years. (Reading it again almost three years later, it has unfortunately turned out to be fairly accurate in terms of U.K. and U.S. death counts and waves over time [see page 16].) I had coworkers who thought we were going to go back to normal by the early summer of 2020. Then they kept kicking the thought down the road. “We just need to make it these next few weeks.” They said this for over a year, being constantly disappointed. The only reason I read the report was because a friend sent it to me. I didn’t obtain it from my biweekly check-in at the Central Information Portal. Because we don’t have that!
We could extrapolate this out to many other local, national, and global conversations that are happening, and we begin to see how much money there is to be saved or to be used in a more effective manner. We can estimate how valuable this dissemination and intake of knowledge can be. We can parameterize this value with myriad others and determine the UBI payments. This would be a voluntary system, but depending on the incentivization, the percentage of people participating could be quite high.
Community pulse and information should be looked at in the same way we view water, food, and infrastructure. In this Universal Basic Information system, other than time, it is inherently free for an individual to participate. To access the information, all a person has to do is contribute their information once every two weeks. In this way, we collectively create and replenish the system. This “information mining” is a vital utility and could perhaps become one of the most necessary public goods. (Over 50% of homeless people had a smartphone in 2017. Libraries also offer free Internet access.) It also has a minimal free-rider problem. And when viewed through a DAO/blockchain lens, it makes no sense that we aren’t formalizing these data communication rails and paying ourselves for our own feedback right now. In essence, all we’re doing is correcting an omission. So, as we contribute to the public pulse, in the spirit of a past Dao Haus Governance Mining initiative, let’s mine income as we mine information.
As a major side effect, this could increase voter turnout. Of course, we should be mindful of drowning in this new fountain of ours. We have to discover where and when we enter diminishing returns. But if we work to whittle the experience down to an hour every two weeks, where you have your voice not only heard but recorded on the blockchain, where you could see your feedback acted upon in a community that you spend your sacred time in, and you get paid for it, who would say no to that?
In a time of transition, new discourse, and unprecedented access to power, it’s increasingly clear that we would benefit from attaining a hive mind state. Voters will actually be collectively educated at the polls for the first time since I don’t know when. More informed, frequent, and representative voting leads us closer to true, transparent, and verifiable democracy. With modern voting being positioned as a citizen’s duty, if these incentivized systems work in creating a near real-time hive mind-like experience, it might be more accurate to one day replace the word voting with governing.
From DAO Sandboxing to City Data Markets
One of the current major use cases of DAOs is to act as test beds or proofs of concepts for new coordination systems for towns, cities, and the world at large. Since DAOs have now proven they can create their own tokens and microeconomies, one fairly straightforward way to start seeding a UBI system is to implement a DAO UBI token that begins as a currency only used for perks within a single DAO. (At these initial stages, this would only work for DAOs that have assets or services that can be perkified.) Then, slowly, intentionally, and mathematically DAO stats and updates are woven into the dashboard. Follow that with directional/mission sentiment polling. Add in some carrots, some proposal discussion and voting, and boy, you’ve got yourself a good stew going. Once the system hits appropriate milestones and reaches some equilibrium, it could expand to several partnering DAOs in a UBI currency exchange setup if desired. There’s never a shortage of DAOers hollering about KPIs (rightfully so), so juicy metrics should be available to assess the system after appropriate time-frames.
Upon measurable successes, the excitement ratchets up when we translate what we learn in DAO UBI Dashboards to Public UBI Dashboards for towns and cities. When you replace “DAO member” with “Citizen”, this spawns myriad real-world feedback systems, firmly placing the citizen as the data source for shaping city life, policy, and desire. Since we already have pilot programs to experiment with UBI in exchange for literally nothing, paying citizens UBI for providing Universal Basic Information seems pretty reasonable and fair play.
What this unlocks is systemic elegance. Let’s say you live in San Diego. You (and your friends and family that live in the same city) have the San Diego Public UBI Dashboard as an app or site bookmarked in your browser. The app contains your UBI earnings information and alerts you when the next information round opens and closes. Each two-week window, you can open the dashboard, read up on the biggest city news events and city data feeds from the previous two weeks (i.e. since you last governed), as well as absorbing any community proposal background information, which you will use deftly in the voting section. You get updated on water supply statistics. You get educated on how impervious cover affects the water table, and why certain impervious cover laws are in place. You answer an easy quiz to verify comprehension. You don’t get mad when your new house can’t be as big as you had hoped. Because you understand. Because you’ve participated in the Public UBI Dashboard System. Because you want what’s best for your city. Completing the information updates section unlocks the information providing section, where you answer questions like: how satisfied are you with your city, what are the top five most pressing issues, how would you tweak the city budget, and what are the top five things going well. Much of what you read in the first section will influence what you answer here. You want to protect local eateries, so you downvote a new McDonald’s. There is a pistachio shortage (God help us), so you upvote raising pistachio farmers’ salaries by 5%. Once you submit your sentiments, then the voting section is unlocked. Once you submit your votes on community proposals, your account is marked for the current round’s UBI distribution. At the end of the round, you get paid, and your information filters through smart contracts, oracles, and AI programs that all work together to synthesize the data and bring the decentralized strategies into reality. Come back in two weeks and see how your and fellow citizens’ knowledge and input influenced and helped your city.
The Public UBI Dashboard is a living and breathing arbiter, a credibly neutral agent of human desire, as well as the city operator, constantly assessing conditions via data transactions on the blockchain. It analyzes traffic patterns, estimating when the best times are to get on the road, and incentivizes people and organizations to commute earlier or later. City Data Markets begin to emerge with liquidity pools associated with them, investable with UBI or other digital assets. Utility coverage, rental property inventory, maintenance — all sending data streams to and from the blockchain continually. These streams can benefit and educate seemingly disparate sectors. Based on enough historical polling data, the Public Dashboard can relay which jobs or projects are the most needed or which are in need of the most help. Resource allocation statistics are ingested by the public. The same way DeFi lending/liquidity pools with low capital deposited offer higher APY, urgent job salaries rise according to the city’s needs. If there is a shortage of teachers, the average teacher salary goes up for that year. People will know about these increases with their UBI participation and rush to fill those jobs. Once a job market reaches a sustainable position, the salaries fall back into equilibrium ranges. A homeless person or anyone looking to switch careers could register for city beautification projects and learn a trade at the same time. Or the person voluntarily enters a trade pool, where others can invest their funds, effectively crowdfunding on-the-job education. Once trained up, a percentage of the workers’ new salaries goes back to the investors as their return on investment. Efficient allocation of talent while meeting a city’s needs, tracked live on the Public UBI Dashboard. Art, Transportation, Education, Security, all lit up with decentralized information flows that anyone can interact with. This is a highly interconnected, well-oiled coordination machine on steroids that with a little work and collaboration could become commonplace in the next decade. Markets, markets, everywhere!
We Can Finally Blame Ourselves!
Sitting on the sidelines and complaining is highly unproductive for all involved, especially the individual doing so. With so many people armchair quarterbacking governments, if we want our communities governed differently, we’ve gotta get up and participate. This new decentralized world necessarily increases personal responsibility and accountability in an ubiquitous, public manner.
On paper, democratization of information serves us better, but we need to assure our leaders that the public horde can and will grow tougher skin. The pandemonium pendulum will swing, sure, but with novel access to critical information, the general public will slowly (or quickly) evolve how it absorbs information for the better. It will have to. A little pain in the near term I think is worth the new array of public viewpoints that might crowdsource a way to deal with any given situation that otherwise would not have surfaced.
In an interactive community feedback system, when something goes wrong, instead of spending precious time (or our whole lives in many cases) being mad at each other, at politicians, or at the conditions of the system, we can scan the blockchain history, look to each other and say, “We all gave our input here, and this was the aggregated direction we wanted to go, so we have nothing and no one to cast blame on.” We’ll collectively learn our lessons so we can do better next time. This starts to break up the us vs them mentality that is so prevalent right now, and we can begin operating in an us mentality, which, honestly, has always been the case. It’s time we convince ourselves of it.
The next article will show one way of how this public goodnessed, smart contractified, UBI-incentivized Public Information Dashboard could be structured.
This is the third article in a four-part series that focuses on information and voting in DAO and civic landscapes. Here is the series list:
Article 1: Digital Symmetry Coursing Through the Network City
Article 2: DAO Voter Turnout and Other Impossible Feats of Humankind
Article 3: This article.
Article 4: The Universal Basic Information Dashboard Framework
UBI Dashboard Github Repository: Back end — Deployed to Ethereum Goerli Testnet. Instructions on how to interact with the contracts are in the README.
Live “Minimum Viable Product” website: UBI Dashboard dApp
