Eden Election(7.9.2022) Post Mortem Analysis

Eden is an EOS Community organization that uses a new way to elect representatives known as “political playoffs”. The community completed its 3rd election on July 9th, 2022. This analysis is part of the Vote.Eden.Lead RFP set of deliverables.

General Comments:

The third official Eden Election was successfully completed on July 9th, 2022.

The community did reach a satisfactory consensus, but not without some issues:

1. The Website portal was often overwhelmed by the volume of activity around the end of the voting rounds while people were casting their votes.

• It was often crashing/stalling as if there were simply too many calls happening at once and it couldn’t withstand the volume.

2. There didn’t appear to be sufficient communication to the community prior to the election that they could not sign up for the election until the last minute.

• We need to create a greater awareness regarding the 24 hour cutoff window for sign-ups.
• This needs investigation, but Douglas Buttner specifically stated he was definitely signed up more than 24 hours in advance, but nonetheless in practice he was unable to participate in the election.

3. We still have a pretty severe apathy with election participation and people signing up to participate:

• There are approx. 425 or so Eden members Heading into the election
• Although it was hard to tell with the website not accurately portraying those who did sign up, it appeared through bloks.io there was around 88 or so actually signed up.
• This would be a sign-up rate of around 21% which is pretty pathetic for a group that’s entire purpose revolves around election participation leading to legitimate consensus.

4. We also have a problem with participants who did sign up, “no-showing” on the actual election day.

• It’s hard to say how many, but it seems to be around 20 or so no-shows.

5. The website itself wasn’t properly updating to reflect the reality of how many people were signed up, leaving people confused as to whether or not their sign-up request had been executed.

• It showed something like 133 at what point, when I don’t think it was ever more than 88 or so.
• It wasn’t clear to individuals whether or not they were actually signed up as sometimes it wasn’t reflected in their portal view that they were in fact registered even after they had done so.

6. At least 1 room(Group 19) in the first round was unable to reach consensus.

• They stated they did in fact reach an agreement on the zoom call, but were unable to get their vote casts in time due to website issues(crashing/stalling) as outlined above.
• This was problematic, because we couldn’t simply just then manually override the voting and the next round’s randomization was in process, so we simply had to accept the lack of consensus result and no one moved forward from that group.

7. In general, people were confused about the time progression of each election round and what to expect from the website portal as it was often buggy and did not reflect the true status of what was going on.

• When the round is initialized, the first 10 minutes is simply to prepare the zoom video portion of the election. Once each participant puts in their zoom information, a zoom link is chosen by the software(first one in I believe). Then there will not be any indication of success until the END of that 10 minute period. At which time the participants are automatically placed into the “winning” zoom room.

8. The main(general) room where the community gathers initially prior to the election and returns to following each round is usually provided by whoever is hosting/running the election.

• Replacing that link for each election can only be done through a pinned Telegram message previously created by Brandon Lovejoy in the Eden Members channel.
• This Telegram post seems to be linked directly to the website portal where it draws the link information from this post and then displays it in the website portal for each member.
• This creates a bit of a dependency problem as if changes need to be made at any time, only Brandon can edit the post content.

Recommendation Notes:

1. If possible, see if we cannot simply integrate an Eden-owned and operated, video conferencing account which is integrated into the software directly, thus reducing the need for individuals to use their own zoom links.

• This would also be ideal as we could set it up to auto record each room, etc. and then shut it down at the end of the 40 minutes and immediately begin the process of uploading the recordings.
• I realize this may be too much work, or not quite possible without extensive software re-writes.

2. We need to better communicate the fact that the ability to sign up for the election ends a full 24 hours prior to the actual election day and time.

• Maybe just a simple campaign that starts about a week prior to the election and then cranks up its intensity to 4–5 times during the last 24 hours before the end of the sign-up period.

3. Address the website performance issues.

4. Eden might want to consider a better way to incentivize election. participation

5. Possibly consider doing some election walkthrough videos

• A video from the perspective of those running the election
• A video from the perspective of a participant in the election.

Next steps:

Documentation:

• Review all of the existing documentation and aggregate it in one place to act as our source of truth going forward.
• Fill in any gaps in the documentation to ensure we have everything needed to make running future elections as easy and seamless as possible.
• Review the documentation further to ensure it’s in as easy a digestible format as possible, so that anyone requiring election training in the future has easy-to-follow guidelines and processes.
• Consider translating the documentation to Chinese, Korean and Spanish

Submit a plan that outlines future election support with recommendations on how to keep election support costs to a minimum. Ideally under $1,000 USD