Consensus Launches the Decentralized Governance Platform
Tallinn, Estonia — Today, Consensus Foundation is announcing the launch of the Consensus AI project, a decentralized artificial intelligence for collective governance.
Consensus is the open-sourced platform, powered by native cryptocurrency and built with the vision to improve the governance mechanisms at all levels of organizational structures: communities, companies, NGOs, cities, counties or, eventually, the entire countries.
As the world is getting increasingly complex, the governance mechanisms currently in use are becoming rapidly outdated and inadequate for the evolving societal and environmental complexity. This will present limitations to our co-existence in the near future, unless new frameworks are developed and deployed. Consensus aims to build new systems that will address these upcoming challenges and will allow effective collective governance using advanced blockchain and AI technologies.
The New Collective Governance Platform
In a short number of years the following global trends are expected to gain importance: a) countries with the progressive outlook will issue electronic identities to their citizens; b) forward looking jurisdictions will launch their own cryptocurrencies; c) the rise of artificial intelligence will eventually automate everything that could be automated; d) the increasing global mobility and demand for highly skilled work will see countries competing for top talent in a similar manner private companies do.
It will be problematic for the old governance structures to keep up with these exponential global changes, and the governments will need to adopt new frameworks to remain relevant and competitive. Entire countries will need to move faster to attract, invest in and retain top citizens and businesses by increasing transparency and efficiency of their operations and by adopting new technologies that will become available. To improve legislation and economic policy, governments will also need to collect and analyze vast amount of data which will require greater participation and involvement from the citizens. Currently, these mechanism are incredibly out of date in most parts of the world. Many people still vote once in 4–5 years and that is the extent of their participation in governance of their own country and society. As Ralph Merkle puts it in DAO, Democracy and Governance paper: “Economically rational citizens should not vote”.
The aim of the Consensus project is to help the old systems to transition to the new kind of decentralized collective governance, which is built on the principles of interdependence and interconnectedness of factors and is using advanced AI algorithms to model potential scenarios predicting short-term and long-term consequences and externalities. With this Consensus will allow citizens and community members authenticated with eIDs to have better visibility into the governance issues, enjoy better inclusiveness and have the ability to propose and influence various decisions such as budget allocation and monitor the public projects execution. On the other hand, governmental bodies will gain the necessary input from the citizens, data analysis and simulation of the decision outcomes.
Consensus Development
The first stage of Consensus development will include building a decentralized Research Platform for public opinion data collection in exchange for native cryptocurrency rewards. This will help different organizations and governmental bodies to make more informed decisions and to prepare research proposals, saving time and resources involved in running costly public surveys. Subsequently, Consensus is planning to launch the AI Advisor, a machine learning service that will provide automated, data-driven solutions to the most complex problems of our collective governance by modelling the potential policy and economic decision outcomes of proposed changes using a multitude of data sources, including public opinion research, open and proprietary data.
In the later stages, Consensus will open the network for developers and entrepreneurs to build various Dapps using the Consensus smart contract functionality, eID-authenticated trusted nodes, AI capabilities and any integrated public registries. We believe that Consensus can help foster the adoption and legitimization of smart contracts and eID signatures by governments, leading to transactions executed on the distributed ledger to have legal power in the respective jurisdiction. We anticipate that the early Dapps will be the social projects funding and the open tender systems, that will allow to transparently propose, evaluate and finance various public projects, select stakeholders for execution and monitor the progress.
E-Residency Integration
Estonia, being a forerunner of the future digital world, has already implemented some of these ideas — for example the electronic IDs have been in use in the entire country for the last 15 years, with the vast majority of services available online — everything from health records to public transportation, to accessing banking, to signing contracts, to voting — is done using the digital ID, saving the country 2% of its GDP annually. One of the more forward looking ideas is the recent proposal to launch the national crypto token, Estcoin, and its funding and development with a public token sale.
Another innovation by Estonia, the e-Residency program, introduced 3 years ago, serves as the basis for this digital society of the future and highlights the global trend that the world is moving rapidly towards a single market and global citizenship. E-Residency allows everyone in the world to apply and gain access to the subset of digital services Estonian citizens have enjoyed for years.
Consensus initial work will be launched within e-Residents community of 25,000 early adopters as a pilot.
Kaspar Korjus, the managing director of e-Residency commented on the Consensus announcement — “We are very proud that Consensus AI has decided to launch its project by offering a chance for e-residents to be the first adopters. The e-Residency programme is always keen on supporting new services and opportunities for our community of forward thinkers and passionate advocates for innovative and disruptive ideas.”
Consensus Story
Consensus project is founded by Oleg Gutsol, a Canadian entrepreneur and software developer, who most recently served as the Head of Global Growth of the Republic of Estonia e-Residency and previously was the CEO and founder of 500px, a global photo distribution platform with the highest quality content powered by image recognition and machine learning algorithms.
After departing from 500px in 2014 and travelling for an extended period of time, Oleg saw, firsthand, the economic and ecological crises people are facing in different parts of the world. Many of these problems are caused by inefficient allocation of resources and funds, limited perspective and outdated governance practices. Later, he joined the e-Residency team to lead the growth of the initiative and had the opportunity to experience how the most progressive digital nation is operating from the inside.
In the course of his work at e-Residency, Oleg realized that many countries are interested in progressing towards digital governance, however, may not have the necessary structures and resources for such as a transition. In order to make the transparent and efficient governance available to all organizational structures, Consensus project gathered a team of senior professionals in a wide variety of fields of expertise, including open-source software, artificial intelligence, public administration, global scale product development, blockchain and others.
The team analyzed the opportunity and developed a product strategy for the Consensus project and is now preparing for the funding stage of the project, conducted via a token sale. Further details about the upcoming token launch will be available soon on the project’s homepage at https://consensus.ai
Follow project updates on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Consensus_AI and Telegram: https://t.me/consensus_ai
