Improving Governance With Decide Voter | Building Blocks

Published in

GoodBlockio

5 min readMar 20, 2024

Building Blocks is a series where we look at GoodBlock’s work in leveraging emerging technologies to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems. In this article we’ll be diving into Decide Voter, a unique piece of tooling to facilitate fair and accessible democratic processes within communities.

Governance is broken and in need of a massive overhaul. The current methods in place for groups to reach consensus around a shared goal are plagued with problems like opaque processes, poor user experience, and voter apathy. This has led to a growing distrust in the democratic processes, no matter how well-intentioned the people may be that are utilising these systems.

GoodBlock is on a mission to solve this issue, with their innovative, decentralised governance tooling, Decide Voter. Keep reading to learn more about how this project aims to bring about a more optimistic future for consensus building.

A Growing Need for Fair & Accessible Governance Tooling

Technology has come a long way since society first began to utilise democratic processes for collective decision making, but the technology surrounding governance has remained more or less the same. This has caused increased distrust in processes that are integral to a society functioning properly. Whether the scenario is a smaller form of governance, such as a condo board, or larger scale, such as governing a nation state, there’s no question about it — governance matters.

Yet, governance tooling has seen little innovation over the past hundred years, and most organisations rely on slow, opaque processes to reach consensus. The rise of Web3 presented exciting, new opportunities to evolve governance with blockchain based voting solutions. These allowed users to vote on decisions and have the results logged on a publicly accessible ledger. This restores trust in the process by allowing participants to audit results and understand how an outcome was reached.

It also dramatically improves the time it takes to reach consensus, by tallying results in real time. But many blockchain based governance solutions have problems of their own. The high transaction costs on popular blockchains present a fee for participating that deters most users from engaging. Additionally, the current user experience to engage with popular blockchains presents another barrier, with long serial-numbers as account names, the need to set up complex wallets, and more.

Decide by GoodBlock aims to take the benefits of blockchain-based governance and remove the barriers to entry by abstracting the fees away from the user and creating an easy to use user interface, among other benefits.

How an Open-Source Governance Engine Enabled Global Coordination

When GoodBlock CEO, Douglas Horn, wrote the whitepaper for Telos in 2018, there was a strong need for governance infrastructure which could allow the founding community to coordinate their efforts once the chain launched. Due to the global nature of the network, with contributors located around the world, the need for a neutral settlement layer for decision-making was obvious. It was with this in mind that GoodBlock designed Telos Decide, an open-source governance engine built on top of the Antelope tech stack.

Decide allowed community members to vote on funding proposals and governance changes in real-time, on a decentralised, fully verifiable blockchain. With near-feeless transactions, this tool greatly reduced the barrier to entry for on-chain governance, enabling community members of all economic backgrounds to take part and shape the future of network. The Decide engine solved a lot of the problems that surrounded other Web3 governance tools when it came to things like high transaction fees, long wait times for ballot finality and ease of use.

As it was released as an open-source piece of tooling, the Decide engine was also made accessible for other applications to leverage in new ways. The Telos community and other projects in the Antelope ecosystem continue to leverage the Decide engine as a means to reach consensus in a fair, decentralised manner.

Fostering Mass Adoption of Decentralised Governance with Decide Voter Mobile

With successful adoption by the Telos community, the GoodBlock team set out on a new and ambitious goal for innovating governance tooling: mainstream adoption of decentralised governance. It’s one thing to get a Web3 native user base utilising blockchain based tooling, but it’s a much bigger challenge to create a Web3 product that can be easily adopted by a lay-user who isn’t used to navigating this type of tooling.

In order to achieve this, the GoodBlock team designed the Decide Voter Mobile App, available on iOS and Android. The Decide Voter Mobile App takes the same technical infrastructure designed for the initial Decide governance engine, but improves accessibility, by allowing users to interface with it through an easy-to-navigate mobile app.

The goal of the app is to meet users where they are at, offering a familiar feeling UI, without requiring them to go down the rabbit hole of learning how to navigate complex Web3 tooling. As the Decide Voter Mobile App continues to evolve, GoodBlock’s goal is to make decentralised governance easy enough that even your grandma could participate in it.

Check out the video walkthrough below to get an idea of just how easy it is to sign in and start taking part in on-chain governance.

Levelling-Up Governance Tooling with Decide Enterprise

While still in the early stages of development, the GoodBlock team is already thinking of the next evolution of the Decide Governance Engine, Decide Enterprise. Decide Enterprise is a more robust solution that will meet the needs of governments, corporations, co-ops and other institutions where more control over the process is needed.

The enterprise solution will allow more granularity over how a poll can be set up and more security for sensitive types of decision making. Decide Enterprise will also serve another purpose, as a for-profit iteration of the tooling. This will allow development to continue to evolve for the Decide Suite, while keeping the basic functionality open source and accessible to everyone as a free, public good

Striving for Fairer Governance Tooling, One Ballot at a Time

At GoodBlock, we’re committed to reshaping governance for a brighter future. Join us on our journey to foster inclusive decision-making and drive societal progress.

Visit DecideVoter.app to learn more, and download the apps on iOS and Android. Follow us on Twitter and social media to stay updated on future releases, and to be notified of future Building Block articles. Together, let’s build a world where everyone’s voice is heard.

Originally published at https://goodblock.io.