Tackling Corruption and Enabling Self-Regulating Systems

We are doing a 5 part series on how Holochain can save democracy. This is part two.

Photo courtesy of Hava Gurevich

A slew of challenges with democracy involve information as feedback on the health of democracy.

• Are there corrupt actors in the system?
• Were people able to go to polling places and participate in elections?
• Are politicians acting as they promised they would?

We have, in the last decade or so evolved tools for crowdsourcing knowledge of these issues. There are very direct existing tools for gathering information on these types of events, such as: IPaidaBribe.com, which crowdsources data on the incidence and nature of government corruption, or Truth-o-Meter, which aims to hold politicians accountable for their promises.

There are also more broad open-ended tools such as Ushahidi which maps democracy in crisis, as well as assessing data to generate reports on the state of democracy, such as Global Integrity.

Holochain isn’t inventing any of these solutions. For these issues for democracy, Holochain offers several improvements.

1. Holochain can be run on networks that are not hooked up to the main backbone of the internet since they do not require a centralized server. So Holochain networks can be set up anywhere that a sufficient set of networked nodes can connect to each other. The infrastructure is more resilient (central authorities can’t shut them down by flipping a switch).
2. Reputation. The data is only as reliable as the people who input it or the tools that record it. Having a way to gather information from an agent over time, verify it for reliability, then rate it for reputation is easy on Holochain. It can even increase the integrity of the data gathered.

Some have already recognized the possibilities brought forth by Holochain and are preparing software with the goal of completely transforming governance, economics, and business into a truly decentralized ecosystem of voluntary exchanges. The Digital Co-Governance Web is one such framework with the lofty goal of truly empowering every citizen with transparency and influence in all of the systems in which they participate. As stated in their documentation, the project would not be achievable except for the agent-centric, un-enclosable carrier provided by Holochain as it’s networking and data storage layer.