Putting the “Student” in Student Government
How An Emerging Non-Profit Can Help Reinvigorate Student Voices on Campus

Students are what make up our campuses, yet their voice is lost on most of them. We hear student government and we paint this picture of students at the helm, but the reality is that in the most active level of student government — the committees — the seats are filled with faculty and administrators. It sounds contradictory to the name, but it’s true. At the University of Oregon for example, I was a member of the Undergraduate Council that is responsible for reviewing, evaluating, and enhancing the quality of the undergraduate academic programs, and yet I was the only undergraduate student. How could I — one student — speak for every undergraduate experience?
And this isn’t just a problem on my campus, and it isn’t just a problem in the lower levels of student government. Marshall published an editorial on the subject just earlier this year, in March. They found that less than 10 percent of students participate in student elections, and so it’s expected that even less will be actually represented in student government.
How can we get more students to participate in student government, and, in turn, increase student representation on our campuses?
Leveraging The Like to Bring Attention to the Student Voice
There is a non-profit called Democracy Earth Foundation (DEF) that is building a platform to “tokenize the like” and bring a new level of accessibility to democracy. In other words, using the like to democratize, democracy. Seems odd right? Or, seems perfect for our increasingly digitally-oriented generation. What better way to get students involved in campus decision-making and actively engaged in campus-wide discussion than through a social media spin on a civic system? Looking to a bigger vision, what better way to fight ballot box coercion and potentially unlock frozen representation?
Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “how is tokenizing this useless social mechanism, introduced by Facebook, going to empower student voices on campus and potentially improve our global democratic systems?” So, before going too far, let me take the time to interject here with a quick overview of DEF: Democracy Earth Foundation is a Y-Combinator, civic-tech non-profit started by Santiago Siri and Pia Mancini. Prior to DEF, Santiago and Pia founded Partido De La Red (The Net Party), winning 1 percent of the vote in the 2013 Argentinian parliamentary elections using a internet-based democratic participation platform. The lessons they learned from this initial venture are helping to shape Sovereign — DEF’s blockchain based, open-source, governance platform. In other words, what DEF is building today. Today, DEF is on a mission to enable a token-based liquid democracy, battling censorship, enabling a smarter delegative voting mechanism, and truly democratizing the democratic process. Now to answer the looming question on the like. Facebook’s version of the like quickly becomes representative of empty conversations with little impact. Users get a sense of limitless possibilities with a like on Facebook. They can like any and everything that they want — this way, they’re infinitely inflatable. This has generated what we know as “slacktivism”, where users get a sense of satisfaction from talking about issues online but those posts, likes, and shares rarely have any substance in the real world. With DEF’s tokenized likes, such expressions are deployed rationally by the users because each vote has a value, both speculative and real. This more intentional use of votes can make advocacy movements online more meaningful, sending a precise and secure signal of citizens’, or in this case students’, preferences. With that partially answered, let’s get back to why this matters on campus. To continue reading about DEF, here is their white paper: The Social Smart Contract.
In it’s current stage of development, DEF’s platform is more like a discussion forum than a voting tool that can be used in student government or local politics today. However, this is just as important. With most student issues — like with national and even global issues — change arises from the bottom, at a grassroots level. It starts with students and student groups leading the discussion on campus. And presenting these discussions in a social media format makes them more accessible, encouraging them to move outside of the committees and student group meetings onto a platform every student can engage in. Ultimately DEF shortens the gap between student discussion and administrative attention by allowing administrators to follow these discussions, and see what issues students care most about.
It’s Democracy, But It’s Also Blockchain.
I’m sure you’ve already guessed (since it’s hinted at in the thumbnail), this is one of our projects for the Fall. We are part of a group of universities working with DEF to simultaneously run pilots on our campuses, including UC Berkeley, Yale, National University of Singapore, UCL, and a few others. We will be collaborating with a number of student groups, student activists, and administrators on our campus, at the University of Oregon, to take the first step towards liquid democracy.
Our goal this year is to reinvigorate the student voice that’s been lost on our campus, like with many others.
If you’re a student at the University of Oregon, we will be hosting a number of open meet ups to get everyone involved learning about the DEF platform, engaged in the discussion, and leading this initiative on campus with us. More information will be available on the time and place of these meet ups and how you can get involved in the coming month as we get closer to the start of Fall term.
Subscribe to our Medium and follow us on LinkedIn for more updates to come on this project and everything else we’ve been building this summer.

