Another relevant governance whitepaper is Equality of Power and Fair Decision Making by E. Glen Weyl and Kasey Wertheim
ChatGPT 4 summary of their whitepaper
- Inequality of power and influence: The paper starts by discussing the existing inequality of power and influence in traditional democratic systems, which often leads to imbalances in decision-making processes and the under-representation of minority groups and interests.
- Quadratic Voting (QV): The authors propose QV as a solution to address these inequalities and improve the fairness of public decision-making. QV allows individuals to express their preferences by allocating a fixed budget of voting credits to various options. The cost of casting votes increases quadratically, enabling voters to balance the intensity of their preferences with the cost of voting. QV aims to capture the true intensity of voter preferences and reduce the influence of strategic voting and special interests.
- Quadratic Finance (QF): The paper also introduces QF, a mechanism for public goods funding that promotes fairness and diversity. In QF, individual contributions to public goods are matched using a quadratic formula, ensuring that projects with broader support receive more funding. QF incentivizes small contributions from many individuals, fostering a more diverse and inclusive funding landscape.
- Addressing manipulation and collusion: The authors discuss the potential risks of manipulation and collusion in QV and QF systems, and they propose solutions such as using cryptographic methods to ensure privacy and prevent vote-buying, as well as mechanisms to discourage collusion among participants.
- Empirical evidence and real-world applications: The paper presents empirical evidence from experiments and real-world applications of QV and QF, demonstrating the potential of these mechanisms to improve the fairness and efficiency of public decision-making processes.
- Transparent and verifiable processes: Democracy Earth emphasizes the need for transparent and verifiable governance processes, leveraging blockchain technology and cryptographic methods to ensure that voting and decision-making processes are tamper-proof and auditable by all participants.
- Open-source development: The paper highlights the importance of open-source development, making the tools and platforms developed by Democracy Earth available to anyone who wants to use, modify, or build upon them. This approach fosters collaboration, innovation, and the broader adoption of decentralized digital governance solutions.