Using Plutus as a non-monetary governance tool

Hey friends,

I wanted to ask here before going too far down the rabbit hole on my own…

I’m looking at Smart Contract functionality as an enterprise and business function, but also as a governance tool. This get’s tricky as it seems like right now each person in in the (E)UTxO model is required to input an amount of ADA in order to participate. My application in this instance definitely has use among the Cardano community, but I am thinking also likely within spaces where Cardano has yet to find adoption. Think unions who are accountable to their membership for decisions - credentialing members is done by generating a unique signature hash for each person that only carries one “vote” on each manner of business. It would make credentialing a breeze, and remove barriers of necessitating in-person attendance, which the pandemic has shown us has greatly increased participation in democratic processes - though with this increase, it has revealed weaknesses in current infrastructure (e.g. an organization utilizes a Google Form and unauthorized voters “hack” into the process or commit errors such as voting multiple times, signing up with separate emails, etc.)

So my questions are:

  1. Do you think that distributing native tokens as “votes” with a value of zero solves this issue?
  2. If yes native token, then I wonder about if there is a hard lovelace requirement to process any transaction? If no, is there another solution you can think of?
  3. If yes native token, is it possible to send the required amount of lovelace for said transaction to the “wallet” upon registration for the voting event? I put wallet in quotes because I’m thinking in terms of not tying any money to the transaction, where the person never sees that it’s a “transaction” per se. I don’t want money to have anything to do with the process, and if it does, only on the backend.

Still noodling on this, but would love to hear other’s thoughts!

Best,

Hermes

1 Like

Seconded, would also like to know.