Home - GraceRachmany/VOH GitHub Wiki

Voice of Humanity

The following chronology follows the work on Voice of Humanity on decentralized governance, documentation and specifications that are related to how the team has envisioned decentralized and distributed governance over time. For the latest work, scroll to the bottom.

If you're interested in getting involved, reach out to Grace directly.

[email protected] The most updated websites are Voice of Humanity and PricelessDAO

Some VoH History

Voice of Humanity started as a thought experiment, triggered by the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Humans have new technology for just about everything but not for governance. If we were to start, not by fixing current systems, but by asking "What is government? What is governance? What should be governed? And how?" When we initially talked to people about this idea, they would usually misquote Winston Churhchill and say that democracy is the best form of government we've got, as if there is some upper limit on what we could invent in the realm of governance. But there isn't. We could invent whatever we want, just as people have done in every other human realm.

2019 Updated Thinking

As of this writing, November 2019, I perceive Voice of Humanity to be holding a space of wholeness in envisioning new forms of governance. While quite a bit of new technology is being developed in the area of governance, most of it seems to either lack a holistic view of what it would take to encompass all components of governance or to say "some things can't be established as protocol." That's a funny thing to say. Human protocols have existed since the invention of the spoken word.

Voice of Humanity holds a space for what governance would encompass, and Voice of Humanity is starting to build components of that system. It is unlikely we will build the entire system as a whole, but just by identifying the complete solution, we are able to identify the most sorely missing components, the integration interfaces, collaborations and potential standards that would be needed to create a full governance system alliance. Our ambition is to create a system where any group of people, of any size, with any challenge or opportunity, of any size, can make efficient and optimal solutions to their challenge, take actions to implement that solution, and take full responsibility for the outcomes.

The Flows Update 2022

Voice of Humanity did research in 2019-2021 around the sufficiency currency project, looking at how ecovillages, cooperatives, and other types of villages could form a Regional Economy and Regional Identity System that would supplement the default financial system, with the goal of creating stronger regional resilience and allowing democracy to evolve outside of the pressures of the capitalist and extractive economy. The team also spent a week designing an MVP. The information about the Sufficiency Currency can be found here. Voice of Humanity has put together a budget and begun fundraising efforts for the regional sufficiency currency. The PricelessDAO is one of those attempts.

The Voice of Humanity Systems View

So, what is this holistic view of governance?

  • Identity and reputation: The fundamental holon for Voice of Humanity is the individual human, and each human should have their own self-sovereign identity (SSID). Many SSID solutions are already available, and one of VoH's areas of work is helping establish industry standards and interoperability to support rapid adoption of SSID solutions among decentralized governance (dGov) projects.
  • Acculturation: All human activity happens inside of rules, norms, and communications mechanisms. Yet, most of the digital platforms in the area of dGov ignore acculturation and onboarding. The assumption is that people come together to govern something because they already have shared values, and that if they don't, they can leave. However, all intentional communities have created such acculturation processes, because the desire is to create a cohesive rather than fragmented culture. The most critical issues facing humankind today are issues we cannot escape as communities or individuals. Further, "acculturation" has been left to the social media and surveillance capitalism players, resulting in many antisocial and even sociopathic behaviors to become normalized. We can change culture through digital platforms, thus we consider it essential to build in an acculturation process of creating norms and standards that can be learned and improved through use of the platform. For highly divisive issues, trolls, and tragic experiences, the onboarding process will include specific modules designed to onboard people in those situations.
  • Discussion: Discussions will revolve around specific issues, and be moderated by people who have earned reputations as sage moderators. The discussion modules will include a variety of formats from live video conferences through threaded chatrooms. The results of a discussion process will include clear definition of the problem to be addressed, standards and formats for proposals, and measures that proposals should include to be considered as full proposals.
  • Proposals: Proposal-making will be a formalized process initiated when signalling indicates that there is a specific realm of challenge the group wants to address. Proposal-making includes problem definition, scope and urgency, and deciding on which of the proposal-development processes is best for that particular challenge. The proposal-making process will reward people for collaboration, elegant solutions, and solutions that are optimal for the largest number of people impacted. Proposals will include budgeting and financial implications, measures of success and milestones that will be measured such that if the proposal is not reaching its outcome, it will go back to the discussion and proposal stages. Proposal making is the first module that we will be (Openly) developing. By openly, what we mean is that many of the cultural behaviors will be built into the proposal module, without explicitly being called onboarding or acculturation.
  • Voting: Voting structure will be determined during the proposal-making process.
  • Action: Voice of Humanity asserts that each proposal should come along with specific milestones, budgets, and measures that are taken on a regular basis, to ensure the project is having the effect desired. The Action module will consist of interfaces (APIs) that develop accountability of the solutions being implemented, and bring the topic back to discussion if the desired outcomes are not being reached despite action.
  • News and data: The discussion module requires the input of good information in order to facilitate good decisions. Data and perspectives are both considered. Data is neutral, proven information, while perspectives represent the variety of opinions about what to optimize. Data can tell people how to optimize for monetary gain or for health, but human perspective provides the judgment about which is more important in any given situation.
  • Currencies and/or other types of visibility measures: Voice of Humanity’s underlying system is based on a form of digital cash that represents people’s contribution to society as a whole. Value is not scarce: anyone can produce value for another human by listening, smiling, or giving advice. Those forms of value are no more or less valuable than serving someone a meal, sewing a garment, or sweeping the streets. By creating a digital currencies that represent different types of values in each community, and currencies that are based on people's work and time, VoH creates a fundamental economy that is more logical as well as more representative of human values, creating balance and sustainability based on the values that each community chooses to measure.
  • Security: Security of the VoH platform extends beyond the security of the cryptocurrency, code, and hosting to the security of the individuals participating. Creating a new monetary system, or using a new system outside of the fiat system, can be dangerous in and of itself in certain cultures and nations. VoH will create the appropriate protocols to protect its network and the individuals who participate and lead in the network.

2023 DAO specifications and Blueprint for Decentralization

In 2023, Grace worked with an anonymous team of DAOowl, Camel, and azLion for the creation of a DAO specification for a Domain Name Service and a content moderation mechanism for a system to be developed by tomi.com. Much of the work on the reputation system was done with the help of Walt.id. Although the project has pivoted since, the specification is of general interest to DAOs and represents a progression in the Voice of Humanity thinking around a real use case. The work has been published in this repository. TomiDAO Specifications, DAO for a decentralized DNS system

Thinking about DAOs and decentralized governance progressed with the election of a Supervisory Council for the SingularityNET ecosystem. As a result of a six-month collaboration with Daniel Ospina, Xonny Sholla, Esther Galfalvi, and Elisabeth Cusma, the team published a comprehensive Blueprint for Decentralization which was not published as of this update to the Github. The draft can be found in the links to Written Material below.

2024 Network of Networks research and specifications

In 2024, Voice of Humanity merged with Foundations Earth to create an organization called Sideways. Based on the reputation and certificates specifications work done with tomi.com, Sideways started seeking use cases for how to help coalitions, networks, and consortia better collaborate. The summary of this work will be published under the Sideways collaboration.

The research identified three main problems which spawned three specifications which will be initially published in this repository.

  • Identification of bad actors. Groups and individuals recognize the need to get to know their partner organizations/workers over time, and they didn't feel a reputation system would significantly reduce the time it takes to get to build trust and working relationships. However, that is conditioned on the fact that neither side is a bad actor. In a highly fluid network of individuals and organizations, there is a lack of mechanisms for preventing bad actors from doing damage.

  • Identification of who is "in" the network. Groups cannot identify members of other groups easily. People can say they belong to a group, but it often doesn't mean anything. Joining a group or consortium is often as simple as declaring yourself a member. Proof of membership doesn't exist in most cases, or it is not a meaningful identification.

  • Budget allocation and project resourcing. Competitive means (DAOs, Hackathons, contests) for budgeting of projects is time-consuming and the results are patchy. Several organizations have been struggling to find ways of cobudgeting that encourage collaboration, enable team formation, and develop the best projects.

[Radical cobudgeting and cofunding and adaptive system project resourcing] (https://github.com/GraceRachmany/VOH/wiki/Radical-Cobudgeting-and-Adaptive-System-Project-Resourcing)

Written material

The Voice of Humanity Whitepaper gives a full overview of the original vision for distributed digital democracy. As the vision evolves, we have written more whitepapers that focus on the underlying infrastructure for democracy, specifically in 2021-2022 we focused on value-exchange and resource distribution systems (economy). The other two papers are potential starting points that could be funded as MVPs or initial projects to start working on VoH.