Summary 

This is the second in a series of blogposts that explores how Mina’s governance can learn from collective intelligence where groups of people are organized at scale to solve complex public problems in ways that often outperform individual people alone. 

First, we explain the renewed interest in collective intelligence due to major societal challenges, including the declining confidence in representative democracy. Researchers, entrepreneurs and pioneers, such as Mina, are drawing on the methods of collective intelligence to respond to this challenge by testing out viable alternatives to make democracy more meaningful and its outcomes more legitimate. These alternatives include direct democracy where people are more directly involved in decision making through participatory and deliberative processes. 

We then explain the value of deliberation to Mina’s decision making. Deliberation helps people identify their preferences- and their rationales for them- before voting so that the result is more likely to reflect what the community really wants. Deliberation can reveal objections and major disagreements and then negotiate proposals that everyone is more likely to agree on. This provides all participants with better knowledge and understanding about proposals that helps with their implementation. It also builds trust between people who may have opposing views, leading to more effective collaboration over time. By encouraging competing and independent perspectives, deliberation can overcome cognitive biases and challenge rigid ways of group thinking and feeling. 

Data is fundamental to collective intelligence. The rapid development of digital and AI technologies can gather, organize and analyze data so that deliberation can be meaningfully informed. We present examples of different types of tools to support deliberation between dozens, hundreds or even thousands of community members.

The development of mass deliberation tools is a unique feature of Mina’s governance compared to other blockchains so Mina can set an exciting example to the rest of the industry. Mina can also be an exemplar to the wider world. Systems of democratic decision making were designed in the 18th century yet they are failing to keep up with a rapidly changing world of the 21st century. Mina can demonstrate how novelty could be introduced into these stagnant systems.

Maintaining the legitimacy of democratic decision making

Declining confidence in representative democracy

There is renewed interest in collective intelligence due to major societal challenges. As explained in a previous blogpost, one of these challenges is the growing complexity of public problems and emergence of wicked problems, including governance. However, other challenges include the declining confidence in representative democracy.

Democracy often involves people voting periodically to elect officials who represent them in making public decisions and allocating resources. Although many people feel dissatisfied with how democracy is working in their countries, most of these people support representative democracy. Nonetheless, confidence in representative democracy has declined in several countries. Some people often feel that their representatives are out of touch and disconnected from their everyday lives, and they have too little influence over their representatives unlike major donors, lobbyists and special interest groups. Political scandals highlight how the distinction between lobbying and bribing can be blurry. Rather than serving the public interest, self-interest is perceived to be the main motivation for representatives to seek office whether to make a lot of money, run for higher office in the future or seek fame and attention. 

A major concern is that this declining confidence could undermine the legitimacy of democratic decision making. Consequently, researchers, entrepreneurs and pioneers, including from the Mina community, are drawing on the methods of collective intelligence to test out viable alternatives to make democracy more meaningful and its outcomes more legitimate.

The potential of direct democracy

These alternatives include direct democracy where people are more directly involved in decision making through participatory and deliberative processes. 

Participatory processes involve entire communities and societies in decision making so that they can exert more influence on its outcomes. Examples include participatory budgeting (where people can decide on the budget of the city they live in), referenda and plebiscites (where all the members of an electorate can vote on important public questions, such as making changes to a constitution).

Deliberative processes involve a part of the community or society to consider a problem, identify and assess the full range of options and make a decision or recommendation about solutions. The focus is on the quality of deliberation rather than the quantity of people involved. Examples include polls and citizens’ assemblies. 

As highlighted in a previous blogpost, collective intelligence provides frameworks and methods for implementing these processes. 

The value of deliberation to Mina’s decision making

Deliberation benefits voting

Voting aggregates individual preferences and a decision results if some mathematical threshold is reached. But voting alone may be insufficient if voters are not even aware of their preferences. Deliberation is a process of discovery, clarification and persuasion that allows voters to identify their preferences- and their rationales for them- before voting to help build consensus on a result that is more likely to reflect what the collective really wants.

Voting benefits deliberation 

It may be unrealistic for deliberation alone to achieve consensus. Consensus may not even be the ideal if the aim is to identify areas of disagreement and differing views. Voting not only measures winners’ victory but allowing people to register their dissent means they are more likely to view the processes to be legitimate. 

Consensus vs consent based decision making 

While voting can help to achieve consensus, consent based processes seek each person’s consent to a proposal before voting takes place. Deliberation can identify objections and major disagreements and then negotiate proposals that everyone is more likely to agree on. It builds trust between people who may have opposing views and can strengthen the relationships within the group, leading to more effective collaboration over time.

Deliberation provides all participants with better knowledge and understanding about a proposal that not only helps with its implementation but also better prepares them to make future decisions.

Deliberation counters cognitive biases 

Cognitive biases can lead people to adapt and distort data to maintain their worldview and seek out only data that confirms their models. There are various examples where groups failed to make the right decisions even though they had all the information they needed. The Titanic may have sank due to groupthink amongst its officers despite warnings of icebergs, and groupthink may explain why officers at Pearl Harbor did not take warnings of attack seriously. Groupthink may also be responsible for decision making that eventually led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

By encouraging competing and independent perspectives, deliberation can overcome cognitive biases and challenge rigid ways of group thinking and feeling. This is important due to the cognitive limitations of democracy. After all, people often vote based on loyalty rather than good policy; unfortunately, this may even be a false sense of loyalty if people are misinformed or emotionally manipulated. ‘One person, one vote’ may be necessary but not sufficient; the quality of deliberation to arrive at the truth or common good matters as much as the quantity of people involved. 

Similarly, the Abilene Paradox occurs when a group of people collectively make a decision that goes against the preferences of most or all of them yet miscommunication (rather than people distorting their views) means each person believes the decision is aligned with the preferences of most of the others. Deliberation can help to ensure clearer communication within the group. 

Deliberation can also respond to Asch conformity. This relates to the social circumstances that affect whether people conform to, or defy, a majority group even when they know the majority view is wrong.

Making sense of data 

Data is fundamental to collective intelligence to ensure that decision making is evidence based. Its core functions begin with observations and data gathering to identify a specific problem followed by data analysis and modeling to understand it. 

This raises the challenge of how to gather, organize and make sense of data in ways that deliberation can be meaningfully informed. The rapid development of digital and AI technologies can respond to this challenge. For example, language processing and opinion mining can generate high quality insights about information flows, including how different perspectives and levels of support for them change over time. The recently published governance proposals stress the opportunity for Mina to draw on these technologies to support deliberation between dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of community members (see Figure 1).

It also raises the need for access to uncensored data, information and opinion that cannot be corrupted or manipulated so that deliberation is not undermined. 

Figure 1 Overview of proposed changes to Mina’s governance Arrows indicate the direction of information flowing through the system.

Discussion tools

MinaResearch

We encourage community members to discuss ideas on MinaResearch and seek wider feedback. MinaResearch is useful for longer, more detailed posts to inform rich discussions where readers can follow the history of threads to understand how discussions have developed. 

Discord channels 

We also encourage community members to use relevant Discord channels. Discord is better for shorter posts and live, interactive conversations. However, their history is harder to track so it is more difficult to follow how conversations have developed. 

Polling tools

One drawback of MinaResearh and Discord is that lengthy threads and multiple responses by the same individual could dominate the discussions. Community polls and surveys are useful tools to gauge wider support.

Pol.is

Pol.is is an open source tool for real time surveying of large groups of people. A person initiates a conversation that includes a brief summary, relevant examples and links. Other people can leave comments (140 character, plain text statements) and can vote on comments submitted by others to signal whether they agree or disagree. A conversation not only produces a collection of comments and votes, it can also show the opinion group each person belongs to; representative comments for each opinion group; and the opinions most widely shared across all groups.

The case of vTaiwan 

vTaiwan is the longest running, national scale implementation of Pol.is. vTaiwan is an open, participatory process where the Taiwanese public and government have worked together to create legislation relating to the digital economy. Since vTaiwan launched in 2015, more than 200,000 people have participated, resulting in 26 pieces of legislation concerning topics such as regulating Uber, telemedicine and online alcohol sales.

Anyone can submit a proposal to a ‘competent government authority’ that agrees to become accountable for it, as well as a facilitator to take charge of it. Opinions are gathered through online forums where anyone can ask questions and provide comments and other feedback. Poli.is is one of two digital platforms used to build consensus. Once consensus has been reached, the community meets through a series of consultative events to reflect on whether it is time to proceed. If so, then a final discussion takes place to decide the action that the government will take. 

Survey tools

Talk to the City 

Talk to the City (TttC) is a large language model interface that analyzes qualitative responses to questionnaires. It extracts key arguments made in the responses; arranges the arguments into clusters based on semantic similarity; generates labels and summaries for all the clusters; and provides interactive maps to explore the arguments in each cluster. TttC can identify common understandings and key disagreements between perspectives.

Pilot 1: feedback on participation in zkIgnite

The Mina Foundation used Tttc to support surveying zkIgnite participants. TttC mapped out each response then clustered them in four main types of opinions: improving the voting experience with suggestions; satisfaction with the scoring and voting mechanics; concerns about the transparency and effectiveness of the voting process; and improving transparency and criteria with suggestions for clear guidelines (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Using TttC to survey people who had participated in zkIgnite

Pilot 2: Testworld 2.0 sentiment assessment 

The Mina Foundation also used TttC to support surveying people who had participated in Mina protocol’s testing program. TttC grouped responses into clusters and sub-clusters as part of an interactive, nested map (see Figure 3). This included feedback on the reliability and performance of the Mina Daemon Node; opinions on the quality and clarity of the Mina Protocol documentation; experiences and suggestions related to the technical support provided; comments on the involvement and organization of the Mina community; and insights into the day to day operations of Mina Daemon Nodes.

Figure 3 Using TttC to survey people who had participated in Mina’s testing program

Survey bot on Discord

Based on demos of Talk to the City, Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance Team developed a Discord bot to survey the community, gather and analyze sentiment, and summarize feedback. The tool’s first test was to collect feedback from the community about the governance proposals. 

The bot is programmed to be as simple as possible without biasing or categorizing in any particular way. It has been developed in an open way for anyone in the community to verify its development data to check how it gathers information and provide suggestions for improvements. 

Further tools 

Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance team aims to develop future tools together with the community. These could include new types of bots to help facilitate governance processes, as well as potential new dashboards to make it easy and simple for community members to remain updated and participate in them.

Voting tools 

Off-chain voting

Helios 

Helios is ‘end to end’ verifiable so that voters can verify that both the recording of their ballot and the tallying process were carried out correctly. Each vote is encrypted inside the voter’s browser before it is sent to the server where it is stored in an encrypted form. Cryptographic techniques are applied to combine all of the encrypted votes into an encrypted tally, and only the tally is decrypted. 

Snapshot

Snapshot is a voting platform that allows DAOs to create voting processes off-chain customized to their needs. Various blockchain projects use Snapshot polls to assess community sentiment as part of drafting and submitting proposals while using on-chain voting to ratify them. Strategies are selected for creating a proposal; defining voters’ voting power; and calculating the outcome. Voting power can be distributed across multiple choices so that voters can more precisely represent their diverse opinions. Snapshot supports quadratic voting that considers the number of individual voters on a proposal and not just the amount contributed to it, making it more difficult for holders of the most tokens to push through their choice despite having the majority of voting power. 

On-chain voting

Tally

Tally is an on-chain voting protocol for DAOs based on the OpenZeppelin Governor smart contract framework. Only delegated tokens can participate in voting- an account can vote directly by delegating its voting power to its own address or it can delegate its voting power to another account and let them vote on its behalf. At any point, an account can re-delegate its tokens to a different address or un-delegate to reclaim its power to participate directly in the vote. Tally Zero ensures DAOs can always vote on-chain via the InterPlanetary File System. Tally has recently introduced incentives so that accounts can be compensated for their effort and time to draft and submit a proposal, including other accounts that have contributed towards the proposal.

Punkpoll

Punkpoll is a decentralized voting platform on the Mina blockchain with a two utility token system that  represents political rights (zk-PUNK-nft as votes) and economic rights (PUNK Token for receipts and rewards). Voter eligibility is verified through accessible mechanisms, such as KYC via KakaoTalk and WhatsApp, ensuring a secure and transparent voting process. Users request their friends to authenticate each other’s identities. ZK-PUNK NFTs are issued post-authentication where voting receipts are provided as NFTs by smart contracts, ensuring vote inclusion. Participants receive PUNK TOKENs as rewards, enhancing engagement. 

Socialcap

Socialcap provides a voting platform for community based decision making processes that can be customised to the specific needs of each community. Socialcap allows members of a community to participate directly in the decision making process and cast their vote themselves. Since this can be time consuming, slow and challenging for complex and urgent decisions, Socialcap also allows community members to participate indirectly by delegating their decision making to elected representatives to vote on their behalf. Built on Mina, the voting process remains confidential and private since zero knowledge proofs allow each vote to be verified without revealing the voter’s choice.  The voting process also results in a consensus in blockchain based credentials that guarantee a transparent and immutable record of the consensus. 

Swarming tools

A previous blogpost also stressed how the study of swarms, especially how honeybees select new hives, is a key focus of collective intelligence research. Swarm intelligence can be modeled in terms of how decision making subunits (such as individual bees) that represent alternative options (different hive sites) compete and inhibit each other until their excitation exceeds a threshold, causing their option to be selected as the swarm’s decision. Similar modeling is used to explain how individual brains and groups of people make decisions.

Swarm intelligence in insects and animals involve very high speed feedback loops, allowing fish to detect vibrations in water propagating through schools, and birds to detect motions in the air propagating through flocks. Humans lack these natural abilities so tools, such as Swarm AI, provide artificial capabilities for doing so. Groups of people are connected over a network and algorithms provide high speed feedback loops by processing people’s inputs and returning their outputs in real time so that the group can collectively explore options and converge on the most agreeable one.

Swarming tools may be less easy to use than traditional deliberation methods, such as polls, surveys and voting, and need specific training. However, the different ways in which they process information could provide benefits for decision making. For example, traditional methods ask participants to self-report their sentiments but people are unreliable when reporting their feelings. Plus, people have different internal scales so it’s unclear how to aggregate their feelings across groups. Instead, swarming tools can actively observe how people behave.

Mina as a democratic innovator

Researchers, entrepreneurs and pioneers, including from the Mina community, are drawing on the methods of collective intelligence to test out viable alternatives of direct democracy. Involving people more directly in decision making through participatory and deliberative processes can help to make democracy more meaningful and its outcomes more legitimate.

Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance Team hopes to inspire ideas from the community about further democratic innovations that could be applied to Mina’s decision making! Please connect with us on Discord at the following channels:

• #announcements – the most important updates;
• #surveys – open surveys to gather everyone’s thoughts and ideas to improve proposals;
• #general-discussion – the primary place for all protocol governance discussions;
• #minaresearch – general questions or discussions related to topics from MinaResearch.