DISCLAIMER: Backend code was written locally and uploaded here on June 26, 2022. The frontend code was also upoaded on June 26, 2022 but it was written on June 25, 2022 here: https://github.com/davidcarr3ra/sortition_frontend
Our project is a contract that optionally enables any DAO proposal to use sortition for voting. Sortition is the practice of randomly selecting a small group of eligible, unique voters from the wider population (e.g. 10%) to make decisions for the whole group (like a jury panel). Our MVP will include logic that selects the voters for the proposal being submitted using Chainlink VRF v2, deployed through Tatum, and leverage WorldCoin to prevent sybil attacks.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are often praised for and are promoted as a fairer, more transparent digitized form of democratic governance. In practice though, many DAOs are modeled and built off of the real-world governance systems that we see and use everyday. While this may be a logical place to start, doing so risks introducing, into Web3 governance models, the same flaws and inefficiencies that have plagued real-world democracies for decades. Not surprisingly, the structures we place our faith in to run and govern our societies have drifted very far away from true democracy, where the power rests in the people. Chief examples of this phenomenon include this week’s momentous decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn Roe v. Wade when 85% of regular Americans believe abortion should be legal [1], when Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election with only 45.9% of the popular vote [2], or the $3.7B USD spent in 2021 by special interest groups on lobbying politicians who are meant to be “servants of the people” [3].
With the advent of Web3 technologies, we finally have the tools to not only re-design how these institutions should work but also the opportunity to build something better — void of all the faults and imperfections that plague our existing democratic systems that we’ve so unknowingly and unfortunately become all too accustomed to.
We propose the use of a centuries-old form of direct democracy to bring more fairness and transparency to Web3 governance models: Sortition.
Sortition is the practice of selecting a smaller group of voters from a larger pool of eligible participants to vote on proposals and make decisions for the wider community. This method of governance was used in ancient Athens, and in fact, is still used today for selecting jurors for jury duty in most criminal justice systems in North America. We view and label jury duty, as the name implies, as a civic duty to be performed by individual community members for the greater good and security of the collective. This distinction perfectly describes what it means to give “power to the people” and what the sortition-based voting primitive attempts to achieve.
Sortition, when used in DAOs, has many benefits, including:
- An organic rise in community engagement - since anyone could be called upon to make a decision for the community and can be incentivized financially to do so, members are incentivized to be well informed and educated on the proposals and state-of-the-DAO.
- Empowerment of ordinary community members (i.e. direct democracy) - regular people can be given the chance to make real, important decisions that impact the wider group
- Promotion of fairness (i.e. if selected, you only have 1 vote regardless of how many governance tokens you own)
- Elimination of personal bias and agendas from the decision-making process
- Decoupling of financial incentives (e.g. fewer cases of “the powerful do everything they can to remain in power”)
In our project, we introduce a way for DAOs to govern using sortition that relies on the Chainlink Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF) to randomly select a statistically representative sub-group of voters from the wider community. Being a juror for proposals in sortition-enabled DAOs will be optional but those that accept their role are rewarded financially to encourage participation, in the present and in the future.