Inspiration and Essence
Civol is digital direct democracy on your phone, with a built-in decentralized 4th Estate. It's based on experts discoursing and debating important issues, and everyone who is interested in those issues voting their level of resonance or agreement with what the experts are saying. We call this ambient voting because Civol makes it an effortless and rewarding part of the media consumption flow.
Because Civol's market is communities at every scale, worldwide, from DAOs to nonprofits, villages, cities, states, nations, the planet and beyond, it requires infinite scalability.
And because Civol is all about voting, blockchain security, immutability, and verifiability are essential. But at the same time, it must have a high transaction rate.
Because Civol is about sharing revenue generated by the platform within a self contained sustainable ecosystem, it needs to be tokenized.
And because Civol is a consumer facing dapp it has to deliver web speed performance.
And because Civol will be mission critical infrastructure for the communities it serves it has to be unstoppable and tamperproof.
All of these requirements brought me to DFINITY, the decentralized cloud, the blockchain singularity, the one and only Internet Computer. In the beginning I watched Dominic slack-jawed, literally awestruck. It seemed unreal, no way, not everything... But soon I realized the IC was in fact a dream come true, exactly what Civol needed to fulfill its transformational potential, and the DFINITY Foundation would even help me build it!
So with the initial 25k grant we built a working prototype of the Civol Xchange Player Recorder, in Flutter, but it didn't run on the IC. With a follow-on 50k grant and a new rock star team we have completed the XPR and made it run happily on the IC, which included developing our Parallel Video System, all in Milestone 1. Now for Milestone 2 we've greatly enhanced the PVS, and added the core voting and consensus capability, which is what we're showcasing in this project.
Architecture and Construction
The Civol Frontend is being built using Flutter, and will be housed in the requisite assets canister once we have the web app ready. Right now we are strictly mobile. Flutter provides us with Android, iOS, and Web apps from a single codebase. The Backend currently lives in two main canisters, Data and Video Management, both developed in Motoko, along with an autoscalable array of video storage canisters, currently 16 of them.
Challenges and Learnings
The general challenge we faced was how to make voting ambient. How to minimize and simplify the experience so as to render it both effortless and enjoyable, so that a user might comfortably watch and vote on 10 or more video posts in a day.
And with potentially millions of people voting 10x/day, what is the optimal way to store all these votes on chain and generate meaningful consensus metrics from them in real time?
A final challenge has been testing. Here we had to develop a tool to inject test users and have them vote using a combination of scripts and methods.
What we've learned is that a mission critical problem like democratic voting can be solved by a tiny team of unknowns given access to the amazing technological substrate that is the Internet Computer.
What's next for Civol
Our next milestone is a launchable Alpha, which will include decentralized methods and functionality to empower the community to create new discourses and threads, as well as ensure that the panel of experts on every thread is being constantly refreshed and open to experts from across the spectrum. Also coming soon will be our Flutter Web app, our Cache canister, and the first version of the CVL wallet, possibly with voucher tokens that will be exchangeable for real tokens once the latter launches. We look forward to becoming one of the first dapps to go fully autonomous with SNS.
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