Decentralized Autonomous Government

Inspiration

Democracy was founded 'for the people, by the people, and of the people', but in today's scenario, representatives have more power than the people who vote for them. People in many villages, cities, counties, countries, states, and even universities are dissatisfied with the system of governance, and many times it is due to corrupt and inept representatives. This introduces an inherent flaw in the system, which was supposed to represent the interests of the people. To counter this we came up with the idea of DAG, a platform representing the ideas, opinions, and decisions of the people.

What it does

This project is a spin-off of a decentralized autonomous organization, called "Decentralized Autonomous Government" (DAG). Here people can come up with key policies, have a vote, and based on the vote, it will be added to the system or not added to the system. Similarly, they can vote on resolutions, hire committees to come up with laws which they can vote on, decide on government contracts, throw out (or more specifically fire) committee members which they feel aren't doing work. The DAG will replace the Legislative Wing of our current Government system and drastically reduce the power of the executive to a figurehead. The Judicial branch will however still be separate, so to avoid unlawful populist opinion be overturned.

How I built it

The software for this project was built using the Remix IDE for testing and displaying the outputs of the various parts of the program. The entire system was built in the Solidity Language leveraging the Ethereum Blockchain as our backend.

Challenges I ran into

Initially, DAG was supposed to have a fancy WebApp to complement the amazing Ethereum Blockchain backend, however things didn't go as planned, and we had to settle on Remix for our demonstration purposes. We also tried to pivot to a python-based CLI but that too proved too hard to do. Both of these things, the WebApp and Python CLI failed due to the issues we ran into with integrating the Web3 and Ethers.JS Libraries of Ethereum that connect the backend to the front end of the software.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that this application does have a real-world direct application in places where there exist power vacuums and there is a lack of governance. We are also one of the few if not the only team that has gone for a blockchain solution as our core focus.

What I learned

I learned a lot about resolving nitty-gritty issues in Node and AngularJS, Web3, and Solidity. I also learned a lot about what good governance should look like.

What's next for Decentralized Autonomous Government

Decentralized Autonomous Government is a very promising project. The software submitted today is just the tip of the iceberg, we plan to introduce many more features such as actually making a budget, expression of opinion in an appropriate manner, debates, and much more. DAG will also be more like a framework rather than a stand-alone application, from which models of government can be generated. This can help it being applied in the corporate side of things as well, with many a startup wanting to utilize the power of a Decentralized Autonomous Government/Organization to help in the smooth and democratic functioning of their teams.

Built With

• blockchain
• ethereum
• solidity