By
Kseniia Klichova
March 23rd, 2020
The Bitcoin Foundation Elections Committee has launched a new website that has been under construction for the last year.
The Bitcoin Foundation Elections Committee decided not to create another forum for candidates and members but made ‘The Distributed Opinion,’ a new official distributed opinion system for the Board Elections.”
Using The Distributed Opinion, Foundation members as well as those who are not registered via the system are able to see the candidates and their up-to-date status with regards to the Foundation members’ opinions.
If Bitcoin Foundation members want to modify their opinions having previously submitted their initial votes, they can do it easily. Members can give their either negative or positive opinions (or stay anywhere in between) leaving their rating on one or several candidates.
To go to any candidate’s profile, it’s necessary to click on his or her image or name. On candidates’ profile pages, users can find detailed information about candidates as well as the pros and cons that members can put forward supporting or, vice versa, decrying the candidates. Any candidate can get either pros or cons from the same member. But only one opinion can be placed towards the ‘smiley’ (‘support’) or the ‘sad’ (‘oppose’) side of the scale.
Michael Toomim, a coordinator of this project:
“The Distributed Opinion actually developed from my partner Travis Kriplean’s breakthrough PhD research—it’s a new social protocol that scales decision-making across humans. Compare this with how Bitcoin has a computer protocol that scales the minting of currency across miners. When we pair these together, we get the world’s first Decentralized Decision-Making for our Distributed Currency. But both technologies have enormous application beyond currency. It’s a wild time we live in, huh.”
In the discussion called ‘Consider.it – Radical new Election System is Ready!’ Toomim promotes the brand-new system:
“We’ve made a website that lets us deliberate and decide together without central mediation. Check it out at bitcoin.consider.it. The homepage visualizes all candidates’ popularity in realtime amongst the distributed membership. Go give your opinion on someone right now—you will see the candidate move!”
He also puts together the rules of the website:
- Anyone can participate, but only Foundation Members’ opinions count on the homepage rankings.
- To get member rights, you must create an account with the same email address you use to login to the Bitcoin Foundation.
- Candidates are ranked as follows. A member’s opinion falls on a scale from -1 to +1. Each candidate’s rank is calculated as sum(all opinions on candidate).
- I will moderate points and comments if necessary.
- This site is for deliberation only. Votes are not binding. Binding votes will by tallied on a different site.
It’s important to know that the votes on this site are still unofficial. The official voting is to open in about 2 weeks.
