The Governance Challenge

Teams participating in the Legal Hackers 2018 Computational Law and Blockchain Festival are encouraged to tackle the Governance Challenge with a high level design concept and rapid prototype project:

Conceptual Design

Develop a conceptual design and rapid prototype demonstrating a blockchain-based system for self-governance by a group or community.

This system may cover executive (enforcement and implementation), legislative (voting), and/or judicial (mediation and dispute resolution) functions of governance.

The conceptual design should specify the intended groups or communities that would use the governance system and include a realistic approach to a specific method of governance by that group or community.

For example, teams submitting a blockchain-based voting system (potentially based off of the ideas of liquid democracy, representative democracy, etc.) should be able to champion the design, implementation and deployment, and demonstrate how the system can be self-regulating, fair to all participants, and hack-proof.

Design Specifications

The design should specify:

• The basis of a vote (e.g. per person, per account, weighted, role based such as miners and secure node operators, value based such as account holders, etc., also considering staking requirements and related time locks)
• Reasoning why the vote basis was selected and why it is better or more suitable than other approaches (including reasoning for allocation of votes to different roles, quantity chose for staking, etc.)
• Whether and how the results of the voting system would be enforced and integrated within existing legal and governance frameworks (e.g. Terms of Service, Intermediary Liability laws).
• The features of the system: how is privacy maintained; how is identity proven; does it allow proxy voting; ballot structure; etc.
• Overview of the system design and architecture

Rapid Prototype

The prototype would demonstrate the voting, counting, and validation process in a legally valid and binding implementation.

• Voter identification (what credentials are used)
• The voting method
• Vote validation during voting and how votes are stored and protected
• Counting, validation, and verification of results

Team Participation

To register your team project for the Sovereign Legal Identity Challenge, submit a GitHub Issue with the following information:

• The name of your project and your team name;
• The names of your team members including the GitHub username of at least one member;
• The URL of the GitHub repository where your project will be developed and submitted;
• The URL of the YouTube Channel where your team will submit video; and
• The name and URL of the Festival Node your team is participating in

Criteria and Judging

Teams are expected to:

• Pitch their project idea at or before the start of the 2018 CL+B Fest through a 2 minute or shorter video clip uploaded to YouTube under Creative Commons license;
• Present their final project in a 2 minute or shorter video clip uploaded to YouTube under Creative Commons license;
• Provide their final project materials (including any slides, video and other media, documentation, working code, etc) through a GitHub repository under an open source license.

Final team projects will be reviewed and rated by a panel of invited judges. Evaluation criteria will be added to this challenge page after an initial meeting of the judges and prior to the start of the CL+B Festival event. The top team projects will be determined based on rank order resulting from an aggregate of the ratings by each judge. The team submitting the top ranked, highest rated project will be invited to present the project in-person at MIT to interested students, faculty and researchers.

More information on challenge criteria and additional prizes and awards will be added to this challenge page as they are finalized.