Fullvoting is an idea to combine direct, representative and augmented voting for DAOs.

Why?

1. To make better decisions
2. To increase the number of people who can effectively collaborate in decentralized organisations

Many DAOs such as ENS, BitDAO, Decentraland, Proof of Humanity and Uniswap use Snapshot for off-chain voting.

These DAOs choose one or more voting strategies on Snapshot.

A voting strategy on Snapshot that would enable direct+representative+augmented voting would allow eth addresses to delegate to a URL. E.g. my-voting-provider.com/user

Then, the js code of the strategy would fetch something like my-voting-provider.com/user/space/proposal to know a vote.

These voting URLs would have no authentication. Anyone could see on my-voting-provider.com/USER/space/proposal would see the vote of the representative USER.

These URL voting providers are composable.

For example, provider1.com/BLUE could delegate to the following list:

1. provider1.com/A
2. provider1.com/B
3. provider2.com/C

In the previous example, provider1 could also let BLUE vote directly.

So if BLUE doesn't vote but A does, BLUE would vote as A regardless of B and C. If BLUE and A don't vote but B does, BLUE would vote as B regardless of C. But if B doesn't vote either, do as C says.

Consider that BLUE, A and B are from the same URL voting provider, but C doesn't. This means that A and B can use delegation list + override like BLUE. But C, the last delegate from BLUE, is on a completely different provider.

This other URL voting provider could be a cascading list. If A doesn't vote but B does, vote as B regardless of C. But if B doesn't vote either, do as C says.

Or this URL voting provider could be a16z — who already delegates half of their voting tokens.

Or it could be an AI-assisted URL voting provider and suggest us to vote according to our past votes. If we agree, we don't need to do anything. Otherwise, we can always vote directly and/or change your delegates or voting providers at any time.

Or one of the delegates on the URL voting provider could be completely autonomous like César Hidalgo’s augmented democracy TED talk.

Or it could allow C to delegate to a list of all Nobel laureates or MIT neuroscientists. This provider could integrate with Wikidata/Wikipedia to confirm their occupation, alma mater and awards — like my old side project agreelist.org

Anyway, to mitigate risks, off-chain delegations could end a few days before direct voting.

And your URL voting provider could end AI-assisted delegates before human delegates.

That way people could always be alerted and override votes from delegates.

To sum up, if we implement direct+representative+augmented voting for DAOs we could:

1. Make better decisions
2. Increase the number of people who can effectively collaborate in decentralized organisations

And this is important because of what the MIT Professor Alex Pentland said:

The biggest problem in the world is not climate change, war or poverty, but how we organise among ourselves to make good decisions and carry them out.

What do you think? Does it make sense? Should we build this?

If you think it is worth exploring, please reach me at @fullvoting or leave your email:

Originally published on June 21, 2022