other projects or whitepapers worth looking at for comparisons
http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/ Dissent accountable anonymous group communication Dissent builds on dining cryptographers and verifiable shuffle algorithms to offer provable anonymity guarantees, even in the face of traffic analysis attacks, of the kinds likely to be feasible for authoritarian governments and their state-controlled ISPs for example. Dissent seeks to offer accountable anonymity, giving users strong guarantees of anonymity while also protecting online groups or forums from anonymous abuse such as spam, Sybil attacks, and sockpuppetry. Unlike other systems, Dissent can guarantee that each user of an online forum gets exactly one bandwidth share, one vote, or one pseudonym, which other users can block in the event of misbehavior.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/credence/Credence_nsdi.pdf In this paper, we describe Credence, a decentralized ob- ject reputation and ranking system for large-scale peer- to-peer filesharing networks. Credence counteracts pol- lution in these networks by allowing honest peers to as- sess the authenticity of online content through secure tabulation and management of endorsements from other peers. Our system enables peers to learn relationships even in the absence of direct observations or interac- tions through a novel, flow-based trust computation to discover trustworthy peers. We have deployed Credence as an overlay on top of the Gnutella filesharing network, with more than 10,000 downloads of our client software to date. We describe the system design, our experience with its deployment, and results from a long-term study of the trust network built by users. Data from the live de- ployment shows that Credence’s flow-based trust compu- tation enables users to avoid undesirable content. Honest Credence clients can identify three quarters of the decoys encountered when querying the Gnutella network.
http://www.credentica.com/ISB0810SB.pdf another paper talking about blinded signatures and their use, locked with DRM to prevent copying the abstract here.
https://gnunet.org/sites/default/files/ba_dold_voting_24aug2014.pdf Cryptographically Secure, Distributed Electronic Voting This thesis describes the design and implementation of an electronic voting system in GNUnet, a framework for secure and decentralized networking. We provide a short sur- vey of voting schemes and existing implementations. The voting scheme we implemented makes use of threshold cryptography, a technique which requires agreement among a large subset of the election officials to execute certain cryptographic operations. Since such protocols have applications outside of electronic vot- ing, we describe their design and implementation in GNUnet separately.
https://docs.pol.is/welcome/Overview.html Polis overcomes these challenges and produces meaning from open ended responses. Participants can write what they think, but they can also agree and disagree with what others are saying one comment at a time. This process happens in real-time. As soon as someone writes, others can vote. Polis runs statistical analysis on these voting patterns, also in real-time. It produces opinion groups and surfaces the comments that brought each group together. It also surfaces comments that found broad consensus among participants. Polis scales to any number of participants, even millions. It accomplishes this by combining crowd behavior and machine learning. Humans can do what they are good at - reading text and forming snap judgments, as well as comparing statements. Computers can do what they are good at - finding patterns in large data sets.
https://www.countable.us/ Why does it have to be so hard to understand what our lawmakers are up to? With Countable, it doesn’t. Countable makes it quick and easy to understand the laws Congress is considering. We also streamline the process of contacting your lawmaker, so you can tell them how you want them to vote on bills under consideration. You can use Countable to: Read clear and succinct summaries of upcoming and active legislation. Directly tell your lawmakers how to vote on those bills by clicking “Yea” or “Nay”. Follow up on how your elected officials voted on bills, so you can hold them accountable in the next election cycle. Countable is available for free online, on iOS, and Android devices.
http://democracyos.org/ Propose Create your DemocracyOS in a click. Build proposals and be the change you want to see. Debate Debate in a platform that rewards the best arguments and filters that noise that usually ends up calling the trolls. Vote With a clear deadline, get everyone on board to reach a voted decision and avoid endless debates.
https://brigade.com/ Remind your politicians they work for you Your vote gives you power. Brigade helps you use that power to make the change you want to see. Get Started Now Continue with Facebook or Sign up with email
https://unherd.com/2018/09/save-democracy-must-disrupt/ http://g0v.asia "a group was formed, including Audrey, with a call to “fork the government”. It was a call for reform in the language of software developers: for government to take a different path, forking off from the current one. They called themselves Gov Zero – or just G0v – and with increasing volume and urgency demanded open politics as well as open source. The values of the Open Source Movement were morphing in to demands for mainstream political reform." "...if we were talking about Twitter or Facebook, we’d see echo chambers, spats, competing online petitions and massively contradictory information flowing to politicians. But pol.is produced something more useful than just feedback: “we found that it became a consensus-generating mechanism”, said Colin. People were asked to continue to draft statements, but the ones that were given visibility were those that garnered support from both sides."