Electora

Submission

PROJECT NAME

Electora

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

Electora is a tool that makes governance 10x better by adding privacy to applications and voting.

It's perfect for managing grant and scolarship programs, job applications, community decision-making, nominations, Public Good funding, and any other use case where privacy matters. 

Keywords: gated proposals, ZK proofs, private voting, grant management, private job applications, private fellowship programs, private community votes.

Architecture

Electora is really a protocol, and the app is merely a demonstration. It has a modular design:

•  Sismo - zk proofs used for voter eligibility, and candidate nomination
• Threshold Network - for conditional decryption used to keep votes private during the election period
• Arweave - decentralized, permanent storage for storing all votes ever cast

The benefits of this are great. Instead of diluting the space with more tools/solutions, we are building ontop of well established projects. Also, the modularity means that components can easily be switched out...Arweave for IPFS, Sismo for Semaphore etc..

CONTACT

Discord - james.c#7468 meatballs#5289 santicristobal#

tg - santicristobal

REPO

electora-vote/electora-app

Scroll contract

VIDEO DEMO

https://streamyard.com/7asp5v7tw4fc2pc5

BOUNTIES

Governance Track and Intro

The year 139 BC marked the introduction of the first of the four Tabellariae Leges, most widely known as the “ballot laws of the Roman Republic”.

Why are we talking about them after more than 2,000 years? Because they successfully limited the influence of the aristocratic class, reduced bribery, and expanded freedom of choice for voters, setting a new standard for governance mechanisms: privacy.

Privacy is a key component to building a new, better, more resilient governance system. It´s not just some specific use case. It´s enhancing every on-chain interaction (Sismo) to build 10x better governance solutions.

Electora is a governance tool that DAOs cam leverage for several activities: job applications (TalentLayer), grant programs and Public Good funding (ENS), nominations for scholarships (Talent Protocol), community decision-making (Cypher Party), service proposals, collective behavior (Spaghett ETH), and, of course, legislation on how to transform an Italian city into the pioneer Ethereum-powered micro metropolis (Let´s fucking GO!). 

Please find more detail on the infrastructure we lean upon and the new use cases we unlocked below:

Sismo

Sismo is a key component of our product. We use Sismo groups to determine who can vote, but, most importantly, who can add new options (candidates) to an existing ballot.

What does this mean? This means that:

1. DAOs can create open ballots (votations) where people satisfying a given criteria define the options between which people satisfying a given criteria can vote.

2. People submitting options and voting can demonstrate they satisfy the required criteria using ZK Proofs and therefore preserving their privacy.

We strongly encourage you to keep reading to explore together different use cases we can derive from this implementation.

TalentLayer

How do we use TalentLayer? We use TalentLayer's reputation and its integration with Sismo to allow companies, users, or DAOs to add work-related criteria to their ballots without compromising participants’ privacy.

Why? To enhance the labor market’s privacy, allowing workers and service providers to participate in Request-for-Proposal, grant programs or job applications without disclosing personal information or being subject to bias.

What is the novelty? While TalentLayer already has privacy-enhancing mechanisms, we bring this to situations in which voting is required.

Let’s explore a use case together:

- A DAO creates a Request-for-Proposal that only allows people who have already worked with the DAO to participate, and only allows people who have a given NFT to decide on which proposals to take (think of grants council member NFT). Users submitting options don’t have to disclose private information and voters are not biased.

- A company creates a job application that requires applicants to have verifiable experience in a given domain. Applicants can demonstrate they have the necessary skills without revealing additional information.

ENS

How do we use ENS? We allow ballot creators to include holding an ENS subdomain to create new options for the ballot (candidates) or to vote, all done privately through Sismo integration.

Why? To give communities more options on how to make decisions. While privacy can create some compromises for some big DAO decisions, there are many situations in which community members could be subject to strong peer pressure, especially in smaller communities which are the ones that typically gather under an ENS domain and use subdomains as a way to signal community involvement.

What is the novelty? We allow small communities using ENS subdomains to have private ballots.

Let´s go through a use case together:

- A community opens up a votation on whether to expel a community member or not and users vote without having to expose themselves to possible consequences of voting for either option.

Talent Protocol

How do we use Talent Protocol? We use Talent Protocol’s reputation to create a more efficient way for communities to elect their members to receive a grant, scholarship or membership.

We created a Sismo group that allows users to create ZK proofs of their Talent Protocol achievements. These ZK proofs can be used by ballot creators as a criterion to define who is able to propose options (think of nominations or submitting a proposal) and who is able to vote.

Why? Talent Protocol provides our tool with very valuable information concerning people’s reputations, which is essential for creating more fair compensation systems that consider skills and past achievements instead of popularity.

What is the novelty? It's actually 3 novelties:

1. We are able to add privacy to existing election systems.

2. We bring enhanced granularity to the election system since ballot creators can define different criteria for users proposing options and users voting.

3. We take the results and election on-chain and allow for decentralized participation.

Here´s a possible use case (which might or might not be based on a true story):

- Talent Protocol could organize a scholarship program were the community votes privately. This will help Santi, who has 4 frens participating in the election and can only vote for one of them, but doesn’t want his frens to know who he voted for. It could also help Talent Protocol define very specific criteria for who can apply (by creating a new option on the ballot) and who can vote (by selecting one of the ballot options, ergo, one of the applicants).

The Graph

We created our own subgraph to allow anyone to get information on what’s happening on our platform.

Is it a novel use case? Well, private voting can be used for over 1000 things so I guess one of those 1000 things is gonna be novel enough. Getting events emitted and registered under our own subgraph is a key step in making the most out of our privacy layer.

SpaghettETH

We believe our tool is PERFECT for privately dealing with 3 out of 4 of the ideas mentioned in your bounty description:

- political, electoral, and representational purposes at the local level (let´s fucking vote for the next Sindaco on chain. It HAS to be private so…).

- Citizen Science policies (reputation-based private voting as a peer-review mechanism?).

- sustainable collective behaviors for: consumption, upcyclicing, circular economies, transportation of people and goods (so much fun stuff to do).

And we also love Spaghetti. One of our team members even calls himself meatballs.

Cypher Party

Not gonna lie. We didn´t use EthereansOS, but Electora would be a great tool for collectively reclaiming an abandoned Italian ghost town and morphing it into the pioneer Ethereum-powered micro metropolis. Just let us know when so we don´t miss any of the fun.

LIVE APP

app.electora.eu 

Please note that you should connect your wallet manually. You can freely create your custom ballot election/request-for-proposal/funding round/job application but you need to belong to specific Sismo groups to be able to vote or candidate on ballots created by other people.

PREVIOUS SUBMISSION FOR ETHDAM

We are working on an existing project. This is a project that was started before ETHRome hackathon, specifically at ETHDam 2023.

Here's the link to ETHDam's submission.

Here's a google docs with a comprehensive overview of previous iterations.

Many things that had been built for the last hackathon had to be fixed since the underlying infrastructure suffered significant changes in the 5 months that went through.

TEAM MEMBERS

meatballs: chief raspberry officer

theref.eth: chief bug fixing officer

santicristobal: chief talking to people officer