eDemocracy DAO has an exclusive license to bring Ethelo to the Web3 space.

The Ethelo technology combines a rugged, well-tested and user-friendly interface with a cutting edge data analysis engine for identifying good decision outcomes.

There are two unique benefits to the Ethelo platform and engine:

  1. Versatility: Ethelo provides a powerful multi-criteria decision making framework that uses a broad lexicon of parameters to describe a broad variety of different kinds of decisions and complex problems with many potential outcomes.
  2. Fairness: Ethelo is able to integrate participant preferences across many dimensions to identify specific, actionable outcomes with broadly, evenly distributed support. Ethelo builds support for collective action by providing a fair process for solving problems; an optimized consensus.

Deliberative Decision Making

Many people think of group decision making as voting. However, voting is in many ways the “final act.” Before voting there is a process of generation, deliberation and aggregation that almost completely determines the success or not of the voting stage. The oft-overlooked question is “what is voted upon?” Large, scalable decisions for decentralized decision-making such as our current democratic systems distill choices down to simple alternatives or small sets of options. This choice procedure promotes outcomes that appeal to distinct groups, and so outcomes which only require 50% support (or even less) can succeed - creating winners and losers. This inevitably leads to polarization.

The question of “who chooses the options which are put to vote” quickly exposes the shallowness of current decentralized decision making. This was noted in DAO Landscape: Case Studies in Decentralised Governance, by Grace Rachmany.

Ethelo on the other hand reaches behind the voting stage to the deliberation process that leads to proposals. It is able to break decisions down into a range of parameters and engage people in finding a proposal that appeals to a broad cross-section, maximizing support and minimizing polarization.

Underlying the Ethelo UI is a unique multi-attribute decision algorithm with the ability to evaluate millions of decision outcomes in real-time. It combines nonlinear solvers and collective intelligence to find broad consensus even in complex, highly polarized situations.

In other words, the Ethelo platform helps find common ground. It utilizes an algorithm optimized to find peace instead of conflict even when dealing with divisive decisions.

This graphic illustrates the intentions behind the design of Ethelo’s platform.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/4diURvIyRGMUOtH-90MN7we3fJVKjnH7ssyv2jD6iV47gpHM2FBu29fSIeQql5Y3czbFHpy-aevF3WzFpaLPjgX5Z2RYFfpIXSAFzpfZqtx8f4k4_SBEAhRIFsrYxSH4fL2pqYmV

Optimizing the engine that solves this algorithm is the object of an ongoing research partnership with the University of Waterloo.

Web Platform

The Ethelo platform consists of an admin panel that allows configuration of an almost infinite variety of decision workflows. The most common decisions have been compiled into templates, which are stored in our library and customized for specific processes.

Ethelo platform has been rigorously tested in the field by a large variety of individuals and devices, and continuously improved over almost a decade of active service: