4. ECF.network Solution Based on Pensieve
Background. In 2018, the early community of Ethereum builders founded ECF (Ethereum Community Fund) as a grant program to support the development of critical infrastructure and public goods in the ecosystem. Since then, ECF has been initiating, supporting and promoting work and projects to expand and reach the potential of Blockchain and Web3 ecosystems, with the mission to be flexible, nimble and adaptive to the needs of the decentralisation communities.
A new platform of ECF.network has been designed and implemented based on Pensieve Framework as a community-curated and governed knowledge base of our collective book of history and a manual for finding and building accountable and impactful web3 projects and projects leveraging web3 technologies. It aims to be a necessary application of set of social mechanisms for legitimacy to assist decision-making in governance and coordination.
Vision. The long-term vision for ECF.network is to collaborate with other knowledge bases and tools within the community, aiming to preserve a diversity of ideas crucial for humanity's adaptive capacity, and with an enhanced ability to coordinate among individuals across borders to more efficiently tackle challenges globally.
This chapter introduces ECF.network as an extension beyond the basic Pensieve mechanism, exploring areas that the original framework does not cover. It aims to provide only an overview of ECF.network as a product, not a comprehensive elaboration. For detailed documentation, please refer to the online resources on ECF.network.
4.1 Problem Statement
Decentralised and blockchain technologies are revolutionary in offering potential for large-scale coordinations with enormous resources. However, after more than a decade of development, the benefits have not proliferate to broader population, and its role in solving real-world problems is still arguably insignificant. We propose ECF.network can be an efficient tool to remove the below obstacles and boost the adoption of web3 solutions that improve individual and community empowerment:
Scarcity of Legitimacy. Legitimacy is a powerful social technology, a crucial aspect of community-driven projects and decentralised networks, but it is often scarce and based on quasi-intuition rather than verifiable facts. The scarcity of legitimate and verifiable information undermines the ability to evaluate and understand projects adequately, especially those that operate within distributed networks. The frameworks needed to assess such projects' legitimacy are often underdeveloped, leading to gaps in governance and community trust.
Information Disparity. In decentralised systems, the trustworthiness of information underpins all coordination and productive activities. However, human coordination and broader activities often do not benefit from blockchain's capabilities to verify factual information comprehensively. This disparity leads to challenges in capturing sufficient track records and maintaining the authenticity and accessibility of information across different layers and community interactions.
Broken Links. A significant challenge not only within decentralised information systems is the difficulty in distinguishing opinions from evidence-based information. The absence of effective mechanisms to link information directly to its sources frequently results in confusion and misinformation, creating friction in understanding and utilising data effectively.
Neutral Sources. Credible sources of information are hard to find in general, and the dependency on institutional sources has seen its own pitfalls. As in everywhere else, the problem of source neutrality concerns the challenge of accessing unbiased and trustworthy information. Centralised sources often face credibility issues due to potential biases that align with institutional interests, complicating the verification process and leading to fragmented information.
4.2 ECF.network Solution Overview
Overview. ECF.network addresses these issues first by leveraging a decentralised, private, and permission-less infrastructure to ensure information authenticity and integrity, focusing on community-driven solutions and factual verification. The 'ECF Community Pensieve' underpins a decentralised fact-checking tool, crucial for maintaining the integrity of information. It facilitates the verification of content through community consensus, reducing misinformation and building trust with minimal cost and maximum efficiency. Then ECF translates accountability evaluation from its expertise and research into the data framework (identification of relevant Items and taxonomy ) : ECF Blueprints. With mechanisms built in the code, the platform attempts to mobilise the community to share knowledge about projects, curate, and promote accountable decentralised applications and initiatives in the space that improve people’s well-being, address real-world issues, and protect the participants in the community. Once validated, in mid-term, community would have a trustworthy reference for both individual and collective decision-making to happen, by facilitating the coordination of resources for supporting accountable impactful causes.
Goal. ECF.network aims to fostering a transparent environment where the legitimacy of information and projects is collaboratively verified and maintained, enhancing trust and effective governance within decentralised communities. Through the mechanism of ECF.network, community help build the credibility of a project by sharing and providing knowledge of projects that assist evaluation of their accountability.
User Flow. Anyone can propose a web3 project as a Page to the knowledge base of ECF.network by filling the Items pre-determined for users to contribute to for understanding of a project’s accountability in the aspects of its transparency, participation, performance, security, complaint and redress. By gaining Contribution Points and voting for different submissions, users get to publish and promote accountable projects to the community with community verified information. Combined with PlatformStake, contributors get to curate projects to gain community’s attention.
This test case ECF Platform goes beyond the scope of its function of discovery of web3 projects in two ways:
The design principles outlined in Section 4.3 of the ECF.network serve as a crucial enhancement to the ideal knowledge-sharing framework beyond the Pensieve Mechanism. These principles aim to present a value proposition deeply rooted in the ethos of the Web3 community. With ECF.network as a validated case, demonstrating a sustainable public good owned and governed by the community, the adoption of openly accessed, community-contributed, immutable knowledge bases governed independently by communities can become more widespread.
In the long-term roadmap, platform intends to promote a comprehensive toolkit for efficient coordination that can be used with confidence after the knowledge shared in later stage
4.3 Design principles
Decentralised Technical Framework. ECF.network is a decentralised application run on a peer-to-peer network of computers rather than a single computer. It utilises the Pensieve Mechanism with employment of smart contracts and decentralised storage to log and verify transactions and modifications, ensuring that all community activities are auditable and traceable.
Community ownership. A fundamental value of the knowledge base developed around the Pensieve Mechanism is its inherent community control over content, underpinned by web3 technologies and collective data ownership. This principle is crucial as it forms the foundation for trust, transparency, and collaboration within social networks and organisations, ensuring that all stakeholders have governance in the content displayed and managed. The extensive community involvement in decision-making processes, empowers users to guide the governance and content curation. This participatory model fosters a sense of ownership and accountability among all community members.
Open Participation. The open participation in content editing and governance is crucial for maintaining the platform’s neutrality, ensuring no user group is excluded. Knowledge needs to obtain representation, adequate reviews, and reflect as much as possible not only the majority opinion, but also the minority opinion and the process that leads to the conclusion. The platform’s design should encourage ongoing contributions, welcoming new users to engage and address any gaps in knowledge previously established by earlier user groups.
Transparent Fair Process. All the processes, The Pensive and ECF.network mechanisms described in this paper are protocols in code and transparent to all users. It should be open to changes based on testing and feedback from communities, and subject to updating with community governance.
Neutrality. As the design addresses a community-owned vehicle, it is critical that the platform displays information impartially and objectively, and that it reflects the community's will and collective intellect to adopt the information displayed, and that the platform itself will not and cannot take a role in deciding for the community, but remains a neutral tool.
Immutability. Our collective knowledge and cognition of the world evolves in response to the expansion of the frontiers of human knowledge, technology, and time. It is therefore held as a principle that community-owned knowledge should not be removed because of majority will of a given time. We argue that even with the fewest supporters, the information presented is valuable and should not be subject to majority censorship, despite the fact that it may not receive the most resources to be broadcast. We believe In the process of pursuing truth, all information discovered and its sources should be faithfully documented.
The immutability of data on the platform does not imply a lack of information correction, but rather that the events of correction is transparent and completely documented. The displayed knowledge with the Pensieve’s design, in fact reveals evolutionary selection of relevance: it is natural that information given less weight and support sinks to less important virtual estate of the platform, and so is the case for projects in the community curation process, and thus destruction of Item and project Page data is considered unnecessary and against the design principle. Hence, the information can be modified, changed, re-organised and re- adapted, but such changes made to the public ledger should be reflected in the records for when it is needed after and therefore the choice of a decentralised network is best fit for maintaining the neutrality of the platform against centralisation risks.
Reward and Rationing (Proof of Work). Not all preferable actions taken by the contributors are rewarded, despite the fact that verification and correction are needed work in the knowledge base. In scenarios, where reward only increases engagement and does not expand the database or improves the quality of data, it is strongly discouraged by the platform’s mechanism to give rewards of any form. ECF.network limits Contribution Points and PlatformStake distribution to only the following contributions coherent to Pensieve Mechanism’s design:
Users get reward when they substantiate an empty Item and provide information to the community, creating value for the platform (passing Genesis Verification for an Item or a Page).
Users might get reward when they spend resources to bring controversial Items to public’s attention and place stakes to indicate their conviction in the conceived truth.
Communities could define rules of “good behaviours”, acknowledge and document contribution in user logs but it should not result directly in weight of governance immediately without testing impacts on the governance.
Risk Mitigation with Incentive Alignment (Proof of Stake). Adherent to Pensieve Mechanism, ECF.network also introduces stakes into the system of fact discovery to bind the best effort in truthfulness of the information, and consequently the integrity and prospect of the platform, to the users who are governing the platform’s content and the platform itself. With material loss and gain, the virtuous cycle of improving value of the platform leading to increasing value of stakes can take place.
4.4 Governance
Governance is part of the solution of ECF.network’s design.
1. Authority
Authority in this system is collectively held by all participants, mirroring practices seen in open-source communities. Decisions are made and governance is conducted through consensus or collective agreement, ensuring that every stakeholder has a say in the process. This inclusive approach fosters a shared responsibility and accountability among all involved.
ECF.network’s governance model is firstly merit-based, emphasising the quality and utility of contributions over the contributor's identity. This system promotes equitable and weighted-voting governance by valuing community contributions based on their merit. The ECF Platform’s design calculates a user's influence on the platform through the 'PlatformWeight' algorithm, which considers the user's 'PlatformStake' and 'Contribution Points'. This mechanism ensures that user influence is based on engagement and contribution to the ecosystem.
In the design of ECF Platform, the merit and legitimacy of a user is gained through contribution to both the web3 ecosystem and the platform, meaning users who have made more contributions to the ecosystem have more weight in the decision making. Their algorithmic influence is proportionate to contribution made across time.
Secondly, the governance is also identity indifferent. For the platform to fully run by itself in a decentralised autonomous network, the mechanisms are purposefully designed to depend on the defined merits and minimise the need and usage of distinguishing unique users. Thus no personal data of the users should be considered in the merit-based governance mechanism. The most crucial design to create the system that is safe for user identity commands the system where identity is irrelevant to the functionality of the system. The ECF Pensieve Mechanism considers, and only considers whether activities conducted by participants of the platform fit the purposes of the knowledge base intended when it comes down to allocate weight to participants or accepting proposed content, and is indifferent to any elements other than that, this mechanism potentially is open to constructing collaboration protocols for any possible players that are not necessarily in the form of a unique individual human being or groups of human beings, or human beings enhanced by tools such as artificial intelligence.
2. Scope
Through gained authority, any contributor to the ECF.network knowledge base can participate in different levels of governance.
Level 1. Knowledge Governance based on Pensieve Mechanism (Submission Level): gained Contribution Points pass legitimacy to govern and promote contributors’ selected version to be considered.
Level 2. Projects Curation (Page-level knowledge curation): Ordering projects according to its relevant categories and present best practice with community input.
Level 3. ECF Blueprint Governance
Data-framework level: Contribution Points guarantees users’ participation in governance over the Items of a project Page that are rewardable when they are contributed to.
ItemWeight: Contribution Points and ItemWeight allow users to participate in the governance of the weight each Item carries, in the ECF Blueprint moderating incentive mechanism, and governing the governance model of ECf.network platform.
Level 4. Goal Alignment (Operational-level): this is a more generic and comprehensive branch of the governance that empowers community to work towards effective goal alignment. It can focus on any aspect of the operation of the platform and major governance decision and is going to be implemented with the product ECF.network platform itself once all previous levels of governance methods are validated.
4.5 Issues and Concerns
Aside from the general technical concerns and problems that are being addressed diligently by the builders of the entire web3 communities, below listed are acknowledged issues and concerns pertinent to the platform and design:
Platform Operational Cost. With significant information gathered by the platform and frequent data exchange, reconciliation to be recorded, the transaction and storage costs related to the tech-stack of choice must be factored into the design from the start.
Evaluation of Viability. The success of the Pensieve Mechanism and the test case ECF platform is essentially a qualitative measurement of how factual and valuable the information documented with the platform's mechanism is regarded by community users. Hence, more research is needed to understand the quality of engagements, the subsequent timeliness, and the referential value of information provided by collective efforts via the platform.
Limitations in in “Merits" and"Contribution" recognition: The ECF platform begins to prioritising the allocation of weight to users whose claims can be backed by immutable proofs on fully decentralised blockchains, or from credible sources verifiable by decentralised systems including the ECF platform itself after deployment. This is due to the fact that verification must be of least cost possible and without the need for human intervention for auditing proofs and evidence from sources more centralised and opaque.
Spam. The balance between frictionless user experience and quality contribution is a fundamental long-term challenge, and platform protection against attacks and quality degradation must not come at the expense of user privacy.
Invasion of privacy. Only information that users choose to broadcast across networks and share via interactive features is stored and published by the platform (e.g., content sharing, messaging and commenting functionalities, etc.). Any information users provide using the platform's sharing features ("User Content") will be accessible to other users with whom they share. It is unavoidable that a system that records immutably the sensitive information of personal privacy will continue to harm the user. The platform is obligated to:
Warn users about disclosing information, whether it is their own or someone else's, and,
Research and develop designs leveraging zero-knowledge proof to provide greater protection even when users are asked to disclose in social scenarios on the platform.
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