Eden Showcases its Alternative Approach to Democracy

Eden on EOS elected its fourth group of chief delegates at the weekend. Could it mend our broken political system?


Credit: Bywire News, Canva
Credit: Bywire News, Canva
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LONDON (Bywire News) - A quick look at the world at the moment should be enough to show anyone that democracy as we know it is in trouble. From the rise of Donald Trump in the states to the quintessentially British horror story of Liz Truss' conventional democratic elections failing to deliver. Demands are becoming deafening for something different and one blockchain community thinks it may have found it. 

This weekend saw Eden on EOS celebrate its fourth successful election. Eden is a community within EOS dedicated, in the words of its website, to helping its members ‘life, liberty, prosperity and justice for all.' What that means in practice has been the topic of ongoing debate. For some Eden is the governance layer for EOS providing leadership and supporting the growth of the network. For others, it’s a grand experiment for a new way to manage decentralised organisations. 

Central to that is the principle of fractal democracy and the upvote process. While conventional democratic institutions thrive off division and conflict, the upvote process aims to build consensus and a way of voting leadership teams that is free of corruption and works with the best interests of the community in mind.  

Using this process, Eden elects a group of chief delegates to lead it forward every three months. It starts with all election participants splitting up into groups of five. Among themselves, they will vote for a super-majority to decide who should advance to the next round as their representative. 

The process is repeated until you are left with a final group of five with a head chief delegate being chosen by a random process of sortition. 

The theory is that it promotes those most likely to take the overall interests of the community into account and judging by the weekend’s result it is proving reasonably successful. 

This fourth group of chief delegates includes a mixture of old hands in the chief delegate process as well as a few new faces. 

Chris Barnes was elected for his third term as a chief delegate and is the only survivor from the most recent group of chief delegates. It will also be the first time any members of the chief delegates have been re-elected for the next term. 

His focus, he said, will be on ratifying the new bylaws for Eden as well as his existing project to create a new website for Eden and a dispute resolution process to govern the removal of members who break the rules. 

That process could soon be put to the test after one election participant broke a cardinal rule of Eden elections by refusing to turn their camera or microphone, making it impossible to guarantee their identity. It was the second time this individual had done this which would make them a perfect candidate to test the removal process. 

Chris will be joined by another former chief delegate, Jesse Jaffe of EOS Bees. He is working on a plan to promote Eden and EOS to the wider community. EOS Bees has already done sterling work combating negative sentiment about EOS online and using social media to boost the profile of the sector. 

They will be joined by three new members: 

Rieki Cordon, who will be bringing his experience of building decentralised organisations, Xavier Fernandez of EOS Costa Rica, and Chris Waxa, CEO of Eden Marketing.

If it is an experiment in demonstrating how this process can work, it seems to be working. But Eden doesn’t intend to stop there. It has grand plans for how its take on democracy can be applied to organisations, political parties and even entire countries. 

A new video added to Eden’s website will paint a picture of a scenario in which it could be applied to a presidential election. For now, Eden will be setting its sights a little lower. Part of Chris Barnes’ focus this term will be promoting Eden’s process as something that can be applied elsewhere. 

He is due to speak at a convention for all the alternative independent parties that sit outside the two-party system in the US and is looking to build a new tool that could be used to elect leaders in these parties. This would be a massive undertaking and could take Eden to a whole new level.

The future, then, for Eden is exciting. With this latest election, the process appears to have demonstrated its worth – at least on this scale. Whether it can be applied beyond this circle will be an intriguing theme of this and future terms.  

(Writing by Tom Cropper, editing by Klaudia Fior)

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