In the context of EOS eco-system Eden is referred to one of two things:
a) Community
“Eden is a community working to maximize the power and independence of its members and thereby securing life, liberty, property, and justice for all.”
b) Application
“Eden is a process automated by smart contracts for identifying who is a member of a community and how much budget they are allocated.”
In essence Eden is a community, at this point consisting of hardcore EOS mainnet members, that will utilize governance principles proposed by Daniel Larimer. Those principles are being manifested in EdenOS, a progressive webapp.
Core features of the first version of the app are:
- Member induction
- Leadership election
- Budget allocation
In my view, objective of Eden is to create a framework that social organizations could use to become truly democratic. Framework that at its core has governance (fractal democracy) and financial system that will maximize the power and independence of the people.
Electing representatives/leaders within the community that work towards achieving that objective is paramount.
Question is, how to elect such leaders?
Daniel Larimer is proposing fairly elegant mechanism — Political Playoffs. Eden community will be first to try it out to elect their representatives. If it turns out to be success, any social organization could use the open-source software being built to improve their governance.
How Political Playoffs work?
Firstly, in order to be eligible to participate in Eden's election you have to be inducted into the community. To get inducted you have to be invited by an existing member and two additional members have to vouch for you. Current members can be seen here. Invitee has to agree to the Peace Treaty, and induction ceremony has to be performed via Zoom. Recordings of all ceremonies are uploaded to IPFS. Here’s my induction ceremony.
Eden's UI showing members — https://genesis.eden.eoscommunity.org/members
Eden’s UI showing member profile page— https://genesis.eden.eoscommunity.org/members
Elections are currently scheduled to happen every 6 months.
Every election starts by randomly assigning members to small groups of ~10 people. Election is hosted via Zoom. All the group sessions are recorded and uploaded to the IPFS.
Each group must reach super majority (~7/10) consensus on one of their members to represent their group. Elected members become Level 1 officials.
All Level 1 officials are then again randomly assigned to groups of ~10 people that must reach super majority (~7/10) on who will represent their group. Elected members become Level 2 officials.
If super majority agreement is not achieved then no official is elected and nobody proceeds to the next group.
This process is repeated until there is one group left with less than 10 people in it. In order to elect the leader of Eden (last Level) super majority has to be reached in the last group as well.
Each elected official is issued a budget in EOS. The higher the Level of the official the larger budget the individual receives.
So far, there have been two Eden trial elections. On both occasions the whole election process took around 4 consecutive hours. I’ve participated in both, and I like what I’ve experienced. Since members who got elected, did deserve to be elected, and they also did what they promised their electors to do. Shout-out to Chris Barnes who became elected in the last round in both of the elections, and is doing a great job with representing the community.
I got elected in the first round of second election, hence I became Level 1 representative. My promise to my electors was to write an article about Eden, pack it into tweet, and for marketing purposes make a retweeting contest. One randomly chosen retweeter will receive 10 EOS that was allocated to me for being elected.
When will the first election happen?
Eden’s UI — https://genesis.eden.eoscommunity.org
First real election is scheduled to happen on 9th of October. EOS Foundation will allocate part of their budget to Eden community. Elected individuals will receive funds to deliver on their promises. I believe successful election would open the gates for proliferation of Eden and EOS mainnet communities. I expect Eden to be at the pinnacle of on-chain decentralized governance, iterating in a high-paced environment with solutions to build true democracy.
Would you like to take part in shaping true democracy?
Join us and take part in the upcoming election! Introduce yourself in EOScommunity forum, join EdenOnEOS Telegram group, or/and write me on Telegram @cxzvnk. There are numerous benefits in becoming a member and they will only increase with time.
Would like to learn more?
To understand the guiding principles by which the Eden is being formed, I recommend reading Daniel Larimer’s book More Equal Animals. Free PDF available here and audiobook can be found here.
My highlights from the book:
“The nature of underlying reality isn’t changing rapidly; therefore, our laws shouldn’t be changing frequently either.”“Independence begins as a mental state of being which when acted out results in reducing your dependence on the status quo while organizing and respecting a parallel system of consensus.”
“Who owns the moon, the ocean, the land, and the air? Do Adam and Eve have eternal property right to 50% of the Earth each or does Adam own the world because he was here first?”
“In order to negotiate you must have the ability to say “no”.”