Please note that this proposal is in a preliminary stage. It is being presented for the purpose of discussion, input, and refinement. The ideas and strategies proposed are open for scrutiny and they might undergo changes based on the feedback received.
Description
Say goodbye to endless forum scrolling and hello to easy, efficient and fun community signaling with Pairwise! Our open-source, snapshot-style voting dapp, based on the big brain algorithm research out of Colony in 2018, offers a fast-paced and intuitive experience, perfect for the next generation of DAOs. Join us in revolutionizing governance with the power of algorithms and give your community a fun way to engage in governance, as opposed to boring old voting…
Pairwise turns web3 voting into swiping on Tinder. Compatible with all EVM chains and fully open-source, our project is in active development but needs support!
Problem
Current voting mechanisms provide poor user experience and require a high cognitive overhead leading to intense voter apathy.
As an ecosystem, we expect community members to spend a lot of time reading forum posts and have designed our tooling around this expectation. This will not scale.
Solution
Pairwise is a novel voting pattern and dapp that makes it easy and fun for web3 communities to signal their preferences. If this project can be well funded, it will enable much greater engagement for web3 communities across the ecosystem.
Pairwise aims to make it easier for Web3 communities to signal their preferences and make informed decisions. Pairwise is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive, like a dating app, allowing users to choose between pairs of options to signal their preferences as opposed to having to read endless forum posts and vote within a set time period. The system converts these simple subjective inputs into objective, measurable outputs, minimizing the cost and cognitive burden of voting.
Pairwise will be implemented as a dapp with its own front end and an open-source backend that can be used in various contexts, such as community governance or project funding with custom front ends. Pairwise voting will be compatible with all Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains and the development will be fully open source, and will also include documentation for developers who want to use the system in their own projects.
The goal of the project is to promote greater community engagement in DAO’s decision-making processes. But not only can Pairwise be used for governance with different snapshot strategies, but Pairwise can also be used to allocate budgets based on community signaling. And that’s just the beginning - we can’t wait to see how the community will discover and utilize all of the potential use cases for this tool.
We are confident that this project has the potential to make a significant impact and we look forward to the opportunity to bring Pairwise voting to life with your support.
How does it support Public Goods?
The mission of Pairwise is to be a public good itself (by being free & open source), and by supporting decision making within public good DAOs and projects. It is non-excludable (anyone can use it for free) and non rivalrous (it can work alongside any other governance tool).
Here are a few practical use case studies and specific examples of how Pairwise could benefit public goods in the web3 space:
Grant Proposals: Pairwise comparison helps organizations prioritize grant proposals by systematically comparing their potential impact and feasibility, ensuring more effective funding distribution. This is especially useful in cases where there are many projects or initiatives that are requesting funding (retroactive public goods, Gitcoin grants etc.).
Decentralized Curation and Ranking: Pairwise can be used to compare, rank and curate projects, content, products, or services, and can serve as a “decentralized suggestion algorithm”. One use case being explored is with Giveth, where users can vote on projects that they are passionate about, which would then feed into the website ranking. This not only allows the community to vote on what projects are important for them, but it also opens the door for new projects to surface that otherwise would have not received the same exposure.
User research: A fun use case is user research, where the community can be polled on what their subjective preferences are. For example, this can be used within any DAO to decide on features as kind of a “hot or not” game, where users can vote on specific designs or traits, to determine which ones are most valued by the community.
Product Features
- Make your own community space
- Make your own Pairwise votes
- Add options
- Add a question
- Extremely simple UX
- Multichain support
Validation
- Testing within the Giveth ecosystem has been very successful with positive feedback
Progress
Video Demo
We have a working demo and are doing our initial user testing with the Giveth Community.
Differentiation (from other projects)
Pairwise is similar to Snapshot, but with a specific type of UX. Snapshot votes are built around the expectation that users will go do research in forums and read long-form discussions. Our approach leans into the fact that most of the community isn’t even going to skim the forum posts and will vote with their gut. The goal is to give a clearer signal of what the community wants through more engagement in fun and simple micro-decisions.
Pairwise shouldn’t be used for EVERY decision, but we believe it is an important complement to the current voting applications that exist today.
At General Magic, we believe in the power of collaboration in the open-source world. That’s why we would be thrilled if Snapshot chose to integrate Pairwise into their platform. However, even if Snapshot decides not to, we are still committed to deploying this feature independently and integrating Snapshot’s strategies into our system. We believe that this will benefit the entire governance ecosystem as we work together to create more efficient methods based on algorithms.
Team
Pairwise is a project built by General Magic with a lot of support from rockstar DAO OGs. @VitorMarthendal is the project lead with design by @markoprljic and @thegrifft as the product owner. @mathsguy, @kronosapiens, @gichiba @AAbugosh, @ZeptimusQ, and the Giveth community are all supporting the effort as well.
Grant Request $
9.500
Funds
Right now the product is in a pre-Alpha stage and is not usable. The 9500$ together with the 5 ETH requested in the Public Nouns would secure enough funding to get us to the first Alpha version of our product! With this grant, we’ll upgrade our UX design, revamp the Pairwise sorting algorithm (including the way we use “abstain” in voting) and create a usable open-sourced new voting primitive for the DAO community.
We really believe that Pairwise is an incredible tool in the way that it breaks up one large decision into many micro decisions. This is very needed in the DAO space and will greatly reduce voter apathy.
Grants received so far
- ENS Small grant Public Goods round 5 ( 1 ETH Received)
- ENS Small grant Public Goods round 7 ( 1 ETH Received)
- Optimisms RPGF ( 7805.18 OP Pending)
- Dorahacks (0.64118904 BNB + 1000 USDT Received)
- Gitcoin (pending)
Milestone 1: Platform Development and Implementation
Platform Design (5k USDC)
- Detailed design of the application’s foundational architecture, to make a really smooth user experience for creating spaces and votes, and making the abstain button more prominent.
Back-end Development (10k USDC)
- Building the server, database, and implementing the improved pairwise algorithm.
- Includes setting up the server environment, defining database schemas, and creating relevant APIs for front-end interaction.
Front-end Development (15k USDC)
- Development of the user interface for creating spaces, votes, and projects.
- Developing the voting interface with allowlists.
- Implementation of the interface for viewing pairwise voting results at an individual and global level.
Testing & Debugging (5k USDC)
- Unit testing, integration testing, and functional testing to ensure the platform works as intended.
Deployment & Documentation (5k USDC)
- Deployment of the platform on a server we host.
- Documentation including user manuals and technical guides for further development.
Overall Roadmap
Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio
General Magic provides solution services and product development to Impact DAO’s.
We support commons-based organizations and public good projects. We build digital products, governance tools, and economic systems, General Magic has a proven track record and high success rate.
Our team of designers, developers, system architects, researchers, writers, and seasoned Web3 professionals have the knowledge and insights to support the ever growing demands of Impact DAOs — both by integrating with existing teams and creating resources from scratch.
Learn more:
Website - https://generalmagic.io/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/generalmagicio
