Proof of Witness Presence: Blockchain Consensus for Augmented Democracy in Smart Cities

06/30/2019
by   Evangelos Pournaras, et al.
0

Smart City data intensive urban environments are becoming highly complex and evolving by the digital transformation. Repositioning the democratic values of citizens' choices in these complex ecosystems has turned out to be imperative in an era of social media filter bubbles, fake news and opportunities for manipulating electoral results with such means. This paper introduces a new paradigm of augmented democracy that promises citizens who actively engage in a more informed decision-making integrated in public urban space. The proposed concept is inspired by a digital revive of the Ancient Agora of Greece, an arena of public discourse, a Polis where citizens assemble to actively deliberate and collectively decide about public matters. At the core of the proposed paradigm lies the concept of proving witness presence that makes decision-making subject of providing evidence and testifying for choices made in the physical space. This paper shows how proofs of witness presence can be made using blockchain consensus. It also shows how complex crowd-sensing decision-making processes can be designed with the Smart Agora platform and how real-time collective measurements can be performed in a fully decentralized and privacy-preserving way. An experimental testnet scenario on sustainable use of transport means is illustrated. The paramount role of dynamic consensus, self-governance and ethically aligned artificial intelligence in the augmented democracy paradigm is outlined.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 3

page 7

page 8

page 11

research
08/09/2023

"This (Smart) Town Ain't Big Enough": Smart Small Towns and Digital Twins for Sustainable Urban and Regional Development

One of the major challenges today lies in the creation of governance con...
research
08/30/2023

Debunking Disinformation: Revolutionizing Truth with NLP in Fake News Detection

The Internet and social media have altered how individuals access news i...
research
07/05/2018

SpeedyChain: A framework for decoupling data from blockchain for smart cities

There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consum...
research
07/31/2019

Towards Digital Retina in Smart Cities: A Model Generation, Utilization and Communication Paradigm

The digital retina in smart cities is to select what the City Eye tells ...
research
12/26/2018

Toward a self-learned Smart Contracts

In recent years, Blockchain technology has been highly valued and disrup...
research
11/07/2021

Consistency and Consensus Driven for Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Decision Making with Pairwise Comparisons

Hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation (HFLPR) is of interest bec...
research
11/26/2018

Finding Places: HCI Platform for Public Participation in Refugees Accommodation Process

This paper describes the conception, development and deployment of a nov...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset