08/16/2025
CivicAI

The Forum Initiative — Whitepaper (2025)

TL;DR

The Forum Initiative is a citizen-first social network and policy pipeline. It replaces engagement-driven feeds with designed neutrality: transparent rules, one-person-one-vote identity, machine-assisted consensus mapping, and auditable governance. The stack comprises a CivicAI layer for sourced synthesis, proof-of-personhood identity, a user-owned ledger, and CivCoin incentives (with non-transferable credentials) to reward real civic work. It is strictly independent from government direction; public institutions may consume anonymized sentiment and process artifacts, but cannot steer them. The Forum’s outputs—consensus maps, evidence packs, budgets, and on-chain audit trails—are built for pre-legislative workflows. *+2*+2

1) Mission & Problem

Mission. Build a social network “for democracy”—where people engage, vote, and lead—using AI and blockchain for transparency rather than virality. The site commits to no algorithmic engagement ranking and emphasizes user-driven visibility (“you upvote what matters”). *

Problem. The status quo online rewards manipulation and noise. Forum’s essays and podcast set the context: social media’s political effects and mental health harms, and why tooling must center informed, citizen-driven decision making. *+2*+2

2) Architecture Overview

A. CivicAI (evidence over affect).

  • Source-linked summaries and claim tracking.

  • Spectrum mapping of viewpoints to surface overlap and contend honestly where values diverge.

  • Prompts that nudge participants toward evidence density (not outrage density).
    (Foundational rationale articulated across Forum’s civic/tech pages.)     *+1

B. Deliberation workflow (proven building blocks).

C. Identity & equality of voice.

  • Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) to secure one-human-one-account, combining attestations with zero-knowledge proofs so users prove “uniqueness” without doxxing. (Design space informed by Buterin’s analysis of PoP trade-offs and current ZK-credential systems.) vitalik.eth.limoWilson Center

D. Ledger & data model.

  • A user-owned chain/rollup writes: proposal states, votes, treasury disbursements, and audit anchors.

  • Discussion content and sensitive data stay off-chain; hashes create an immutable evidence trail.

E. Incentives.

  • CivCoin (reserve-backed utility/governance) rewards high-quality civic work (facilitation, evidence reviews, drafting) and funds experiments.

  • Quadratic Funding (QF) for grants and pilots to favor breadth of support over whale dominance.

  • Non-transferable credentials (“SBT-style”) record earned trust (e.g., “Deliberation Facilitator”). Woodstock Fund BlogEffective Altruism ForumSSRN

3) Governance & Institutional Posture

Independence with interoperability. The Forum remains independent from state control. Legislators and agencies can ingest anonymized sentiment and artifacts (consensus maps, evidence packs, budgets) but do not direct process or outcomes.

The Constitution of Office Framework (COOF). A procedural charter covering: role definitions, open logs, conflict-of-interest rules, and redress/appeals.

Founding Congress (community legitimacy). Early governance seeded by a diverse, mission-driven cohort (e.g., Maine nonprofit community) to set norms and pilot oversight before broader elections.

Accountability Matrix. Public, non-punitive dashboard showing how officials’ actions align with citizen sentiment and basic needs benchmarks (Maslow-tiered framing).

Pushback Mechanism (safety against ill-considered surges). Proposals advance only if a supermajority, an expert panel, and a representative gate converge; otherwise they return to deliberation.

4) From Talk to Policy (the Forum Pipeline)

  1. Issue Intake & Scoping → set measurable success criteria.

  2. Evidence & Deliberation → pol.is-style statements, CivicAI synthesis; publish cluster maps and minority reports. Crowdlaw for Congress

  3. Drafting & Iteration → Decidim-style proposals, redlines, meetings, and traceable changes. docs.decidim.org

  4. Identity-Gated Voting → PoP-secured voting phases; publish turnout and quorum proofs. vitalik.eth.limo

  5. Funding & Pilots → QF rounds finance pilots and research attachments. Woodstock Fund Blog

  6. Submission Package → consensus maps, evidence pack, budget, and on-chain hashes.

  7. Post-Adoption Accountability → scorecards on alignment and outcomes.

Precedents show this hybrid (online tooling + offline legitimacy) can translate discourse into law; vTaiwan’s four-stage model and Decidim’s municipal deployments are the baseline the Forum extends. Crowdlaw for Congressdecidim.org

5) Identity, Privacy, and Safety

  • PoP without PII leakage. Support multiple, pluggable methods (social attestations, biometric-with-ZK, verifiable credentials); require at least one ZK-capable path to prove uniqueness privately. vitalik.eth.limoDock

  • Non-transferable credentials for earned roles and contributions—avoiding speculation and resale of “reputation.” SSRN

  • Abuse resistance: PoP + rate limiting + transparent rules reduce botnets and brigading.

  • Data minimization: off-chain storage for content; on-chain anchors for audit; user-controlled disclosure.

6) Token & Treasury (CivCoin) — outline

  • Purpose. Incentivize evidence work; underwrite experiments; discount services; enable community budgeting.

  • Backing. Reserve-backed with transparent attestations and periodic proofs.

  • Issuance. Earned via verifiable contributions (facilitation, synthesis, peer review), not mere posting.

  • Sinks. Governance deposits, proposal fees (refunded on good-faith completion), and services.

  • Grants. QF matching pool for public-good proposals and local pilots. Woodstock Fund Blog

(SBT-style credentials are not tradable and don’t convey financial value; they gate roles and increase accountability without pay-to-win dynamics.) SSRN

7) Implementation Roadmap

Phase 0 — Live pilots (now).

  • Run public threads and small-group forums using the CivicAI + pol.is method; publish consensus maps, minority reports, and source bundles. Crowdlaw for Congress

Phase 1 — Identity & Voting.

  • Optional PoP gates for binding votes; publish turnout and Sybil-resistance stats; start QF micro-grants.

Phase 2 — Ledger & Treasury.

  • App-chain/rollup for governance state and treasury; automated reporting (reserves, disbursements, KPIs).

Phase 3 — Institutional bridges.

  • Produce machine-readable dossiers for municipalities/legislators; align deliverables with pre-comment phases. (Forum has already published issue-specific calls to action that can be converted into this format.) *

8) KPIs (what “good” looks like)

  • Deliberation quality: % of statements that cross a bipartisan 60% threshold; number of cross-cluster agreements (pol.is metrics). Participedia

  • Evidence integrity: share of claims with primary sources; correction half-life.

  • Participation health: verified-human participation; geographic spread; retention across cycles (PoP-gated). vitalik.eth.limo

  • Policy conversion: proposals that complete the pipeline to adoption (vTaiwan-style), with public audit trails. Crowdlaw for Congress

9) Compliance & Risk

  • Identity risk. Biometric PoP can concentrate power or leak data; mitigate by offering non-biometric PoP, ZK proofs, and independent audits of any biometric pipeline. vitalik.eth.limo

  • Token risk. Apply clear “utility + governance” boundaries, reserve attestations, and jurisdictional KYC/AML where required.

  • AI transparency. Disclose AI assistance and keep public logs/model cards for civic-impact features—aligned with prevailing transparency norms. (Forum’s public pages already frame these concerns.) *

  • Manipulation risk. Publish pipeline artifacts (maps, minutes, redlines, vote proofs) and rate-limit high-risk behaviors.

10) Why this can work

  • Method, not mood. Forum adopts proven civic tech primitives (pol.is, Decidim) and updates them with privacy-preserving identity and modern public-goods funding. Crowdlaw for Congressdecidim.org

  • Aligned incentives. CivCoin pays for hard, verifiable work (evidence, facilitation), not hot takes; QF lifts broadly supported proposals. Woodstock Fund Blog

  • Legibility & trust. Every important step leaves a public, auditable trail—without exposing personal data.

Appendix A — External references and precedents