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.

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.

Check it out!

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.

What the Funds Are For

This grant will contribute to the development of the first milestone and we are already developing it seeking funding from different sources such as Aragon, Meebits, Nouns and more!

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