Pulse Checks with a Difference

Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), the largest healthcare provider in British Columbia, employs over 15,000 staff delivering critical medical services across the lower mainland. Despite a traditional hierarchical structure, VCH is known for its innovative and engaging culture. Pulse Check surveys were already a regular practice, but VCH sought to enhance them using Ethelo’s discussion and cohesion-measuring tools.

Process: Building on Established Principles

Ethelo and VCH collaborated to refine existing engagement methods, involving departmental stakeholders to align the process with specific needs. Seven key topics were identified:

• Team Culture
• Recognition from Management
• Recommending Your Job
• Speaking Without Fear
• Reasonable Workload
• Talking About Overload
• Work Autonomy

In two sessions (September and November 2016), over 240 staff participated in Ethelo’s online platform at their convenience. While Ethelo assisted with initial setup, VCH staff managed much of the configuration and consultation.

When city staff at London, ON were directed by City Council to build a Climate Emergency Action Plan, they knew that public input would be key to creating something the community could get on board with.

However, convincing folks to engage around an issue as complex and polarizing as the climate emergency is not an easy task. To maximize participation, London and Ethelo came up with a simple strategy: turn the engagement into a game.

“What we found really attractive about Ethelo was the idea of using the platform as a climate plan simulator,” says Jamie Skimming, Manager of Community Energy Initiatives for the City of London. “Recognizing that some people like games and puzzles, we thought this would be a great opportunity to try that.”

Simulating a feasible plan using difficulty levels

The survey presented participants with twenty greenhouse gas reduction actions that the city could take, like energy efficiency upgrades, a green bin program, and new cycling infrastructure. Then, using a sliding scale, participants decided how much they personally thought the City should prioritize each action over the next 10 years.

The challenge was to design a plan that could reduce by at least one million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. So while car fans could gleefully downgrade bike lanes, for example, they would then have to slide other actions up in order to reach the target number – perhaps by increasing the number of electric vehicles or buses in the city.

The idea of simulating a climate action plan is not a new concept. Jamie has tried many different simulators in the past. What is missing from all of them, he says, is transparent information about the level of effort it would actually take to reduce those emissions.

“We didn’t want to tell people that anything was impossible,” he explains. “But we wanted to be open that there are reasons like cost and lack of resources that make it very tough to crank the dial to the maximum level on any given action.”

Each GHG reduction action displayed information about how difficult or easy it could be to implement. Participants then had to make trade-offs on each action to balance the ‘difficulty score’ with how effective it could be. This simple constraint gave participants a more realistic, transparent experience, and provided more valuable data to the city as a result.

Generation Squeeze is a Canadian advocacy organization supported by the Vancity Community Foundation, with a mandate to advance the interests of Millennials.  

The Millennial generation is on a tight budget: housing prices have skyrocketed, career opportunities are increasingly competitive, and healthy food is hard to find. In pursuit of its mandate, GenSqueeze needed to distill and then shortlist from among 36 initiatives popular amongst its constituents. These included such items as life insurance, car shares, child care, and health assistance.

Process

Following several focus groups where initial possibilities were identified, GenSqueeze used Ethelo to extend the conversation to its 25,000 members. During a two-week period, the platform was open to public voting, allowing more than 400 participants to have their say and propose additional suggestions. In this case, the response rate to invitations was 30%.

Decentraland DAO recently teamed up with Ethelo to conduct its second “Community Pulse” survey. This quarterly check-in is a crucial way for the DAO to understand how its community feels about its operations and governance.

Running a survey within a decentralized community like Decentraland presents unique challenges. How do you ensure everyone has a voice? How do you navigate diverse and sometimes opposing viewpoints? And how can you maintain trust in the results within a decentralized environment?

Ethelo’s platform helped the DAO overcome these obstacles. The survey was divided into four key areas:

1. Setting Priorities: What should the DAO focus on?
2. DAO Operations: How effectively is the DAO itself functioning?
3. Core Unit Performance: Are the different teams within the DAO meeting expectations?
4. Communication: How well is the DAO communicating with the community?

Despite attempts to manipulate the results, Ethelo’s technology ensured the data remained accurate and reliable. In the end, 49 valid responses provided a valuable snapshot of community sentiment.

Some trees in the shared courtyard had grown so tall they were impeding some residents’ views. They weren’t supposed to grow that high; the wrong species had been planted originally. It was a divisive issue; those whose views were blocked wanted to remove the trees and replace them with a smaller, slower-growing species. However, most residents liked the trees and wanted to keep them; they were beautiful and had taken many years to grow.

Challenge

As with most condominium associations, there is no formalized method of polling owners other than the opportunity presented at the AGM. AGMs only occur once a year, many issues need to be dealt with quickly, and often only a minority of owners participate.

Holding a special general meeting is expensive and only viable for the most critical issues.

Decisions made in conventional situations often end with owners being divided, causing resistance. In addition, loud voices may dominate and have unfair influence.

Approach

The directors were faced with a polarized debate. However, it wasn’t necessarily a binary decision. The decision could be

broken down into a number of different sub-issues.

Which trees should be targeted? What interventions were possible? Over what time period should this take place? And – importantly – how much money

were people willing to spend on this issue? The budget for spending that year was nearly exhausted.

This information and more was gathered through an interview with one of the Strata directors. The options were identified, categorized into topics, costed, and uploaded into Ethelo. After being reviewed and approved by the directors, invitations (including unique access codes) were distributed by mail to all the residents.

Some residents owned or occupied more than one suite, which under the Strata bylaws entitled them to more than one vote. Ethelo was configured to reflect the different amounts of voting influence that each owner should have.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique opportunity for Canada: a chance to rebuild its economy in a way that is both equitable and sustainable. This “once-in-a-lifetime” budget offered a chance to reimagine the future, but the government’s initial consultation fell short of truly engaging citizens.

“The government’s survey lacked depth,” explains Sabrina Bowman, Campaign Director with the eDemocracy Network. “It didn’t provide a comprehensive framework for citizens to understand the trade-offs involved in different policy choices. It was like asking people what they wanted for dinner without showing them a menu.”

To address this shortcoming, the eDemocracy Network, in partnership with Corporate Knights and supported by the Trottier Family Foundation, launched an ambitious project: an independent citizen’s budget consultation. This initiative aimed to empower Canadians to directly shape the recovery by actively engaging them in the decision-making process to answer the question:

“What set of fiscal policies should Canada adopt to achieve the 10-year goal of creating one million jobs while hitting the 2030 Paris target of cutting our greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 209 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2e”

Unlike the federal government survey (whose results were never released) this digital budget process enabled citizens to:

• Explore a Wide Range of Options: Participants weren’t simply presented with a list of predetermined choices. Instead, they could distribute government investment across a range of policy options, from universal childcare and affordable housing to investments in renewable energy and green infrastructure.
• Prioritize and Balance: The platform facilitated active engagement, allowing participants to prioritize their preferred policies, allocate “budget points” to them, and consider the associated costs and potential impact on jobs and emissions.
• Understand the Trade-offs: Participants were not shielded from the complexities of budgeting. They were encouraged to consider how different policy choices would be funded, exploring options such as wealth taxes, corporate tax reforms, and adjustments to existing tax brackets.

From Big Green to Big GreenDAO

The Ethelo team was fortunate to collaborate with Big GreenDAO (BGD) and had the opportunity to play a role in the DAO’s journey towards progressive decentralization — a process in which the initial stakeholders of an organization relinquish control by degrees, over time. 

As a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) BGD’s journey towards gradually sharing more decision-making power, started sometime before Ethelo came on board. In fact, it started before Big GreenDAO was a DAO and instead was just Big Green; a non-profit organization with “the mission and belief that growing food changes lives, and that it opens up people’s eyes to the impacts of climate change, weather volatility, and connection to nature” Mattew Markman, one of Big GreenDAO’s original co-architects, explains. 

Big Green was established in 2011 by Kimbal Musk and Hugo Matheson. The non-profit provided funding and infrastructure to implement school gardens, which would function as outdoor classrooms for students to learn about healthy foods. 

The organization was continuing to develop and had no plans to suddenly change its mission or its operations; but then COVID hit. “Schools closed. And even once they reopened, they were really restricted. So Big Green couldn’t do their traditional operations”, MathewMattew Markman tells us. Big Green needed to pivot, so “they ended up shifting more into a grantmaker role where they started supporting teachers at those schools.”

Big Green’s shift into more of a grantmaking operation, inspired more conversation about how “Web3 technology could be used to implement a more participatory grantmaking process at scale” Mattew Markman recalls. These conversations were the seed of what would eventually become Big GreenDAO. 

As one of the DAO’s co-architects, Mattew Markman explains, “I came on as an external consultant and expert in the Web3 and DAO building space and, you know, worked initially for several months with Kimball Musk to really think out the scope and architect of the DAO. And once we did that, then we’ve been in a process for the past year of truly operationalizing it, onboarding its community members and implementing its operational processes as well as building its technological infrastructure, which is part of where we came into contact with Ethelo.”

The Evolution of Big GreenDAO

What was initially a traditional charity evolved into a centralized grantmaking organization and then came to be a DAO with the mission to radically democratize and decentralize philanthropy by putting frontline organizations in the food justice sector in the driver’s seat of the grant-making process. Mattew explains this evolution and says that “by building the DAO structure and, partnering with Ethelo in particular for the participatory grantmaking aspect of it, we were able to involve, first 6 frontline organizations, then 16, then I think 45, and now about a total of 75 organizations in this process of grantmaking.” Big Green DAO has now grown to 160 organizations.

BGD’s innovative organizational structure is composed of a process in which the initial core members invite the very organizations that receive grant funding to be part of the DAO and collectively decide which organizations should receive a grant in the next round of funding. Then these new organizations are invited to be part of the DAO and the process repeats itself after every round, thus increasing the membership of the DAO. 

Mattew Markman explains the first few granting rounds in detail: 

“The first round was about identifying, onboarding, and collaborating with core contributors and stakeholders in the food justice sector. And so, that was sort of a handpicked round of organizations that we approached and engaged with, to see if there was alignment for the mission – both the food justice mission in general and the participatory grantmaking structure in particular.”

“In the second round, through a consensus-based deliberative process, the DAO committee decided that the best way to do the second round was to bring in core allies, and each of the original 6 grantees who are on the DAO committee got $50,000 that they could distribute to one or two ally organizations. So, either $50,000 to one or $25,000 to two. So as a result, we brought in additional 10 organizations through that mechanism. And then we launched the participatory process with Ethelo for the next two rounds.”

Decentralizing and Co-designing with Ethelo

Ethelo’s collaboration with BGD started on granting round 3 when the number of organizations participating in the grantmaking process significantly increased. Before working with Ethelo the DAO used Snapshot (one of the most used governance tools in the web3 space) to vote and allocate grant funding. Due to some limitations and challenges with the tool, there was a need to explore alternative ways to do decision-making. The DAO architects needed a tool that would be more engaging and that could better capture the complexity of their desired decision-making process – Ethelo turned out to be the perfect fit!

Mattew Markman explains the decision to use Ethelo and says that “Ethelo stood out as the most robust DAO governance tool I’ve encountered. Unlike simple yes/no votes, it emphasizes the process before voting, which is crucial. Many DAOs focus solely on voting, leading to rubber-stamping or division. Ethelo’s engaged process, flexibility, and adaptability to handle complex scenarios with multiple stakeholders and customizable algorithms perfectly suited our unique needs.”

After grant round 3 ended and $780K was distributed to 27 unique organizations, the DAO was able to learn from this experience and use these learnings to design a better process for grant round 4. This new and improved design involved the separation of the process into two stages: in stage 1) the DAO members would vote for the amount of the overall budget that should be used and in stage 2) the membership would allocate the budget and distribute it among a set of 114 new organizations. 

The second stage of voting would use quadratic voting – a voting system that accounts for the number of people voting for an option as much as it does the amount of voting power (often in the form of dollars) participants stake on each option. In this case, instead of dollars, voting participants were each given a limited amount of “seeds” (114 each) and were asked to stake their seeds on the organizations they thought were most deserving of funding. 

Voting participants had a set of options to indicate their level of support for a grantee and each option contained a number of seeds to be allocated to that same grantee: 

Option 1: 0 Seeds

Option 2: 3 Seeds

Option 3: 7 Seeds

Option 4: 14 Seeds

Option 5: 28 Seeds

Option 6: 57 Seeds

Option 7: 114 Seeds

Effectively, if a participant felt very strongly about the work done by one organization they could choose to allocate all of their seeds to one organization. But this would not mean that the organization with the most seeds would necessarily get the most funding because the emphasis on the number of voters (not just the number of seeds) supporting an organization, which the quadratic voting system enforces, would not allow this. The final results are a set of organizations with a mixture of a high number of seeds allocated to them (signifying intensity of support) but also a high number of total voters supporting these organizations (signifying overall support from the group).  

In addition to the quadratic voting methodology, the Ethelo consensus-making algorithm was used alongside this new voting design approach. Matthew Markmen elaborates on this coupled voting methodology: “And so, in rounds 4, we kind of had a two-part process with money and points (or seeds) to try to integrate our multi-layered voting algorithm, which is sort of like, a mixed quadratic weighted average voting algorithm, which isn’t what Ethelo normally uses. And so, we were able to use Ethelo’s base algorithm as sort of a validating mechanism to see where our votes aligned with (i.e the overall consensus) which was also really cool.”

In summary, Mattew explains, “we were able to simplify the interface, enhance the user experience and even increase or advance the complexity of the actual voting algorithm itself… so we made the experience more simple and more engaging but at the same time able to increase the complexity of the algorithm and have a more robust voting algorithm which was based on building on the iterative process of working from round to round, which is great because we were able to really work as co-designers and collaborators with Ethelo’s team. It felt like we were involved in a generative process together.”  

Overview

Ethelo partnered with Arbitrum DAO to develop and align the DAO’s vision, mission, and strategic priorities. This engagement aimed to create a cohesive framework to guide future decision-making and grant program evaluations.

Challenges

The primary challenges included engaging a diverse community, synthesizing a wide range of inputs into a unified framework, and ensuring broad consensus across different stakeholder groups.

Solution

Ethelo’s platform facilitated a multi-stage consultation process. The first stage focused on identifying core values and strategic priorities. The second stage involved crafting mission and vision statements based on community input. Ethelo’s advanced multi-attribute decision-making engine was used to analyze millions of scenarios and present the best-fit consensus outcomes.

Results

• High Participation**: Engaged over 500 community members across multiple stages.
• Strong Consensus**: Achieved high levels of agreement on key strategic priorities and values.
• Actionable Framework**: Developed a clear and actionable strategic framework, including mission and vision statements with over 85% support and 90% consensus ratings.

Overview

Ethelo partnered with Plurality Labs to evaluate the alignment of grant programs with Arbitrum DAO’s strategic priorities. This engagement aimed to assess community perceptions and ensure that grant funding decisions reflect community values and priorities.

Challenges

The primary challenges included ensuring broad participation, preventing sybil attacks, and accurately evaluating a diverse range of grant programs.

Solution

Ethelo’s platform facilitated a participatory evaluation process. Community members assessed the alignment of each grant program with the DAO’s strategic priorities using Ethelo’s multi-attribute decision-making engine, which analyzes millions of scenarios to present consensus outcomes.

Results

• High Participation: Engaged over 250 community members in the evaluation process.
• Positive Perceptions: Overall, participants perceived grant programs to be well-aligned with strategic priorities, with an 87.5% support rating across all grant programs.
• Specific Program Insights: Programs like ‘Arbitrum Co-Lab by RN DAO’ and ‘Short Term Incentive Program (STIP)’ received the highest alignment ratings (89%).

In October 2019, the City of Prince George formed a Select Committee on Poverty Reduction, which was tasked with recommending how the City could address poverty based on the provincial government’s Together BC strategy. 

After bringing together diverse stakeholders and perspectives from throughout the community, the committee produced 19 recommendations for reducing poverty in Prince George. The committee then needed to engage the broader community to create awareness of the initiatives and learn which ones were the most urgent and highest priorities for residents. 

Sarah Brown, who works in the City’s Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Division, was the Staff Liaison for the Select Committee. She notes that the committee set out several lens groups through which to view the work, which included: children and youth, single-parent families, seniors, Indigenous people and people living in specific neighbourhoods that are disproportionately impacted by poverty. They also wanted to work with at least five community agencies. 

“They wanted to look at the difference between people who are experiencing absolute poverty and those who are considered the working poor,” Brown explains. “So that way, the recommendations would be all-encompassing, so when we look at poverty reduction in the community, it wasn’t just honed in on one group, but really looks at the broad spectrum of people who could be impacted by poverty.”

The City of Prince George has used Ethelo’s Citizen Budget platform for the past five years to include residents in its annual budget consultation process. So when the committee was planning its poverty reduction engagement, they thought of Ethelo as the best tool to include a representative sample of citizens in the process. 

“Ethelo turned out to be a really good fit because we wanted broad representation from the community, “ Brown says. “We used the engagement platform as the foundation and then we worked with our community partners so they could use the platform to get people to provide their feedback.”

Empowering residents to participate 

Questions in the City’s Ethelo engagement asked participants to rank each of the 19 recommendations based on two factors, urgency and importance. 

By using their social media and community networks, they included 814 people in the process and reached their goal of including a broad group of community members.

“It wasn’t just agencies who are supporting people who are experiencing poverty that had their say on this topic; it was across the community,” Brown says. “So to get that diversity of perspective was reassuring that voting on the recommendations was robust and sound. And we could have confidence that this is really reflective of our entire community.”

She adds that the Ethelo team was instrumental in helping set up a successful engagement that also helped educate people about the committee’s recommendations. 

“The Ethelo team was really flexible in helping us set up what our platform was going to look like,” Brown notes. “It was really engaging. The imagery was really appropriate, and it connected people to the topic. Each slide started with an appropriate image, and then there was some relevant background information on each topic. We used all of that information to provide a backdrop and context, and then we asked people to answer the question. Ethelo was also able to link to external websites and information, so if people wanted to learn more, then they could. So that was a really good feature.” 

“The education piece provided the preliminary context so people could make a decision on the urgency and importance.”