Course Identification

The seminar will cover a broad range of research questions, the solution of which is required for building Internet-enabled democratic communities.

These include:

- Voting rules and decision-making procedures

- Methods of participatory budgeting

- Liquid democracy

- Sybill attacks

- Coercion resistance

- DAOs (Ethereum Distributed Autonomous Organizations)

- Democratic cryptocurrency

- Self-sovereign identities

The seminar will educate students to read and present research articles and will prepare them for doing original research in the area of Internet-enabled democracy.

For a conceptual framework see:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.02873

Upon successful completion of this course students should be able to read and present research articles and will be prepared for doing original research in the area of Internet-enabled democracy.

Democracy earth:

Community writers: Democracy Earth white paper (http://bit.ly/defpaper)

Cicada and democratic cryptocurrencies:

Laughing monkey et al.: Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy and Decentralized Application Platform (https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/blob/master/Cicada-WhitePaper-2016-10.13.GA.1.pdf)

Laughing monkey et al.: Identity without authority (https://github.com/the-laughing-monkey/cicada-platform/blob/master/Identity-Without-Authority-2017.21.3.BETA.pdf)

Jeffries: Why Everyone Missed the Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency (hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-mind-blowing-feature-of-cryptocurrency-860c3f25f1fb)

Voting rules:

Shahandashti: Electoral Systems Used around the World (https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.01343)

Brahms: Voting Procedures (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall11/papers/Brams-Fishburn02.pdf)

Liquid democracy:

Boldi, Bonchi, Castillo, and Vigna: Viscous Democracy for Social Networks(https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1953154)

Cohensius, Manor, Meir, Meirom, Orda: Proxy Voting for Better Outcomes (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08308.pdf)

Kahng, Mackenzie, Procaccia: Liquid Democracy: An Algorithmic Perspective (http://procaccia.info/papers/liquid.pdf)

Participatory budgeting:

Benade, Nath, Procaccia, Shah: Preference Elicitation For Participatory Budgeting (http://procaccia.info/papers/pb.pdf)

Shapiro, Talmon: A Democratically-Optimal Budgeting Algorithm (https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05839)

Fain, Goel, Munagala: The Core of the Participatory Budgeting Problem (https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03474)

Goel, Krishnaswamy, Sakshuwong, Aitamurto: Knapsack Voting: Voting mechanisms for Participatory Budgeting (https://web.stanford.edu/~anilesh/publications/knapsack_voting_full.pdf)

Self-sovereign identity:

Lewis: A gentle introduction to self-sovereign identity (bitsonblocks.net/2017/05/17/a-gentle-introduction-to-self-sovereign-identity/)

Allen: The path to self-sovereign identity (https://www.coindesk.com/path-self-sovereign-identity/)

Various authors: Web of trust papers (see http://www.weboftrust.info/papers.html)

Sybil attacks:

Levin, Shields, Margolin: A Survey of Solutions to the Sybil Attack (https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/pdf/Levine2006a.pdf)

Wagman, Conitzer: Optimal False-Name-Proof Voting Rules with Costly Voting (https://ocs.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/2008/AAAI08-030.pdf)

Coercion resistance:

Juels, Catalano, Jakobsson: Coercion-Resistant Electronic Elections (https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/165.pdf)

Conitzer, Immorlica, Letchford, Munagala, Wagman: False-Name-Proofness in Social Networks (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall11/papers/CILMW10.pdf)

Electronic voting:

Smyth, Frink, Clarkson: Election Verifiability: Cryptographic Definitions and an Analysis of Helios, Helios-C, and JCJ (https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/233.pdf)

DAOs and Algorand:

https://ethereum.org/dao and related articles

Chen, Micali: ALGORAND (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01341.pdf)

Cryptocurrencies:

Narayanan et al.: Introduction to cryptography and cryptocurrencies (Chapter 1 of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies: a comprehensive introduction) (http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10908.pdf)