Conviction Voting

[christinevandev]

Title:
Conviction Voting

Proposer:
Stellar x BlockScience

Brief Summary and Why:
Introducing a conviction voting module would allow for voting to be done on a continuous rather than discrete basis. As described by Jeff Emmett in Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance:

"Conviction Voting offers a novel decision making process that funds proposals based on the aggregated preference of community members, expressed continuously. In other words, voters are always asserting their preference for which proposals they would like to see approved, rather than casting votes in a single time-boxed session. A member can change their preference at any time, but the longer they keep their preference for the same proposal, the “stronger” their conviction gets. This added conviction gives long standing community members with consistent preferences more influence than short term participants merely trying to influence a vote. Conviction Voting sidesteps sybil attacks, provides collusion resistance, and mitigates many of the attack vectors of time-boxed voting mechanisms."

Problem Statement:
A chain-agnostic, reproducible design spec for conviction voting that allows other users to bring the mechanism into their application, or to test it further under their own assumed context and conditions.

Potential Applications:
Any situation where we want continuous voting and want to discourage the effects of last minute vote switching. Any situation where we want clarity of signals over time, rather than an immediate and unweighted one-shot vote resolution.