"From Street Protests to Production: How Vocdoni Built Private Online Voting",- Jordi Pinyana

Hello, my name is Jordi Pñana and I'm a contributor to the world project. [Music] So, how Hi. Hi. Hi, Georgie. Thanks for coming.

Uh, for people who don't know you, can you say a few words like what do you do and Okay. Yeah. So, thanks for having me here. It's really nice to be here with you all. Uh so yeah, my name is uh Jordi Pñana and I I'm a contributor to the Ontario project.

It's uh aims to create uh democratic tools using decentralized technologies.

Uh can you expand more on Vdoni like what is it actually and what problem does it solve?

Yeah, so Vogdoni was an idea that was conceived uh during the Catalan referendum of independence. Uh it was like a group of uh activists, political activists, uh people from computer science, people from universities and it was because uh we tried to do this to do this referendum of independence and the Spanish uh states send the military police uh to beat people on the streets for voting. And in my personal case, this is not what I learned at school. And yeah, I was thinking about like how this can happen in an European democratic country in some way. And yeah, I met some people and we started working on a project that uh allows anyone in the world at any time to vote democratically without the fear of being uh detained, prosecuted, killed, whatever.

So we we saw that there was a need not just in Catalonia but around the world of having this digital democratic principles but how does it work? Is it like an app or it's decentralized app like what's like the inside not going very technical but just in simple terms but like a bit of like the under the hood. So uh there are like two parts. One part is the infrastructure or the or the protocol and the other one is the the application layer or the web application. So basically uh well right now we have a a working protocol is used in production by by the clients and the collectives that are using vogoni.

Uh but since uh a year and a half ago we redesigned all the protocol and how this protocol works basically is that it's a distributed network of of sequences. So it's a ZK roll up that basically what it does it's is to aggregate votes create a general knowledge proof upload it to Ethereum and then you have uh all the the trustability of the book. So the the idea of uh the digital voting protocol is that everything is cryptographically and mathematically more stable since uh the very beginning. So since you cast the vote since the from to the tally sorry.

So uh this is what the protocol does. It verifies everything uh pass like a set of snacks using recursion using encryption for for avoiding B buying and yeah and uh from that point uh we created a web app. Just what side note on this uh we were very f and we are very focused on the web two

uh world because we had the need in 2017 of having something ready and working

and uh the project is really is really web three focused but it's uh web two oriented in some way. So with the years we in in talking with people with the clients and so on we try to create a web app that is super uh easy to use. So yeah it's just a web app that you can enter you can register as an organization or start to create votes and we have like two kind of personas in some way. So the organization and the vote and from the voter perspective it's just a matter of doing two clicks.

Mhm. So everything should be like super accessible like these things that people says nowadays that even my grandmother should be able to vote without even noticing that it's using centralized.

Yeah. Yeah. That's very important especially for this tool because it's not only tech people who vote and especially for old people for them it's like wow it's a new world and without proper UX there should be like a big button you know like a big red button like here here. So but how is it used now? like kettle and protests are over there nothing is moving like what is the use case for you now so right now we have like different verticals defined so we have uh sports or entertainment we have uh governmental bodies like I mean at a national level but also uh political parties uh NOS's unions any kind of uh human group that needs to do the decision- making process can use this this protocol and this web app and right now for example is being used by football group Barcelona

by SC.

How how do they use it?

So they use it for the elections of the

PAS

uh because their uh member base is distributed across the the globe and it's not really convenient for them for doing like uh analog or paper uh voting. So yeah, they create an election and they basically send the link for voting to their member base.

Wow. Wow. So how many people is that? It's not a lot because the the penas I think there are like 4,000 people

but for example we had the use case of the official colleges of nurses in Barcelona they're uh 40,000 people

also with cultural which is the largest the largest uh cult organization in Europe with more than 180,000 people uh we are being used by this is a real use case because we have been used by Republicana which is one of the prominent uh parties in Catalonia. And it was super nice because their member base needed to decide if they wanted to in uh to make Pedro Sanchez uh the the paso leader the next president of Spain and Sky Republicana had the the key votes for doing so and they decided to ask their member base. So in some way we can say that currently Fed is the president of Spain because someone voted with with

Wow. Oh wow, that's a use case. Then like the question here like you're incredibly successful in not just making tech because there are so many tags that is made but then it's not used. Yeah.

And the question is like how did you manage to like to to to to for this tech to be really used and especially for like governmental or really big bureaucratic things like yeah like Barcelona football club. So like how how did you manage to do that?

I would say listening to the users that's really important because when you build tech you always think about the engineering part when you don't think about the user most of the time especially when you like a small project with not a lot of resources and so on. So since day one we did a basic proof of concept and we start iterating on the UX and on the UI like going directly to the people and say hey this is useful for you what do you need if you are this kind of organization what you expect to have in this platform what your voters expect to have and well we iterated a lot and we have been doing this for the last seven years and yeah we did a lot of iterations from a mobile application the problem with a mobile application is that nobody wants to install a mobile application Then the web app the first one was cool but not super uh UX friendly in some way. So yeah was just a matter of talking with people but not people that is not going to use your technology. I mean you should talk with people that have the need of using your technology and then you estimate what what is the best way to to provide these solutions to them.

Yeah. Yeah. But that's like really really super cool case and especially uh like how much time did it take because I believe it was not a quick thing to interact with such big entities.

Yes. How did you survive through that like really really long period of like decision making? Yeah. So as a team we survived because we are kind of a family. We are super united.

We are not money driven. So in some sometimes we have like a I would say a decent salary but when things are not that good we have no problem not

making any salary at all. Uh so yeah thanks to I mean first thanks to the people that helped us during the the journey. We had some private donations, people that wanted to help us in some way and yeah, we managed to to go ahead in this situation and yeah and also with with the clients that we had uh and with the clients that we have uh we are providing uh some kind of consultancy services. So the protocol is open you can use it but if you want some customization on the web page for example you want to enable uh to factor identification with with SMS then you need have a custom project and yeah putting this money and money that we get from uh donors investors and people that help us we managed to to survive. Yeah, that's great that we are having you now here.

Do you feel that you can expand outside of Catalonia somehow in like nearest future?

Yeah. Yeah. Right now we are really focused on the European Union because they're uh I think they're making really good progress in uh opening technology to the people. So they have this EPC which is a public European blockchain is made on top of hyperledger

and it's compatible. So this is super useful for us. And then we have the identity problem that the European Union is trying to solve in some way uh using the Aidas uh 2.0 standard with the audi wallet. So I think in 2030 more or less I would say even earlier people will have uh digital identity on their mobile phones.

So we are uh compliant with with the standard we can I mean it's integ easily integrable in our system and uh I think this will be a really really big trigger for people to start using uh solutions like god because the the identity problem is solved so they can uh they can uh authenticate themselves on a voting so at this point we're very positive about how things will go with European Union with the member states and we have also a network of uh integrators for example uh the which is one of the biggest projects open source biggest project in the world for uh particip participatory

uh for a partic participatory society sorry and uh we are we developed a module for integrating also banning with the same the same is been used in the Barcelona city hall in the New York City Hall uh in the thinking the the call uh by the government of Brazil and yeah through this integrator I think we can expand it and also for example Latin America is a really really nice and big market for example we have the case of Peru that through the which is the uh national the processes they uh passed a law which is pro digital voting

and I think Latin America is doing kind of really big steps towards this digital option and I think we have a lot of opportunities there too.

Oh yeah, 100%. Like with Ecuador and like MLE as well even though it's tricky but I mean they're moving there 100% and they're ruining that.

But if we talk about like the initial ignition that like made it happen I mean the um uh the process of Catalunia. What do you think like for now? Uh is there any space for this use for instance? I don't know like Nepal recent thing.

Yeah,

they could use your tech, right?

Yeah, exactly. I tell you, I've been talking with some people in Nepal trying to get a Nepali passport for

Yeah. instead of Discord.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which is like ridiculous, but it's it's cool, you know, for me it's like, wow, voting on Discord. Yeah. But it's a bit tricky. But

yeah, I think I I try to be positive on those things and it's that okay, Discord is not the solution 100%. But this demonstrates that there is a need in the Nepalese society to have a proper decision making that is not controlled by just one party

in the government. So yeah, I mean Nepal whenever they're ready in some way, I mean I think they can start exploring uh solutions like like we've done for doing their elections and since they are like really uh Zenz oriented in some way I think people has a lot to do with technology there.

Okay. So uh your take on the importance of privacy I mean it's basic but still um like what's your opinion on that like of the necess necessity of privacy in web nowadays?

Uh I think I mean if we go to the definition of privacy it's like uh this way of selectively disclosing information. If we go back to the ancient Greeks, we have know this uh polish. So the the public sphere and the oos which is the private sphere. And I think privacy is one of the pillars uh that as a human being uh we need uh in order to develop ourselves and to growth and to have like uh this kind of space for being who you are with the people it's so I think this is totally uh transportable to the internet or to the But uh you should have the right to talk with people privately. You should have the right to transact.

Okay. So yeah, the the thing is that I think people doesn't talk too much about this this right of of transaction and I think everyone should be able to send money to send data uh free uh with this kind of selected disclosure. So I think it's really important and if we go to the case of voting, it's pretty obvious that you should be able to privately vote and choose uh whatever you want uh privately because if you do it in public like social dynamics can uh inflame some way.

Yeah. Okay. And the next question is to be about cy punks like how do you feel in general about social punk moment and how do you feel like what is it now to be a cy? Yeah. Well I cannot consider maybe myself a cypher bank.

I think there are people that represents this movement much better than me. But which what I love about these kind of movements is that they are uh willing to be open I mean without any barrier they want to test things and they want to to hackle things to break things and really to improve things. So in that sense yeah I can say that I'm a cipher p or a hacker or whatever you want to call it. uh because yeah I like to improve things in a positive way that can help uh humanity and society and I think for doing so you should have uh the security the support the need work the resources and the time really. Okay.

And imagine we have it all and now we have like in some future uh we have this internet that we want like f free secure private whatever. So what is this internet like perfect internet of future how it will look like if it's like perfect and ideal and how the life looks like. Okay, for me uh if we talk about infrastructure, we can talk about the perfect infrastructure as well on many layers.

Okay, so everyone has their own home server. Everyone is participating on the internet. These big cloud corporations disappeared. Everyone is sharing data uh privately. They can disclose whatever they want.

They have the right to be anonymous on internet and uh they also have the right to transact and there's no uh kind of central point of failure in this in this infrastructure and this in this new web that we embra

let's see if we can make it.

Yeah, I hope so. That's why we are here actually. So, thanks for coming. Thank you Jord. Thank you so much.

Yeah. Thanks for watching. Ciao. [Music]