Seoul Metropolitan Government is adding a bit of blockchain to its democracy.
The city will be launching on Sunday its revamped citizen participation platform “Democracy Seoul.”
The revamped platform adopts ICONLOOP’s ‘loopchain’ blockchain engine to prevent the altering or forging of voting data and to implement a one-person, one-vote enforcement through a real-name verification system.
The city announced this week:
“The key goal of reorganizing “Democracy Seoul” is to enhance the practical use of citizens’ suggestions by streamlining the process for citizens’ suggestions to become policies. To this end, the existing process — citizens’ suggestions → forum → mayor’s answer — will be reorganized and actively associated with citizen-deliberative budgeting. Also, falsification and tampering will be prevented by applying blockchain technology and a one-person-one-vote system will be realized through the real-name authentication system.”
The “Democracy Seoul” platform aims to incorporate proposals from the public into city policy. Last year, the public made 2,435 proposals through the platform. Some 27 were turned into policy, including support for women undergoing IVF treatments, mandatory protection for street cats in zones undergoing reconstruction or redevelopment and plans to better utilize the city’s Zeropay mobile payments app.
Up to now, Seoul has saved the platform’s voting data in a centralized database. Going forward, however, the city plans to save the data in a decentralized, more transparent way on its blockchain-based administrative platform designed by ICONLOOP.
ICONLOOP had previously carried out a number of trial projects with the city as part of the 2018 Seoul Blockchain Demonstration Project, applying its blockchain engine to Seoul Blockchain Standard Platform, used car trading system, and mobile-voting system.
