Oracle Partner Lonneke Dikmans, CTO at Vennster, has developed a digital decision making platform built with the Oracle Blockchain Platform. This month Lonneke is sharing the details about the design of the voting application and its use with the Oracle Luxembourg User's Group and the UK IOUG Magazine. Following is an excerpt from her article "Enhancing democracy with Oracle Blockchain" published in the Pass the Knowledge magazine.

To increase citizen participation, a group of scientists, businesses and non-profits created a virtual municipality that would be able to move fast and innovate without any of the traditional hurdles. Vaardam is the first virtual municipality in the Netherlands. They are exploiting a range of Oracle technologies to encourage citizen participation in government decision-making that is transparent, resistant to fraud and easy to use – and can be applied to many other business use cases.

A formal structure for decision-making was required – and they deployed a digital identity and voting application using blockchain technology on the Oracle platform to facilitate this.

Various key design decisions were made along the way in order to ensure the decision-making could be from a trusted digital identity, anonymous and tamper-proof.

A formal structure to facilitate decision-making, including voting, needs to adhere to at least the following requirements:

It should make use of a trusted digital identity
Votes should be anonymous
There should only be one vote per citizen
It should be tamper-proof.
To facilitate the decision-making process and to offer a platform for "real organizations", the initiative developed a solution that enables participation that is transparent and resistant to fraud developed with the Oracle Blockchain Platform.