Hello, friends! In my last post, I shared Follow My Vote’s clarified vision on our position in the market and our path to success. I described why Follow My Vote cannot rely on the full array of existing technologies that support other modern applications but must instead work to solidify a more rugged and secure foundation fit for our ideal voting system.

I also explained that until such a foundation is mature, our ideal voting system would be deferred in favor of smaller applications to test, refine, and prove out the platform.

Today, I would like to announce the first such application: Pollaris. Named after Polaris, the star which has guided navigators throughout ages past, this initial application will serve as our guiding light. Pollaris will help us to ensure that the platform we build adequately addresses the difficulties of developing blockchain-based applications while enabling us to test our design principles and guidelines to ensure that our solutions are indeed intuitive to people of all walks of life.

In practical terms, Pollaris is a simple polling application intended for use in communities to establish consensus on any issue they may face. The app will be used by administrators to gain insight into member sentiments on the issues at hand, enabling faithful management of the community’s resources in accordance with member preferences. Initial target markets for the app will include Homeowner’s Associations (HOAs) and collegiate student government organizations.

Pollaris will be developed as a fully open source solution, with rigorous security and transparency standards. The technologies will be open for all to inspect, deploy, and modify as they see fit. Follow My Vote will also offer a fully supported and hosted option for customers who lack either the technical expertise or the desire to manage their own instance.

To ensure that Pollaris is both a commercial success and an effective North Star for our platform, Follow My Vote is pulling out all the stops and challenging all of our assumptions about software design. We are dissatisfied with current standards of software usability and intuitiveness, particularly in blockchain software. Rather than simply point out problems, we aspire to reconsider everything about how software works and lay the groundwork for a new paradigm of human/computer interaction.

Many of the most well-designed and intuitive applications in existence today required armies of developers over sprawling timelines backed by massive budgets, and despite this investment the results leave people frustrated all too often.

Follow My Vote plans to address these issues using a combination of design and technology. First, we will design our software to be self-describing by incorporating detailed information describing the application into the code that comprises it. We will also create systems to allow people to inspect the elements and controls of the application to determine what they do and why they are in a particular status. The application will feature a tutorial mode on first launch showing people how to use the app and how to inspect the components. Finally, we will build a live support system directly into the app to provide human help to users on demand.

Of course, all of these designs require technology to substantiate them and we do not want a one-time solution, but a reusable new approach to developing software. Therefore while we will first build, test, and refine these solutions as part of Pollaris development, they will be generalized into the platform to serve future projects both by our team and others.

While Pollaris is a conceptually simple app, I hope I’ve made clear that there is a great deal of care and attention going into its design and that getting it just right is no small undertaking. Moreover, Pollaris is only the beginning; we have some really exciting ideas to build upon the foundations described above. It will take time to prove all of this out and I can’t say yet how much will make it into the first release, but I do believe when it’s done it will have been well worth the wait.

I’ll be writing more posts as we go forward to announce more about what we’re working on here at Follow My Vote and to go into deeper technical detail on our designs and our ideas, so stay tuned for more. Thank you for reading!