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!

The post Introducing Pollaris appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Predicting Our Future is a new podcast about the next revolutions in technology. 

Ernest appeared on EPISODE 9: DISINTERESTED VOTERS & 500,000 ELECTED OFFICIALS.

Listen to the whole episode or skip to 20:15 to hear Ernest explain and discuss using blockchain technology to build open source, end-to-end verifiable voting software:

“In the United States, there are over 500,000 elected officials. In the overwhelming majority of elections, less than half of eligible voters participate, resulting in one of the lowest levels of voter engagement of any Western democracy. In this episode, Andrews asks and tries to answer: What can be done to increase turnout for elections conducted every year in the U.S.? Can the security risks of implementing online voting be overcome? If online voting did become available in the United States, what might it look like? Which companies would be the winners?”

Episode 9 is one of three different episodes covering the issues facing the future of elections. Check them out on predictingourfuture.com:

Episode 7: Can Online Voting Defeat The Broken Electoral College?
Episode 8: Hacking Elections, DDoS Attacks, & Online Voting Around the World
Episode 9: Disinterested Voters & 500,000 Elected Officials

Learn about Follow My Vote’s blockchain voting software.

About the Author: Will Long is the Co-Founder & Marketing Manager of Folow My Vote. 

The post Follow My Vote CEO Discusses Online Voting On Predicting Our Future Podcast appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Set Up A Graphene Blockchain Testnet

In this video you can follow along with Nathan Hourt, Follow My Vote Co-founder & CTO as he demonstrates how to setup a Graphene / Bitshares testnet and GUI.  The Graphene blockchain testnet will serve as a real running blockchain that you can publish contests and casts votes on. The GUI is the graphical user interface which allow you to interact with the software and see what the end user will see.

Step 2: Set Up The Stake-Weighted Voting System On The Graphene Blockchain Testnet.

Once you have set up the blockchain testnet, you will now have the proper foundation of code necessary to run the actual voting system. We created a second video to help walk you through the process of setting up the voting system so that you can test the alpha.

Step 3: Run & Test The Alpha Release

Now that you have followed the previous steps you can explore and test the blockchain voting software. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out via our contact form or reach out to follow My Vote CTO Nathan Hourt on IRC (Our IRC channel is #followmyvote on Freenode. Nathan’s handle: modprobe)

Now Is The Time To Become A Code Contributor!

In the Follow My Vote Code Contributor Program skilled developers can contribute code to our open source project. Follow My Vote releases open source code under the GPLv3 license. Here are a few reasons why you might consider contributing:

Be A Part Of Something World Changing

Follow My Vote is positioned to disrupt the entire voting industry. . . around the globe. With blockchain based voting we can increase transparency while decreasing costs. You now have a chance to join the project that will likely be the very first end to end verifiable blockchain based voting platform. Get in in the early stages and have your name carved into history as a person responsible for helping build this revolutionary software.

Learn & Gain Blockchain Experience From The Experts.

Follow My Vote CTO, Nathan Hourt is leading the Follow My Vote Code Contributors. Nathan is one of the two architects behind the Graphene Blockchain framework which has been adopted by BitShares, Steem, and Muse.

Earn MERITs

MERITs are digital tokens that Follow My Vote is using to reward Code Contributors and help set the direction of Follow My Vote’s software development. When Follow My Vote is deciding what features to add next, or which direction to take with their products, we will run stake-weighted polls in our software to prioritize development based on market demand. These polls will be weighted in MERIT.

MERITs exist in the BitShares cryptocurrency ecosystem as a User Issued Asset (UIA). Overtime as the project grows and more people earn and hold MERITs, we will see the value of MERITs increase.  This will allow early holders to sell their MERIT profitably on the free market.

At this time, one should think of 100 MERITs as representing 1 hour of time. Developers who contribute code to Follow My Vote by resolving issues* that live in our github repository will be rewarded in MERITs.

*Note that not all issues in our github repository are eligible for MERITs. Non-eligible issues have been tagged with a “No MERITs” label. If you are interested in taking on one of the eligible issues, please place a bid by posting a comment on that issue to include how many MERITs you’d like receive for doing the work. From there, we’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible to discuss the opportunity further.

Not a developer? No worries! Our Ambassadors also earn MERITs for their time spent helping the project.

Get Involved!

Check out our GitHub repo and contact Nathan on IRC.
Our IRC channel is #followmyvote on Freenode. Nathan’s handle: modprobe.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post How To Run And Explore The Alpha Release | Video Tutorial appeared first on Follow My Vote.