Spoke to someone who voted during the NDC election, and got a DM from a candidate, "why didn't you vote for me?" Been brainstorming about governance and transparency (including NDC, but more broadly) and had a couple good conversations this week about how "**declassifying votes**" at a later time may be advantageous if used correctly. Some governments will wait decades before they declassify documents/operations. The stories are often atrocious (like a forceful overthrow of power) but let's not focus on that. Let's focus on the collective emotional impact of facts released "at a later time." It would be interesting to experiment with declassifying votes 6 months later, perhaps particularly for controversial/personal decisions. The last thing we want is for elected leaders to hesitate on their vote because the immediate climate feels volatile or reactive. Delayed transparency, if you will. But this is only to be used for the purposes of integrity of choice. Technically speaking, I'm excited to see all the zero knowledge stuff coming, but this could be way simpler in implementation, too. I might suggest a commit-reveal scheme, which is easy to explain, but would include a private web2 server + database. Important: an untrusted database that's easily verified. Let's say we're voting on funding 3 projects in the community, but don't want things to get personal by immediately having voters' decisions public… For simplicity's sake, each project gets a "yes" or "no" vote by the voter literally sending in plain text "yes" or "no" to the contract. With commit-reveal, what would happen instead is Alice votes yes, but submits the hash of the value "yes234dh78923428923sdf24d8902j3" and only her and a web2 database knows the suffix `234dh78923428923sdf24d8902j3`. Perhaps the Transparency Commission is the only body with access to these suffixes, and they can indeed tell the broader ecosystem, "yes this passed" or "no this failed" and be held accountable to telling the truth. In 6 months, those suffixes are made public, and anyone can confirm that if you put "yes" or "no" in front of the string of random letters/numbers and hash it, you'll indeed get the value of the on-chain vote. So it's verifiable, but later. And if ever a circumstance arises where a TC member lies, they're swiftly removed and perhaps there's a staking/slashing mechanism as well. (It's the easiest thing in the world to tell the verifiable truth, so I imagine it would be infrequent for TC members to burn their own reputation and position by lying. Their guilt would be indisputable.) We're at a unique time where active web3 users/voters are in a small clique, and things can get personal quick. This might be an interesting experiment to help cut through some noise when things get personal or feel personal, which is not uncommon at the current scale of adoption. Food for thought, and I hope we can experiment rapidly and iterate. Pretty cool time to be alive and have the opportunity to organize collectives using novel methods.