Protocol for better cities with individual behaviors
Introduction
We believe that the power to shape our cities can create a better, more sustainable future that lies within each and every one of us. That's why we've created SoCity, a non-profit DAO that brings together communities, individuals and organizations in cities to drive positive change through prosocial and pro-sustainability behaviors.
At the heart of SoCity is an innovative paradigm centering decentralized incentive policy. By quantifying each participant's social and sustainable contribution, monetizing it, and providing rewards to encourage positive feedback loops, we create a dynamic, self-reinforcing system that drives real urban changes. Leveraging the power of decentralization, SoCity empowers individuals to drive positive change and shape better living environments. With awareness, empowerment and trust, we believe that everyone can make a real impact and create a brighter, common future.
Why Individual Behaviors?
We have witnessed urban issues such as congestion, gentrification, and growing wealth gap going hand in hand with rapid urbanization in many cities. As the city gets more and more developed, solving these issues with physical improvements are getting costly and sometime unrealistic. With more people residing in the cities, individuals’ behaviors begin to show its importance in affecting the urban performance. Thus, we believe the potential indeed lies in the awareness and behaviors of every citizen.
Within the built environment, an individual behavior approach has the following characteristics:
Sustainability: Individual behaviors, such as using public transportation, conserving energy, and reducing waste, can achieve a more lasting impact on the environment than construction-focused solutions. By encouraging individuals to adopt sustainable habits and practices, cities can create a more sustainable future.
Resilience: Individual behaviors are more flexible and adaptable than construction-focused solutions, which is expensive, time-consuming, and often rigid. Encouraging individuals to adopt new behaviors allows cities to respond more quickly and effectively to changing needs and conditions.
Community building: Encouraging individual behaviors can promote community building and social engagement. For example, community-based initiatives to encourage recycling, volunteering, or other prosocial behaviors can bring people together and foster a sense of community and social connection.
Personal ownership: Encouraging individual behaviors places the responsibility for improving the environment on the individual, rather than on the government or other organizations. This promotes a sense of personal ownership and foster committed, individual investments in the community and its well-being.
While construction-focused solutions play an important role in improving the urban environment, individual behaviors are an essential component of a comprehensive approach to sustainable and livable cities.
Why Incentive Policies?
However, there are barriers for people to practice prosocial and pro-sustainability behaviors naturally - for example, people could feel less motivated[1] or that such actions are inconvenient[2]. Education and producing incentives play important roles in promoting behavioral changes. Such policies can help overcome barriers for engaging prosocial activities, while encouraging individuals to adopt new habits and attitudes that support the well-being of both themselves and their communities.
Realizing the need and urgency for encouraging behavioral change, many states have initiated incentive programs. The Dutch government has implemented an incentive that rewards its citizens for cycling to work or school [3]. The UK offers tax credits and subsidies to homeowners who install renewable energy systems, such as solar panels or wind turbines [4]. However, not all trials are successful - the individual ‘green account’ program in Shanghai, China, for example, has only fewer than 20 percent active accounts a year after launching to the public[5]. Potential causes for such low activation rates include the lack of stable investment, as well as the infrastructure to support new urban use patterns. Further, the incentives are static and unattractive. The lack of transparency in system design and operation has also produced public mistrust.
A new incentive paradigm with supporting technologies is needed to keep existing challenges and potential issues in mind. We identify the following aspects as critical:
Capable of quantifying diverse, complex behaviors
User-driven incentive mechanism
Distribution system driven by both equity and equality
Operates within an open ecosystem that involves different stakeholders
SoCity DAO: Better Cities By and For Us
As a non-profit DAO, SoCity aims to promote individual prosocial, pro-sustainability behaviors. In our previous blog, we introduced DAO as a new organizational form that is decentralized, autonomous, transparent, borderless and diversified. Vitalik’s blog ‘DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide’ helps us clarify key differences between these relevant terms [6]. According to Vitalik, a DAO is an organization with automation at its center and human at its edges. ‘It is an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do.’ We work with this concept as the basis to explain why we chooses DAO instead of other organizational structures.
Decentralization: The ‘infrastructure’ we identify for the new incentive policy paradigm. Individuals’ participation helps to make policies that are contextual, flexible and innovative. The policy, as a result of the consensus, also encourages participation. Decentralization also implies that the SoCity protocol is owned and governed by participants rather than any single person or entity. Collective ownership promotes increased transparency and accountability, and limits the risk of corruption or the abuse of administrative power.
Autonomous: In a DAO where human is the sole actor making decisions, collusion attacks are inevitable whenever more than 51% wants to achieve a certain goal [6]. Autonomy is the technical solution to ensure that everyone acts according to individual interest without any desire for specific outcomes. In SoCity, the incentive policy making the rules and resources allocation policies are encoded with smart contracts on chain, together with an on-chain database for data autonomy. They facilitate a transparent and decentralized decision-making processes built on consensus and trust.
Organization: Different from a corporation, the core aim of SoCity lies in promoting prosocial and pro-sustainability behaviors rather than generating revenue. Although profits are foreseeable, it is shared by all the participants - the value of which is deeply associated with each person’s performance. Namely, the profit mechanism is intertwined with the consensus mechanism. The term ‘organization’ also sheds light on the value of community for SoCity. We hope to attract groups of people with the shared vision that how we behave shapes where we live and build up the platform for communications, supports and innovations.
In the coming sections, we will dive into the technical considerations to see how SoCity is realized. They are:
Trusted Personal Behavior Record with Blockchain
Incentive Policy boosted by Decentralization
Sustainable Tokenomics connecting the Online and Offline
Trusted Personal Behavior Record with Blockchain
For programs dealing with personal data, a trustworthy data record & management system is one of the core concerns. SoCity deploys privacy-preserved technologies as well as on-chain database to provide traceable, transparent, privacy-preserved individual behavior data recording and processing.
Our data comes from: 1) public dataset; 2) dataset provided by our client; 3) urban IoT sensors; 4) SoCity DApp. We will not collect or trade data in any illegal or unethical manner. We also use a variety of technical innovations to protect data privacy during the collection and processing process, including, but not limited to the MIT Open Algorithm (which keeps data encrypted at all times, allowing only vetted algorithms, moves the algorithm to the data, and executes itself on decentralized infrastructure) and Edge Computing (data does not leave the device and the calculation results are anonymized). Everything ranging from behavioral data to voting data are stored in an on-chain database, which is immutable, traceable, interoperable, cost-saving and privacy-preserved.
Decentralized Incentive Policy with Smart Contract
Being static and irresponsive are the crucial problems of the conventional top-down incentive policy. We believe that decentralization would be the key to tackle such issues, and become the new paradigm in promoting prosocial behaviors. The flow diagram below illustrates how it works. Every individual will participate in the design and decision making process for the policy together, which determines how the reward system works. Subsequently, the collectively designed reward system will incentivize the behavioral changes for each individual.
The above-mentioned participatory, dynamic process is realized with smart contract, the simplest form of decentralized automation [6]. A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement pre-coded. It runs automatically on the blockchain among disparate, anonymous parties without needing any external enforcement. The code controls the execution of the contract, and transactions are trackable & irreversible. Smart contracts permit trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out among disparate, anonymous parties without the need of a centralized authority, legal system, or external enforcement mechanism. Running automatically on the blockchain, it is safe, fast, decentralized, and protects the privacy of each party involved. In SoCity, we use Solidity as the programming language for our smart contracts.
That being said, incentive policy-making is only one aspect of decentralized governance in SoCity. Other aspects include community affairs, proposing new programs, etc. We will elaborate on them in further detail in our following blogposts.
Sustainable Tokenomics connecting the Online and Offline
The tokenomic system in SoCity has two features: dual token system and online-offline connectedness.
The dual token system consists of a governance token and a utility token. The governance token is used for decision-making and voting power in decentralized governance. It is allocated based on voting participation rate, utility token amount and membership duration. It is a means to encourage participation and members’ stickiness as well as keeping their incentives aligned. On the other hand, the utility token is used as a means of exchange and grants access to benefits. It is issued based on individual prosocial behaviors as a reward for their endeavors. The dual token system realizes incentives in a two-folded manner in terms of power, ownership and economic rewards.
Using the utility token as a bridge, SoCity hope to connect the online and offline as we are dealing real-world urban issues. Besides what have been done in conventional government-led approaches like exchanging for public services, we would hope to actively involve local businesses into the SoCity ecosystem. Local businesses play an important role in providing goods and services that are tailored to the needs of the local area, while creating jobs, adding urban vibrancy, and building a sense of communities with personal connections. However, their significance are often overlooked by large developers, therefore lacking support. In believing that they are the key actors in shaping a livable, diversified and resilient community, we hope to bring them into play.
Green Commute: SoCity DAO Program for Greener Travel Behaviors
The first in-market program with SoCity protocol is Green Commute for greener travel behaviors. This program records and quantifies each individual’s travel behaviors, and then distribute rewards based on the Personal Carbon Allowance framework dynamically governed by all the participants. The monetary value of the reward (token) is realized via partnership with local business and carbon trade. Through establishing this positive feedback loop, we hope to raise consciousness, promote a greener lifestyle, and leverage the power of daily behaviors in combating the carbon issue in the urban transportation sector.
SoCity Green Commute has developed a mobile DApp for both iOS and Android. Together with the smart contract and backend, users can register and upload their commute data, receive token reward, and vote for the token distribution rules.
Joining Us for Our Cities and Empowered Individuals
A brief introduction about out team - we are researchers from MIT Media Lab City Science and Tongji-MIT City Science Lab @Shanghai. Please subscribe to our channel, join our community or talk to us if you are interested in our programs. We are looking forward to participants, developers, collaborators and investors. Let’s shape better cities by and for us together!
Website: socitydao.org
Discord: https://discord.gg/cWvjbzBGwE
Email: info@socitydao.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/socitydao
Notes
[1] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.[2] Thøgersen, J. (1999). Perceived convenience as a factor influencing the use of grocery shopping modes. Psychology & Marketing, 16(9), 859-875.[3] https://greencleanguide.com/netherlands-to-provide-incentives-for-cycling/[4 ] https://www.solarsense-uk.com/residentials/clean-energy-grants-for-homeowners/[5] https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_2022355[6] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide