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Josh Stark provides in this article an excellent introduction to the topic of Blockchain Governance Applications.

It starts with a simple definition of the term “Governance”

This is what I mean by “governance” for the purposes of this article – the processes and systems used to facilitate decision-making in any organization.

This decision making process requires some basic technologies, which are provided in this context by the blockchain technology.

Amongst others these are

• First, it requires a way to record a set of rules. Rules like who gets to vote, who gets to sit in parliament or who has commit access to a codebase.
  
• Second, there must be a way for people to interact with the rules.
  
• Third, governance systems require a way to enforce the rules.
  

The article introduces a simple example of a voting system used by an NGO and then applies the blockchain technology to provide a Governance Application solution to the use case. This illustration process is very helpful in getting a quick and easy to understand overview of this rather complex domain.

The benefits of the blockchain in the above example are

• First, blockchains are ideal for recording information in a way that can be later verified as authoritative.
  
• Second, blockchains provide a new way for people to interact with the rules directly. Some blockchains allow users to create logical scripts that are executed by the blockchain itself (smart contract code), which are executing the agreed rule.
• Having the rule express as executable code in the blockchain itself we have already achieved our third requirement – enforcement. When the rule is expressed as executable code, the rule can be enforced at the same time it is exercised.
  

These three blockchain features are the foundation of any bitcoin governance system.

The author then goes on a introduces the bigger picture as well outlines various existing use cases. You can find the full article here.

This blog entry was fully produced within Evernote and published using the Cloudburo Publishing Bot.