Owner: @Momo.Hou

Quadratic Voting

Quoting from “Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy”(2017): Quadratic voting is a collective decision-making procedure which involves individuals allocating votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. It is often considered an innovative improvement of the traditional 1-person-1-vote scheme and, as doing so, it can address issues like majority rule.

The simplified formula is:

cost of the voter = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + number of votes MATIC

Quadratic voting hugely promotes the development of hackathon topic selection and prize allocation. With it, community contributors can vote for their favourite topics and/or projects and emphasize their preference with multiple votes. Along with increased cost, of course:-)

Currently, platforms like gitcoin and hackerlink can hold quadratic votings. However, gitcoin only takes to their own events and hackerlink is open to everyone with reasonable application.

Award Voting in a Hackathon

This is the a critical part of a hackathon with prizes. We list three frequently used ways as following and you are welcomed to add your own ideas:

  Description Pros Cons
Judges vote Limited number of judges will decide the prizes. Straightforward and easy to compute. The final decision could be controversial.
Hackers vote Every participant will get a ticket to vote for their favorite projects and the allocation of the final prize would depend on the tickets count. This final decision would be decentralized and diversified, and the more teams would be able to share the final prize. Fraud and collude could happen.
Open vote Let almost everyone to vote. We strongly suggest you to use quadratic voting in this case. Except for all the advantages of hackers vote, this can provide greater chance to expose the projects and can further expand the impact of your event. You need a platform to hold this vote.