The Innovation for Policy Foundation (i4Policy) builds tools, methodologies and trainings to support common interest formation and public policy co-creation at scale. i4Policy also facilitates deliberative and participatory processes of policy reform and advises governments on consulting their citizens. i4Policy has facilitated the co-creation of the Africa Innovation Policy Manifesto with 150 ecosystem leaders from 44 countries, and has organized policy hackathons in 11 African countries as part of larger policy reform processes. These activities have resulted in a number of concrete policy reforms, such as the Startup Acts that were recently passed by the cabinets in Mali and Senegal.
To reach more people, i4Policy invests in open source technology development to enable open and inclusive public participation in policy making and governance processes. iConsult, which has been developed by a team of developers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has been deployed by the Nigerian Government to consult on a national innovation and entrepreneurship policy vision, by the Government of Mali to host a draft Startup Act, and by the community in Senegal. i4Policy is currently deploying the iConsult tool to gather inputs on the next version of the continental Manifesto (while modeling regional citizen-level policy co-creation), which can be accessed at www.i4policy.org/manifesto.
Kosmos Kredits is an experimental allocation system for distributed contributions to self-organizing autonomous collaborations. Kredits are cryptographic tokens, stored on the Ethereum blockchain, issued and managed via smart contracts. With Kredits, contributors may be transparently and securely acknowledged and rewarded for their contributions, which would enable open source development projects to scale. This would constitute a steep change for open source developer communities globally.
At DOTS, we will bring together developers from both the i4Policy and the Kosmos teams for a civic tech hackathon to achieve several objectives:
Overall, the project is intended to develop a joint work plan to gain practical experience piloting the Kredits application while invigorating the open source developer community around the iConsult tool.
