is an asynchronous video forum, a scalable town hall based on the TV talk show model, where you have a host carrying on a conversation with a panel of experts in front of an interactive audience.

The basic pattern of talk show conversation is simple, repeated endlessly, and people never seem to tire of it — the host provides some context around a subject and then asks an assembled expert panel a question. The panel answers, the audience laughs, gasps, boos, applauds, then the host asks another question, and so on...

It's this talk show pattern that Civol has captured in the form of the xchange, a new unit of media that allows us to record and play back asynchronous video discourse. Here's the structure...

So Civol discourse is all about xchanges. Every thread on Civol is a series of xchanges, and the Civol Xchange Player Recorder (XPR) plays and records them.

Xchanges are actually a whole new form of media. The primary unit of media on the web to date has been the post, typically a body of text by a single author. An xchange is a meta-level unit, a group of posts (videos) by a group of authors (speakers) engaged in asynchronous video discourse.

Every xchange consists of a host post and set of reply posts, each being a separate video that can be securely voted on, with the votes being written to an immutable blockchain. Speakers play the role of host whenever they publish a new host post that other speakers can reply to.

Without replies there can be no xchange, only the lonely host post.

Replies are where new information is added, aggregated, and integrated into the evolving narrative, it's where new realizations emerge. Replies are where the magic happens, the mixing of minds that produces consensus and collective intelligence.

In Civol, panelists reply to each other in video using the Recorder. Published replies appear on the right in the Player. You need to watch an entire video in order to reply to it.

The mobile version of the Xchange Player and Recorder​

The mechanics of replying (assuming you're a panelist):​

• Click the Reply button on the bottom bar of the Player to bring up the Recorder. If the Reply button isn't visible you probably haven't watched the whole video. You can't skip ahead and then watch the end. We need to give the speaker a good listen before we reply.
• On the Recorder, click the red Record button to record up to 90 seconds of video. Rerecord till you feel good about it.
• Add text, links, videos, images, etc. to the Details pane, but at minimum, three words to serve as a title or summary for your post. You can of course do the Details part first, then do the video, whatever feels best.
• When you're done it's time to Publish, after which you'll almost instantly see the thumbnail of your reply appearing at the top of the Replies List on the post you replied to. You can find all your published replies in the Dash Drawer, just hover or tap your avatar in the upper right corner and then choose Replies. Once there you'll be able to edit and delete them, but be quick, as you can only delete a reply that has not yet been replied to.

Happy replying!

Authentication​

No surprises here, just enter your display name, email, and password. We'll migrate your account and data to the new IC version of Civol around the time of beta launch.

Discourse​

The Civol user experience was originally modeled on the TV talk show, making it possible for expert hosts and panelists to record and play back video xchanges between themselves, and for the audience to vote its level of resonance / agreement with everything said. We refer to this not as conversation, but as discourse.

There are six fundamental experiences you can have on Civol:

Exploring​

Civol opens in Discourse View, a grid / list of players filterable in a variety of ways. Hover over the logo and a drawer slides out offering a list of views. Click the Explore icon in the header at the top to scroll through all the Issues and their Threads, complete with all the panelists on those threads.

Playback​

Click Play in the usual way. For every video, reply posts are on the right, the parent post is on the left. Explore the xchange and play individual posts, or click Play All to play them all in sequence.

Voting​

After watching each video you may be prompted to vote, indicating how much you resonate / agree with the speaker by giving the post between one and five hearts. Your vote will be recorded on chain and will be aggregated with all the other votes to determine the post's Consensus Index.

Hosting​

Hostposts are 2 minutes, and are recorded using the Civol Recorder. You need to be a panelist and be in Thread View to see the Add New Hostpost button. Only panelists can create hostposts.

Replying​

After a video plays back a red Reply button appears on the Player's Bottom Bar if you're a panelist on this thread. Clicking it brings up the Recorder, which allows you to record a 90 second reply, add supporting content in the Details pane, and publish it.

Debating​

Any panelist can challenge any other panelist to a debate on a specific question, with the winner decided by the audience, point by point. So if you're a panelist and you're in Thread view you will see the Debate button. Click it and then challenge whoever you like to debate you on the question you type in.

Civol is the world’s first asynchronous video forum, a decentralized app for community discourse, debate, and decision making. On Civol, the narrative evolves toward consensus as all facts are factored and all voices heard.

These speakers could have posted hours or days apart, but playback still feels live.​

Growth​

Most communities want to grow. This is especially true for Dfinity, the Internet Computer, as the foundation for a new Internet. But like most other blockchain platforms, the user experience is still a bit too dense for mass adoption.

The problem is how to make the Internet Computer understandable, the heart of the platform more accessible, so that people buy-in to its long term future. A workable solution will need to be video based, as the average person prefers watching to reading. It can’t be the video we have now though, YouTube, Zoom et al obviously aren't enough. User engagement and especially voter participation remain intractable problems.

Enter Civol. Based on a wholly new digital media experience called Asynchronous Video Conversation, Civol promises a number of breakthroughs — conflict resolution, consensus generation, collective decision making and more.

The Civol experience is unlike messaging (Telegram), broadcast video (YouTube), or live video (Zoom), it’s more deliberative. Hosts have 2 minutes to make a point. Other expert panelists can reply to that point at will, and have 90 seconds to do so. The audience votes its level of resonance with everything said. Panelists and voters are rewarded for this, and collective intelligence emerges from it.

Debate​

Probably one of the hottest things on Civol will be our debates. On Civol any disagreement can become a spontaneous decentralized (unmoderated) debate where the audience decides the winner, point by point.

This means Civol will be leveraging the innate drama of debate to attract more token holders to the Dfinity Community. This is what it's going to take — to onboard and retain ICP token holders the community needs an engaging and hopefully entertaining news-media-discourse-debate front end. This is what Dfinity.Civol aims to be.

Voting​

On Civol, voting is ambient, baked into the consumption flow. Everyone gets to say how much they resonate, or how much they agree, with everything the expert panelists post, immediately after watching them speak. All votes are recorded on chain, and we turn them into a Consensus Index for each post, a precise measurement of Community will.

Dfinity.Civol​

The Civol pilot, the very first Civol instance, will be Dfinity.Civol, dedicated exclusively to the Dfinity Community. Here members of the Dfinity Foundation can speak directly to expert developers and influencers and have the community feed back its level of resonance with what the speakers are saying.

Dfinity.Civol is where top experts currently communicating on the Dfinity Forum, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube can come together to host TV news-style discourse and debate with full participation from the entire Dfinity Community. Turning text into interactive TV-like news produced by the top experts in the community has the potential to solve voter participation.

With Dfinity.Civol, the Internet Computer will have what no other chain has, its governance becomes media, offering a new kind of direct video access to the top minds in the community. Civol makes it easy to get involved in governance by voting directly on solution proposals as they're being expressed, and by following expert neurons who vote on proposals on the IC's Network Nervous System.

Rewards​

Civol rewards speakers and voters with CVL tokens, and that begins now, with the web2 technology preview version of Dfinity.Civol. We don’t have anything formal on this yet, but our intent is for early adopters to receive some multiple of the reward they’ll receive for voting and posting at the time we launch the CVL token. The idea is the more you participate the more tokens you earn. We’ll keep you posted on this as things develop, and we'll also be making a future post on Civol tokenomics.

Your Data​

Finally, Civol's business model does not depend on you becoming our product. The truth is, Civol is a natural born DAO, so the responsibility for hosting, managing, maintaining and developing new features for Civol will rest with the community, all mediated by Civol's own ambient voting system. Ultimately, this will mean no management team or board of directors, Civol users will decide everything about the platform and service by using the platform, including when and how to open source the code.

The Civol Player plays xchanges, a set of posts from a panel of speakers on a specific discourse (issue) and thread. The top-level origin post for an xchange is what we call a host post, and all the other posts in the exchange are called reply posts.

So assuming you're a panelist, here are the mechanics of recording and publishing a hostpost:

Go to the Thread you want to publish on by clicking the Thread name wherever you see it, for example, in the Top Bar of the Player, or in the Conversations list in Explore view Take a look at the thread to make sure no one else is talking about your subject already; if so, you might want to jump into their xchange Click the Add Hostpost button to bring up the Recorder Record/re-record your video as often as necessary to make sure you're saying exactly what you want to say the way you want to say it Add text, links, images in the Details pane, a minimum of 3 words is required as a summary Publish — the Publish button will activate when both the video and summary are present, so click that and your post will immediately appear at the top of the Thread view grid. Host Post Content and Structure In its simplest form, a host post should consist of context and a question. Always try to end with an invitation for other panelists to reply to. You have two minutes to speak, and most of that time will be spent on context, setting up and focusing the xchange.

For more on hosting, see Hosting and Consensus.

Every Civol conversation is a series of xchanges between a host and a set of replying panelists, and every xchange is based on what we call, simply enough, a host post. The host posts, the panelists reply, and you see it all in the same player, which we call the Xchange Player.

So every Civol panelist has the ability to host his or her own xchange, that is, to create a host post, but they must also keep in mind that the audience will vote on this post, and everyone will see the average vote.

An example​

Let's say you're an expert on Universal Basic Income and you want to post on that issue. Using the main nav on the Home screen you would find the UBI issue and click/tap the thread you want to post to. All the xchanges on the thread will be now be displayed, and you should be aware of others hosting similar views. When you're satisfied that you've got something unique you click/tap the Add New Host Post button, which brings up the Recorder.

You're now ready to post. Ok, you know what you want to say, but how should you say it in 2 minutes? What should a Civol hostpost contain? Basically, just some context, your main point, and your proposal or question.

Context​

Your goal is to engage both panelists and audience, so in terms of context, you might want to highlight some of the history of UBI, maybe gloss over a few favorite links, which you can paste into the Details pane.

Point​

Your point is should be some special insight or combination of the latest evidence, something like even though UBI appears economically feasible and would solve countless major problems in one fell swoop, too few people are taking it seriously. So you might want your summary (the text that appears on your video) to read something like, 'MLK proposed UBI, but 50 years later still no one is talking about it...'

Question/Proposal​

Now you address your fellow panelists. How about with a question, something you can pose in the video and describe further in Details text, something like, 'Is the world ready for a global dialogue on UBI?'

So you add some descriptive text to your context links in Details, then record a video where you elaborate and pull it all together. You rerecord till you get it right, then click Publish. Your post will now be available for your fellow panelists and community to see, and they'll be notified if they're following you or the UBI thread you posted to.

Mistakes​

If you feel like you've made a mistake you can edit or delete your posts or replies by hovering or tapping your avatar on the right in the header, then choosing Posts or Replies.

Happy hosting!

So Dfinity.Civol will be our pilot, and while the Civol-IC web3 dapp is being built our Civol-OG web2 app will serve as a MVP meets technology preview.

Technology Preview​

The idea here is to experiment with our web2 prototype while we build the IC version, folding in all the feedback and sharing the good news along the way.

NNS Integration​

In addition to its role of video town hall for the IC community, Dfinity.Civol is actually auditioning for the role of Community Nervous System for the Internet Computer. Here Civol is an AOIS running on the IC where all everyone is equal in voting power, and proposals are amplified by voting.

The Civol CNS is a direct democracy system, where everyone votes on everything said about everything that interests them. It only takes a few seconds at the end of each video and they get rewarded for doing it.

Here's some of the value that Dfinity.Civol, the Civol CNS, promises to bring to IC governance (NNS + SNS):

• Novelty issues can be addressed and decided very quickly​

• Dispute resolution — conflicts can be resolved on an ad hoc basis​

• Autonomy — community can decided every issue it faces​

• Bicameral — NNS serves as a check on the CNS​

• Discoverable — NNS/SNS neurons​

• Followable — NNS/SNS neurons​

• Proposals — burden shifts from NNS to CNS​

Decentralization​

With the advent of the Dfinity.Civol CNS, orders of magnitude more votes can take place on a given proposal as expert discourse and debate suddenly becomes engaging, watchable media.

Follow Neuron​

All NNS neurons and ICP token holders can decide who to follow based on their experience of that person on Civol, and then do so with a single tap or click.

Founding Discourse​

It only makes sense that our first focus on Dfinity.Civol would be NNS. Here are the threads we've started so far:

Network Canister Management Network Economics Governance Know Your Customer Voter Participation

Founding Panelists:​

Evan McFarland Arthur Falls Wenzel Bartlett Jordan Last Quint Daenan Evan has already published a hostpost on each of the NNS threads except Voter Participation, which we just added.

Rewards​

Everyone will get CVL tokens based on their participation and ratings. Rewards will be allocated at token auction when the product launches.

Signup​

Here's the signup. You'll find the familiar support chat button lower right on the home screen, please let us know if you have any questions or issues.

Notes​

The UI and copy need polish. We probably won't be adding any features as this codebase will become obsolete once Civol-IC is born. This a web app MVP, it only runs on laptop screens and larger at the moment. We plan to be fully responsive soon and will then support most phone and tablet screens. Chrome and Brave are the best browsers for now, we'll be adding others in due course.

With this in mind then, it's hard to overemphasize the importance of the founding speakers in establishing good examples for the next round of onboarding users. Written instructions are important, but what we really want as users is to just grok the app first go, as in, see what other people are doing and do likewise.

We humans are great at imitation, but in order to leverage this power we need examples that guide, meaning at the very least that the examples should not suggest counterproductive behaviors or expectations. Civol is not social media. Discourse is more deliberative, formal, focused. So it will be important for the first xchanges to exemplify that.

Speakers first then audience​

The first users to onboard on a Civol instance are the founding speakers. These founders are likely to be considered experts by their community, and routinely offer solutions to community problems. So the very first discourse on any Civol instance should be about a timely and relevant problem the community is facing. This will ensure a lively discourse that the audience, which will be onboarding as soon as a few xchanges have been recorded, will find engaging.

The inaugural host post​

Our pilot is Dfinity.Civol, and for the Internet Computer at the time of this writing, one such timely and relevant problem would be voter participation. Wenzel Bartlett and the ICP Maximalist Network have just conducted a campaign to increase NNS voting. Accordingly, we've created a new thread for the NNS issue on Dfinity.Civol called Voter Participation, and a good start would be for Wenzel or someone familiar with the campaign to publish a first host post to summarize their findings and set the stage for a series of future host posts to discourse on what problems have been solved relating to NNS voting and what problems remain.

First votes and replies​

With the inaugural host post published, the other founding speakers, the panelists, will now watch the inaugural hostpost and vote their level of resonance with it. These votes will be tallied and appear in the Consensus pane, which lives under the heart icon on the Xchange Player's bottom bar.

After voting, each panelist should record a reply, but only if they feel they have something to contribute to the problem's solution. Replies should not be gratuitous, again, Civol is not social media, it's more like a town hall. Speakers don't speak just to be friendly or nice.

Additional xchanges​

So the inaugural hostpost needs to be designed to spawn both replies and additional host posts from the other panelists on the thread. These new hosts will take their cues from the inaugural xchange, which is why it's so important that it be a good example.

These additional xchanges will identity and address all the various aspects of the Voter Participation problem, and will likely take some time to spin up and elaborate.

First audience​

Once our Voter Participation thread has 2-3 xchanges underway we can invite in 20-30 audience members to watch those xchanges and vote on them. This will give us an initial take on product-market fit and allow us to fix any bugs that may be lurking. When we feel solid we can go for 100 more users, and thereafter scale up in a controlled fashion.

New Threads​

While the audience is building we can spin off additional NNS threads, each with its own panel of experts and series of xchanges. Basically, a single expert is enough to spawn a new thread. The expert publishes a host post or two and can then invite their peers to reply and thereby become panelists on the new thread.

New Issues​

We can likewise create whole new issues. For example, SNS is probably a worthy candidate as most developers are going to be curious about how it works. Civol will actually allow the community to help Dfinity shape the final product.

It's easy to imagine 10 or more issues emerging on Dfinity.Civol, each with 5-10 threads, by the time Civol-IC is ready to launch.

Scaling up the audience​

As more issues and threads are created, and more panelists are speaking, we can expect to scale up to the limits of the Dfinity Community and beyond, especially if we're revolutionizing decentralized governance. That will capture the attention of the entire crypto community, which will bring them all to the Internet Computer.

So after you watch a video post on Civol you may be asked how much you agree or resonate with what the speaker just said. It's pretty much effortless and actually kind of gratifying, not to mention rewarded with CVL tokens.

It's actually as easy for the user to vote as it is to close the Voter Pane to avoid voting, so voter participation will pretty much cease to be an issue. Everyone interested enough in an issue to watch community experts discourse and debate about it will be voting.

The mechanics of voting​

Voting couldn't be simpler or more natural. Immediately after playback the Voter Pane appears.

Click the heart that represents your level of agreement or resonance with the post you just watched, and the result is immediately written to chain. This is indicated visually by the spinning heart icon on the Player's Bottom Bar. Once you've voted a few times the whole process will take ~3 seconds on average.

Speakers aren't able to vote on their own posts, so if you're a speaker and see one of your own freshly published posts it will not have a Voter heart icon. You will only see the heart after someone has voted on your post..

Changing your vote​

Your vote for a given post is changeable at any time. Just click the Voter icon on the Bottom Bar and Consensus pane will appear. The Consensus pane offers your current vote represented as the five hearts, and will allow you to change the number of hearts in your vote. Each update is written to the blockchain as a separate transaction.