Idea Box

Introduction

An online retail company wants to improve customer experience by setting up an ideabox for customers and/or employees to post improvement ideas. After a voting period, the top 3 ideas are selected. Voters must be registered by the ideabox's chairman.

DApp

This DApp example provides the Tezos' smart contract to store ideas and votes, and a web interface to display, add and vote for ideas.

Voters must be registered to be able to vote for or add ideas to the box. Each voter is assigned a maximum number of 5 votes.

The DApp chairman registers voters, and decides when the voting period starts and ends. Ending the vote process triggers the selection of top ideas.

Architecture

The DApp is made of a smart contract and a web interface for voters to interact with the smart contract:

An idea is made of a title and a body. Ideas are stored in the contract's storage in zipped format to reduce the contract size and reduce transaction costs. The positive side effect is that ideas are not on-chain readable as such.

Inspect the smart contract transactions in Better Call Dev:

Benefits

The use of the Tezos blockchain makes it easy to setup a robust and auditable application because the blockchain serves as the server with just a 50 lines long smart contract.

Discussion

Are votes anonymous?

The publically available information is the account address that voted for/added an idea. If the association between the address and the person the address belongs to is unknown, then the process may be considered as anonymized.

As a consequence, it is advised that the voter uses a dedicated address for the DApp.

Note that all the information about the address is available though: when did it vote, for which idea and so on.

The register entry point requires that the DApp chairman knows the identity that goes with the address in order to decide whether to register the address. The off-chain register process may consist for example in sending the chairmain an email with the address to register.

info

If voters use dedicated addresses, voters identity is only known by the DApp chairmain