London Voice

How Our Project Will Contribute To The Growth Of The Decentralized AI Platform

London Voice aligns with BGI’s mission by using AI and blockchain to enable inclusive civic engagement and ethical data use. It addresses gaps in representation, empowering communities to express real concerns and derive shared solutions. By providing transparent, data-driven insights to local decision-makers, it accelerates social innovation, fosters equity, and demonstrates how AI can ethically enhance civic well-being.

Our Team

Our team at Factory Labs unites blockchain experts, AI researchers, and civic-tech innovators. Led by Dr. Nick Almond (PhD, governance researcher) and co-founders with deep domain expertise in smart contracts, Web3 identity, and decentralized data platforms, we blend academic rigor with real-world product delivery. Supporting members include designers, community managers, and social scientists committed to ethical, inclusive technology solutions.

Company Name (if applicable)

The core problem we are aiming to solve

Democracies worldwide struggle with disconnection between official decision-makers and local community voices. Voters typically only engage in broad elections every few years, leaving a gap where urgent, nuanced issues aren’t addressed. This fosters disengagement, especially among younger demographics, and leads to policies misaligned with real community needs. Existing systems often overlook or under-represent local voices, amplifying frustration, apathy, and inequality in civic life.

Our specific solution to this problem

London Voice is designed to capture local sentiment continuously, rather than once every election cycle.

• Data Gathering: Citizens share their issues, ideas, and context via a Web3-enabled application, “Influence,” with zero gas fees and intuitive UX.
• Quadratic Voting & SBTs: Voting occurs via Soulbound Tokens for pseudo-anonymous, Sybil-resistant participation. Quadratic weighting ensures each vote reflects genuine priority rather than raw financial power.
• AI Synthesis: The text-based feedback and voting data feed into large language models fine-tuned to represent the community’s collective sentiment. This “community-trained AI” surfaces shared priorities and suggests potential solutions or policy interventions.
• Data Ownership & Rewards: Participants retain rights over their data; no personal identifiers are tracked. Those who provide richer, context-specific input can earn tokenized rewards (“vote mining”).
• Community Governance: The resulting AI outputs—policy proposals, solution ideas, or requests for support—are governed by a DAO-like structure, allowing residents to refine or veto AI-driven insights.
• London Voice: A community governed agent, that is both a representitive and lobbyist for the local population.

By continuously listening to localized feedback, London Voice bridges the gap between policy-makers and underrepresented voices, generating actionable, data-backed proposals that can catalyze real-world change.

Project details

Background & Motivation

Contemporary democracies often capture public sentiment only through sporadic elections, leaving urgent local issues to accumulate without structured attention. Studies indicate that fewer than 4% of people in the UK feel truly represented by national decision-makers—a sentiment magnified in urban centers like London, where economic disparities and demographic diversity collide. Younger populations, in particular, consistently show lower voter turnout, underscoring a sense of powerlessness in traditional political processes.

Communities on the ground face profound and evolving challenges. From housing crises to the lack of accessible healthcare, these issues affect everyday lives in complex, rapidly changing ways. However, the mechanisms for ongoing input—via town hall meetings, sporadic surveys, or comment periods—often fail to harness the rich context and nuanced perspectives of local residents. As a result, critical interventions can be delayed or overlooked. Meanwhile, data that could inform bold, evidence-based policies remain siloed in disconnected systems, limiting politicians’ ability to craft responsive solutions.

Against this backdrop, emerging technologies offer a fresh opportunity. AI and blockchain, particularly when combined, promise decentralized, participatory models that move beyond annual or quadrennial votes. By leveraging AI for large-scale data analysis and blockchain for secure, transparent governance, it becomes possible to capture community sentiment continuously—providing a living map of local priorities that leaders and planners can reference at any time. This is not just about digital novelty; it’s about restoring agency to citizens who feel unheard, and ensuring their insights actively shape policy, urban development, and community initiatives.

London Voice arises from this aspiration. Our core motivation is to create a scalable, human-centered platform that regularly assimilates people’s lived experiences, organizes them into meaningful policy prompts, and presents them back to the community and decision-makers as actionable recommendations. By blending democratic ideals with AI’s power to synthesize vast input, we envision a future where any neighborhood—like Barking or Archway—can rally around a shared digital “voice” capable of influencing resource allocation, urban planning, and civic engagement on an ongoing basis. In doing so, we aim to demonstrate how modern technology, carefully designed with transparency and inclusivity at heart, can mend the rift between local populations and the governance structures meant to serve them.

The Vision

London Voice envisions a future where AI-driven governance and human-centered design intersect to create an inclusive, transparent forum for collective decision-making. By leveraging Web3 technologies, we ensure:

• Pseudonymity: Protecting participants’ personal data through Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) that grant voting rights without tying votes to real-world identities.
• Open Participation: Anyone with an SBT can contribute issues and perspectives, bridging the gap between offline community activism and digital democracy tools.
• Ongoing Adaptation: The AI agent, tuned to reflect local sentiments, is not static. It evolves as conditions change, building a “living snapshot” of collective beliefs and aims.

Pilot Projects & Real-World Interventions

• Barking Voice: Our first major intervention focuses on a real community group in Barking lobbying local developers. Although the area’s density is increasing, vital community services (e.g., healthcare, green spaces) are not expanding at pace.
  • Local Impact: By gathering residents’ direct feedback—needs, fears, aspirations—London Voice will synthesize these into a coherent community mandate. This can be presented to developers and local authorities, increasing pressure to include essential community amenities.

Evidence of Established Community Engagement and Need for London Voice

We have presented London Voice recently to the Thames Life community group, which would be our touch point with the community. Here are some select quotes from the community, which is primed and ready to be activated with this tool. Recorded and transcribed directly from our presentation event.

Quotes from the Barking Community Presentation

Kevin on Needing Reliable Information

“The most important thing, I think for us lot… is information. You can’t change or measure anything without good information we can rely on.”

Suggested Tag: #TrustedInformation

Alan on Feeling Gaslit by the Council

“I’m fed up with being gaslit by the council all the time… we need to keep at them, or they’re just going to ride over us.”

Suggested Tag: #Accountability

Eric on Youth Opportunities

“As a young person, for me the most important thing is more opportunities for younger people.”

Suggested Tag: #YouthEngagement

Pete on “Consultation” Fatigue

“They never do anything for what we want. They ask us to go to their consultations, but they’ve already made the plan… They just want our names so they can say, ‘Oh look, we talked to them.’”

Suggested Tag: #MeaningfulConsultation

Local Resident on Spatial Ownership

“I live north of the A13. I think it’s about people having ownership of spatial things that affect them.”

Suggested Tag: #SpatialOwnership

Resident on Green Spaces & Community Control

“We need to protect our communities… When they’re building all these high-rises and there’s no gardens for people. We need to change the mindset of developers.”

Suggested Tag: #EnvironmentalPriority

Community Member’s Endorsement of London Voice

“We should get behind this. I think it’s a great idea. If you can do it, you’ve got an awesome tool.”

Suggested Tag: #CommunitySupport

By capturing and synthesizing direct feedback like this, London Voice can pinpoint urgent community concerns (lack of reliable information, mistrust of local authorities, unmet youth needs, etc.) and aggregate them into actionable focus areas. These quotes demonstrate both the demand for inclusive, continuous engagement and the enthusiasm for a tool that amplifies resident voices.

Using consultations like this, London Voice can generate the semantic tags that define community voting options. For example:

• Archway Voice (Islington Council & Architecture Association): We plan to activate a partnership with Islington Council and the Architecture Association to create Archway Voice. This initiative will similarly leverage relationships with existing grassroots organizations, enabling them to share hyper-local insights and shape development decisions.
  • Collaboration Model: Students, activists, and council representatives convene assemblies, feed input into our Influence app, and collectively fine-tune a localized AI model. The outputs—policy proposals, design suggestions, or resource allocation plans—can then be championed by local governance bodies.

How London Voice Works

1. Submission Phase: Residents or community members submit issues and ideas—ranging from the cost of living to the need for a new community health clinic.
2. Voting & Data Collection: Quadratic Voting ensures balanced representation of intensity (not just majority rule). SBT-based identity gating prevents spam and manipulations.
3. AI Synthesis: We utilize large language models (LLMs) to interpret and aggregate these votes and text-based inputs, producing a ranked list of community priorities and an accessible summary of underlying sentiment.
4. Agent Governance: The community collectively governs the AI’s parameters and how it may propose solutions. If the AI’s responses or generated proposals conflict with community values, participants can adjust training data, add disclaimers, or set new alignment criteria.

Benefits & Impact

• Local Empowerment: London Voice fosters a culture where local decisions are shaped by lived experiences rather than top-down mandates.
• Evidence-Based Lobbying: By capturing genuine community sentiment, the AI agent provides a credible narrative that policymakers and developers must consider.
• Transparent Decision-Making: All voting records, discussion prompts, and AI fine-tuning steps are publicly available, building trust and accountability.

Data Ethics & Consent

Data contributions are pseudo-anonymous, and no personal identifiers are stored. Each participant controls how their data is used for model training. The codebase is fully open-sourced under GPLv3, allowing external audits of data handling procedures and model behaviors. In this version team members will retain full moderation rights of the platform, to allow data that breachers a set of clear ethical guidelines to be removed from the platform. In future iterations this moderation function can be decentralised to a set of community moderators.

Future Expansion & Tokenized Rewards

Although we are not implementing direct tokenized rewards in this proposal, we anticipate that future iterations may reward participants for high-quality or in-depth contributions. This aligns with our long-term vision of a people-owned AI, where those who provide valuable data are fairly acknowledged and potentially compensated.

Conclusion

By bringing together communities, developers, councils, and AI specialists, London Voice stands as a practical demonstration of how emerging technology can inform, empower, and unify. Whether it’s addressing the lack of green spaces in Barking or co-creating an architectural blueprint for Archway, London Voice aims to channel collective intelligence into tangible, real-world change—one neighborhood at a time.

Existing resources

We are extending and customizing our existing “Influence” dApp for user onboarding, quadratic voting, and data collection. We also build upon well-established LLM frameworks (e.g., open-source large language models), ensuring minimal overhead and leveraging proven technology.

Open Source Licensing

We will use GPLv3 for the entire codebase, including smart contracts, front-end, and supporting libraries, with no proprietary exceptions.

Links and references

Factory Labs: https://ldnvoice.factorylabs.org/

Additional videos

Voice App Preview: https://youtu.be/XSwPnEp8VPw

Was there any event, initiative or publication that motivated you to register/submit this proposal?

Describe the particulars.

A refferal from Esther Galfalvi - Decentralisation Program Lead.