Background

These are all actions anyone can run at the appropriate times to nudge the contract into the next step of the election.

EdenOS is a portal that automates a lot of the election process, but there are a few things that must be known and understood to execute an election. This document will outline what the contract needs as far as event triggering to complete an election.

Smart contracts are reactive—they react to incoming transactions, their own "events" internally, and other contracts' events. So during an election round, the contract is just responding to vote actions and video upload actions, but at times, we need outside triggers to transition the contract between rounds and other states where there isn't an event to trigger the next state.

The easiest smart contract limitation here to relate to is time... contracts can't run an action at a particular time (like a cron job, if that term means anything to you); they are always responding to in-coming events. So the eden contract exposes a few actions that anyone can call (no special permissions) that simply poke the contract awake, and if it's the right time, it will execute the relevant code.

Instructions

Below, we outline what those are that need to be triggered manually, when they need to be called, and how to call them.

The actions involved are as follows:

• electseed
• electprocess
• distribute

NOTE: for each of the steps below, if the action you're invoking takes a "max_steps" argument, generally, you can enter 100. You need to rerun them until there's no more to do. You'll get 1 of 2 outcomes from these invocations.

• Everything that needed to run has now run, which is indicated by an assertion
  • assertion failure with message: Nothing to do
• Code was run, but there might be more to run, which is indicated by a success message:
  • <txid> and successful submission message — Run the same command again to confirm all of what needed to run got run.

Election Timeline (as it pertains to externally-triggered events)

• [up to 24 hours before election begins] electseed must be called with a bitcoin block header to provide the contract the ability to randomly assign members to groups. Instructions for that process can be found here.
• [start of election] electprocess must be called after the election start_time to alert the contract that it's time to start the election. The contract knows whether to act or not; it just needs a trigger to "wake it up" in case there is action to take. So if this action is called too early or multiple times, the contract still acts properly. At the right time, when electprocess is called, the contract will transition itself into the first round state. Link to invoke this action.
• [after each round] electprocess must be called again to have the contract kick off the next round.
• [during sortition 2-hour period] electseed must be called just as it is called prior to the election, except that the block headers used here must be from block produced within the sortition time window.
• [after sortition round is complete],
  • electprocess must be called to finalize the sortition round and choose the Head Chief.
  • distribute must be called to distribute funds from the treasury to the elected delegates, based on their allocated budgets. Link to invoke that action.
• [each month after an election], distribute must be called for the contract to make the monthly disbursements. Note: we will very likely work this into the UI so that it becomes unnecessary to do this manually.