Governance Handbook - InviteOnly Network

🛡️

Proof of Experience (PoE)

Automated and cryptographic telemetry validation

To counter fake reviews and bad-faith manipulation, InviteOnly employs a modular Proof-of-Experience (PoE) pipeline. Authors can attach cryptographic and sensor telemetry to certify that their experience occurred at the specific time and location:

📍 GPS Metadata Checks

Validates EXIF location header data in uploaded photos to confirm geographic proximity to the merchant coordinates.

🧾 WASM OCR Parsing

Runs client-side optical character recognition (OCR) on receipt images to extract timestamps and match merchant names.

🔒 Secure Enclave

Generates platform-attested cryptographic signatures confirming transaction integrity directly from compatible client hardware.

⚖️

Trust Consensus Score ($\theta$)

Reputation-weighted voting math

Rather than using simple average ratings, the visibility of every review on the ledger is governed by a reputation-weighted consensus algorithm. Active users can either Vouch ($+$) or Dispute ($-$) reviews.

Consensus Ratio Formula

$$\theta = \frac{W_v}{W_v + W_d}$$

Where $W_v$ is the total weighted sum of Vouches and $W_d$ is the total weighted sum of Disputes.

Consensus Rules:

Voter Weights: A vote's base weight is equal to the voter's active reputation_score. Higher reputation users have significantly more weight in resolving disputes.
Lineage Collusion Penalty: To deter sybil attack rings and invite-tree collusions, if a voter exists in the referral/invite chain of the review author, the vote's weight is automatically penalized:
Weight = Base Weight * 0.50
Consensus Thresholds:
- High Trust ($\theta \ge 0.70$): Fully visible with verified badges.
- Contested ($0.40 \le \theta < 0.70$): Marked with warning banner notifying users of split consensus.
- Low Consensus ($\theta < 0.40$): Automatically collapsed, blurred, and filtered by default.

🗺️

Geographic Taxonomy & Soft Validation

Zero-friction submission with community review

InviteOnly organizes all reviews within a global geographical hierarchy: Earth → Continent → Country → State/Province → City → Neighborhood.

To prevent locking users out of submitting reviews for locations not yet seeded in our taxonomy, IOR implements a Soft Validation protocol:

⚠️ Soft Validation Mode

If a city node specified in a review does not exist in the seeded taxonomy, the system will not block the submission. The submission is accepted, and the new city node is created dynamically but flagged as "Needs Taxonomy Review". Moderators will verify and merge it into the correct hierarchical lineage behind the scenes.