DemocracyOS

http://democracyos.org

by sinak • 11 years ago

166 155 11 years ago

democracyos.org

stevecode2• 11 years ago

FYI OS means Operating System not Voting System.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

means both things :)

stevecode2• 11 years ago

how so? o.O

benwilber0• 11 years ago

this trend toward naming your pseudo-company "somethingOS" is getting really annoying.

mikermcneil• 11 years ago

that's true-- for these guys it actually makes sense though based on what they're doing IMO

andars• 11 years ago

Maybe I'm just missing it, but why? I associate OS only with operating systems, and these guys don't seem to be making an OS.

ytzvan• 11 years ago

"pseudo-company" only if that means be a YC Backed non-profit organization.

striking• 11 years ago

What about the monitoring and modification of online communities by the GCHQ? This doesn't even look resistant to that.

Also, what about traditional ballot stuffing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_100#Hacking anyone?

I could only trust this if there were attached a mathematical proof of its usability. Otherwise, I kind of doubt it's worth anyone's time.

piamancini13• 11 years ago

We are working to validate democracyOS votes with the blockchain. Happy to listen to any other suggestions

tebou• 11 years ago

Please check out: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/2014/08/30/every-vote-count...

This is a paper describing an end-to-end verifiable self-enforcing electronic voting system called DRE-i (Direct Recording Electronic with Integrity).

In my opinion this is a superior solution to any other electronic voting system developed to date.

joneil• 11 years ago

I think this is great - it's an attempted solution to an important, difficult problem, and they've got a number of interesting angles. In particular I think the branching of proposals, and hopefully being able to diff / blame, could be as important, or more important, than trusted voting.

I look forward to seeing more of the implementation. Congrats on the launch, and thanks for working on a difficult problem that we all need to see solved.

piamancini13• 11 years ago

Thank you! Totally agree with the branching aspect and yesterday we were playing with some ideas to order debate in pros&cons. Also, we are looking for funding to form a blockchain team, to validate democracyos votes in bc. All ideas are super welcome! pia@democracyos.org

jtmurphy2• 11 years ago

Political systems should protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. I worry that Democracy OS's idea fails to address this issue. If the politicians always vote with the majority, what if the majority wants to violate the rights of the minority?

frozenport3• 11 years ago

The remedy is to require more than a majority threshold for decisions to be made. For example, a decision could require 80% agreement before it becomes law.

In the USA we handle these issues with a representation by region (states) rather than by population. Solutions feel more like post-processing, then data gathering.

wyager• 11 years ago

That doesn't defend against tyranny of the majority; it just requires a larger majority.

In the USA we defend against tyranny of the majority with the constitution. The constitution places strict limits on what the majority can do to the minority through governmental force.

piamancini13• 11 years ago

This is exactly the type of conversation we want to have. What institutions can we design for the internet society?

saraid2169• 11 years ago

Ironically, the solution to tyranny of the majority is a strong executive.

privong• 11 years ago

Ironically, the solution to tyranny of the majority is a strong executive.

That isn't sufficient in and of itself, to be ironic. If the strong executive lacks stringent limits on its power and domain of influence, then it is ironic. But, a strong executive is likely necessary in even a libertarian-styled government, to protect rights by enforcing "legitimate" laws (where "legitimate" is open to interpretation and opinion). But the distinction is that the strong executive in a libertarian-style government has a strictly limited domain over which it exercises power.

Strength and scope are different things, despite their frequent conflation in [American] politics.

pekk2• 11 years ago

Who decides what the rights are? A majority?

santisiri34• 11 years ago

We want to figure out the right combination of rules so we can get the best out of the collective intelligence of society.

Like Wikipedia: we believe this is an idea that works better in practice than in theory.

Democracy is always a "Work in progress", its never a complete idea because otherwise it would be an absolutist totalitarian ideology. It's the exception to all ideologies.

And adapting it to software is our biggest mission.

piamancini13• 11 years ago

It's a super valid point. We are not claiming all decisions should be taken this way. But we can imagine a system where a large chunk of decisions can be devolved to the citizens. The constitution and the bill or rights provide a framework in the same way congress today can't legislate (or shouldn't I would say) agains our rights.

dataker3• 11 years ago

All you need is a base of inviolable principles on a moral basis of respect, peace, etc. How one would get there is a good question.

mempko• 11 years ago

Constitutional democracies exist for this reason. But typically when people talk about "majority violating rights of minority", people generally mean "mass of people taking away everything from the rich".

Look, even America, as a constitutional republic, took the rights away from millions of blacks for a long time. The Constitution at its inception did not save them.

I really believe the rich have scared people about democracy, because really democracy scares them. Don't let it scare you.

ams6110• 11 years ago

Your example could hardly be more at odds with your premise.

bmelton• 11 years ago

mass of people taking away everything from the rich

Honestly, I don't think they do. Moreso than anything, I think they're hearkening back to when slavery was legal, women couldn't vote, and it was perfectly acceptable to assault gays in nightclubs.

It's only as those minority groups gain acceptance that they start generating sympathy, really, but while gays are more and more getting acceptance in their fight for marriage equality, polygamists are still a lesser known, smaller minority, and their rights are routinely trampled, despite that all the arguments applying to same sex marriage are equally applicable to them.

As it sits, 51% of the democratic party approves of some form of censorship, so it's not too hard to imagine being in a gerrymandered district in which DemocracyOS is prevalent, and losing the ability to freely exercise your first amendment rights.

That said, this problem isn't unique to DemocracyOS, as we've always had people who hate the rights of others, and even managed to pass the 18th amendment as a result.

The biggest problem with direct democracy is in educating people about the Constitution. We have long, embattled conflicts between Constitutional scholars on whether X aligns with the Constitution, and the "will of the people", absent that knowledge, may serve to exacerbate the issue.

danans• 11 years ago

A Saudi (go figure) once wisely told me: "The greatest thing about American democracy isn't the vote - many democracies have that. The greatest thing about American democracy is the Bill of Rights, which states what the majority is not allowed to do the minority".

asgard10245• 11 years ago

I think the Saudi only saw the end result and failed to appreciate the process that led to it. Many European countries have even better things, like social rights, and allowing prisoners to vote.

Democracy cannot change the culture in the country. It's just a tool for decision making in politics, better than fists. It can lead to culture change, though. Democracy causes people who didn't have power previously to be involved, and different moral view is dispersed in society.

If you would give Saudis the U.S. constitution, it would still take time before citizens would change the culture to consider women peers. The constitution itself doesn't guarantee the outcome either.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

A great challenge we face is precisely this. Today DemocracyOS is strong at a local city-level. We don't believe we are ready for Federal level yet as we must understand how checks and balances work at this scale.

asgard10245• 11 years ago

Democracy does exactly that - it gives everyone the same vote, regardless what minority they come from. Therefore, it protects any minority for maximum possible extent. You don't need any formal rules on top of that; in other words, the solution to "tyranny of the majority" should not be "tyranny of the minority". (I really hate the phrase "tyranny of the majority", by the way, because it simply isn't a good way to describe democratic voting, where the majority is emergent and not determined ex ante.)

But let's say, indeed, majority wants to violate the rights of minority. Stripping other people from voting rights isn't democratic (even if it's voted by everybody), because it violates the basic democratic rule, "every person should get the same power in politics". Democracy is defined by the end result (same access to power), not the procedure (voting). (In fact, democracy allows for tradeoffs where a person gets little more power in exchange for more accountability.)

It's true that even without stripping other voter's rights, minorities can still be persecuted. But it is a cultural issue, which won't be resolved by formal constitutional framework. In fact, historically, it very often were elites (that you may think are the solution) who participated or even organized these persecutions.

For example, in the U.S., there is a large minority of people in prison who are not protected by democracy, because they don't have voting rights. I would appreciate proof of any claim as to how any sort of republican institutions in the U.S. helps these people be protected. I don't see that.

Someone wrote below that the solution could be super-majority vote, like 80% of citizens to agree to change the constitution. I think that's a wrong idea, which doesn't give enough credit to people. This can possibly protect a minority, but it can also delay progress in helping minority. The minority that needs to be overruled in super-majority voting can keep the status quo longer than desired by most, and that's unfair too. We don't know what the future morality will be; it may be different in positive, not negative, fashion compared to today's morality. We could perhaps say, though, that the future society will be more happy with their own morality than ours (because they can compare the two, we cannot); therefore, it should be possible for them not be too conservative and implement it.

Anyway, this debate is always rather academic, because politicians only rarely vote with the majority. (And no, pre-war Germany is not a good example, as I already explained above.)

saraid2169• 11 years ago

(I really hate the phrase "tyranny of the majority", by the way, because it simply isn't a good way to describe democratic voting, where the majority is emergent and not determined ex ante.)

Nothing about the phrase actually requires the tyranny be remotely permanent, and nothing about the concept of tyranny requires it either. Indeed, it's actually more poignant that the tyranny is both ephemeral and, more importantly, inevitable. This is the real issue. It's easy to comprehend the issue by looking at semi-permanent states [1], like Marxist class divisions or political polarization, but those are consequences.

When you place something to a vote and fail to achieve consensus, you have a majority whose will is being enacted upon a minority. This is commonly celebrated by moronic catchphrases such as, "the right side of history," but you still have a winner and a loser. And when the ephemeral majority seems to crystallize from the aether into an unmistakable demographic of some kind, you really have to wonder about this "emergent majority" concept.

The fundamental American problem is that it is incapable of trusting its government. (I can't speak to other governments; I don't live under those.) This lack of trust is well-founded, but that doesn't make it any less crippling. I said below that the appropriate counter to the tyrannical majority is a strong executive. The executive is capable of saying, "No," to a popular opinion in a way that the legislature cannot. (Indeed, this is a role Americans have shoved onto the judiciary, which means we can't actually say no until someone files a lawsuit.) The interplay between the legislature and the executive (the vote, the veto, the super-majority overrule, the refusal to enforce, the impeachment) is exactly the solution being proposed.

None of it works without an executive willing to exercise its options. See Obama's refusal to enforce immigration laws, for instance. (For the sake of this "academic debate", let's presume that he could enforce them to the letter if he wanted to.) That is a check against tyranny of the majority. So naturally, well... see for yourself [2]. This isn't meant as an anti-Republican statement; it's just the most recent example I could bring to mind off the top of my head.

The trust part comes back when you ask, "Why doesn't a minority group tyrannized by a majority group just leave?" You know, secede. This comes back to the emergent majority you spoke of: if you trust the majority to, you know, not be dicks about it [3]. To not always be the majority, then secession isn't necessary. You can expect that the issues will change and you'll be in the majority. Of course, what's happened with the polarized political class in America is that you stick around because you figure you can win next time.

This is a problem. It is the exact opposite of what you need to make sure that a majority is an emergent majority. Instead of melting back into an indeterminate goo and forming new majority/minority groups in each vote, you have battle lines being drawn for a budding civil war. And that's as far as I've figured out.

[1] "State" as in "state of being", not as in "nation-state". My thesaurus powers have failed me.

[2] http://judiciary.house.gov/index.cfm/2015/3/at-the-flick-of-...

[3] Book recommendation: http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Anxieties-Citizenshi...

lalc• 11 years ago

Democracy does exactly that - it gives everyone the same vote, regardless what minority they come from. Therefore, it protects any minority for maximum possible extent.

From my reading, doesn't this say nothing? "democracy protects minorities as much as democracies could ever protect minorities."

the majority is emergent

How does "emergence" affect the possibility of tyranny?

it violates the basic democratic rule, "every person should get the same power in politics"

So maybe the takeaway here is that pure democracy is insufficient? The original point was that "Political systems should protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority."

Democracy is defined by the end result (same access to power), not the procedure (voting).

Isn't this just semantics?

It's true that even without stripping other voter's rights, minorities can still be persecuted. But it is a cultural issue, which won't be resolved by formal constitutional framework.

Isn't "stripping other voter's rights" a loaded way to put it? Freedom to vote doesn't necessarily have to mean freedom to persecute--freedoms generally end at the boundary where they begin trampling other freedoms. Also, in which situations "It is a cultural issue"? What does that imply? Does DemocracyOS fix cultural issues?

In fact, historically, it very often were elites (that you may think are the solution) who participated or even organized these persecutions.

Did the parent suggest a return to oligarchy? Do current elites participate in persecutions?

For example, in the U.S., there is a large minority of people in prison who are not protected by democracy, because they don't have voting rights.

How will people in prison obtain fair representation under DemocracyOS?

This can possibly protect a minority, but it can also delay progress in helping minority. The minority that needs to be overruled in super-majority voting can keep the status quo longer than desired by most, and that's unfair too.

So the solution is to never protect minorities in the first place?

We don't know what the future morality will be; it may be different in positive, not negative, fashion compared to today's morality. We could perhaps say, though, that the future society will be more happy with their own morality than ours (because they can compare the two, we cannot); therefore, it should be possible for them not be too conservative and implement it.

Yes, political systems should enable the implementation of policies. This says nothing about the merits of different political systems.

jonawesomegreen2• 11 years ago

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, — when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

-James Madison 1787

http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Madison

broodbucket• 11 years ago

As with others, I am really struggling to see why this has "OS" in the name. It's not an operating system. I'm guessing it stands for "open source", which isn't really an acronym people use in favour of OSS/FOSS (probably because OS already has a very well established meaning).

Can someone share some insight on the naming decision?

r0naa2• 11 years ago

Well, I think that it's a relevant analogy to what an operating system does. Like an OS a system of government (like Democracy) manages a collection of physical elements (institutions) and serves as an interface between those and the end-users (citizens.)

lugg2• 11 years ago

That's a metaphor, and its confusing if not mildly infuriating.

saraid2169• 11 years ago

Her team’s vision is to make DemocracyOS the “operating system of a more open and participatory government.”

From: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/des...

jlgosse• 11 years ago

Agreed, why not just choose "Democracy"?

unicornporn• 11 years ago

Because the domain will be expensive?

santisiri34• 11 years ago

I actually know who owns democracy.com but still, democracy reminisces a 2000 year old system.. we need to update that.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

It's meant to be open for many intepretations: - Open Source because, well, we are open source (github.com/democracyos/app) - Operating System because, well, we aim to build a layer on top of the current political system. - Open Society becasue, well, we aim for societies to become more participatory and democratic.

Pick your favorite flavor.. the goal is to nail how democracy should work in the 21st century.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Just had this epiphany: DemocracyOS's name is intrinsically democratic.

andrewliebchen• 11 years ago

Open a PR for a name change. Let people +1. Boom, democracy in action.

pekk2• 11 years ago

If people scrape together a few votes and do not get their wishes rammed through, they will complain exactly like they complained about the White House petition site - because it was not a direct way of getting in legislation to (say) legalize marijuana. I don't see how DemocracyOS can solve that problem.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Hi guys, I'm one of the founders. Glad to answer all your questions.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

You can always follow me on Twitter: @santisiri

And of course, @DemocracyOS

alecco3• 11 years ago

How self promotional of you.

na85• 11 years ago

Why did you choose to implement Yet Another Blockchain Solution?

Assuming 3-letter agencies haven't already broken it, they will sooner or later, and now all your users will be susceptible to having their votes manipulated at the whim of US intelligence.

chm• 11 years ago

What do you mean by "it"?

piamancini13• 11 years ago

What would an alternative be for you?

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Im still waiting for proof on this claims. Regardless, the blockchain is still a protocol lacking good applications and products. But its fundamentals described in Satoshis papers + the traction it got, speak for themselves. It's a technology with growth. Show me another one like it, and I'll be glad to study it.

yourad_io• 11 years ago

This is amazing. I have dreamt of a system like this and armchair-proposed it to friends countless times. I am always faced with derision in such conversations[1] - but I believe that a secure implementation of such an idea could be the future of democracy.

Or rather, its past. Ancient Greek democracy wasn't perfect (slavery; not everyone was citizen) but it was much better than our current system of professional politicians and uber-powerful political parties and lobbies.

The small, first struggle will be to implement it as securely as possible - for this you'll likely need to distribute specific hardware[2]. The second and largest struggle would be to actually change constitutions and take power away from the organizations that have hoarded it for decades[3].

There is a lot of scepticism in these comments. My infosec and analytical side is obviously going to go into full-attack mode when there is something solid to take apart - BUT for the time being I'd like to say a huge "bravo" to both this team and YC for backing them.

I hope you change the world.

[1] how would it work; why would people care to get involved; execution/implementation issues; fraud; ...

[2] something between RSA tokens and dedicated mobile voting machines

[3] probably centuries

santisiri34• 11 years ago

We are asking for funding so we can develop a blockchain-compatibility module for our app here: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/elections/entries/bl...

The work on security is very challenging but this MUST be a large open source effort.

Check our code here: github.com/democracyos/app

gvilarino3• 11 years ago

Thanks for your insights!

Totally agree; finding out what democratic interaction should look like and how it should work for societies in the current hyper-connected paradigm is -at best- something that will take a lot of time.

There is, undoubtedly, a technological challenge to address, but moreover I think the greatest challenge is the cultural one. We're risen to think communites (countries, towns, organisations, etc.) should be managed in one of so many fashions, but we're willing to ask ourselves time and again what other possible ways there are for doing this, and implement on that.

We may not nail it soon, but we'll definitely try as long as we can.

killerpopiller• 11 years ago

others made such software before, also member of the pirate party germany. It's called liquid democracy and ads delegation possibilities to trusted fellows. This delegation option is chainable and thus address certain problems already pointed out in this thread: lack of time, knowledge to make an informed decision,..

DemocracyOS falls short in this obvious matters and could ad this feature, since delegation is a core feature

It is fieldtested in small northern german communities by their city councils I think.

http://youtu.be/fg0_Vhldz-8

http://liquidfeedback.org

jonawesomegreen2• 11 years ago

I think delegation or proxying is an important feature in a direct democracy platform that I see missing here. It allows people without the technical expertise to make an informed decision by allowing a trusted third party to make the decision for them.

I believe this would give rise to something like we have today where policiticans collect proxies (votes), however it would be a more ephemeral relationship since people could take their voting rights back if unsatisified or if they felt strongly on an issue. I think this would create a more balanced dynamic then we currently have.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Guys, if you want to play with a secret version of DemocracyOS (the SaaS implementation), help us here: http://hub.democracyos.com

alecco3• 11 years ago

Very questionable people behind it (close second hand). All hype and self promotion. Zero experience. Shunned often in most online forums in Argentina, save TedX. I really don't get how YC decided to back this project.

freddier• 11 years ago

I love that it's not about goverments but governance. Open Source projects can use this. Apartment buildings.

Obviously getting modern tools to shitty politicians is always going to be the focus with things like DemocracyOS, but I'm really excited to see this for deciding stuff on the small communities I'm a part of.

The one weird thing is that they're non-profit, open source. I hope they survive on that model. Is it only donations?

piamancini13• 11 years ago

Hi! We are trying to get enough philanthropic seed funding to find a sustainable model. Maybe OS SAS, or github's: free as long as it's open. For the moment it's all grants.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

We believe that you cannot put a price tag on the right to participate. So the nonprofit is a fundamental first step in our mission.

We want to figure a self-sustainable model, donations can only get you that far. The task ahead of us is a big one: we want to build governance for the internet society.

gghootch• 11 years ago

Love the direction this is going. Dreamt about such a system in the past as well. Looking forward to a mobile first experience which enables me to weigh-in on (local) issues in real-time.

piamancini13• 11 years ago

hi! some pilot live implementations with council-members in the US: marfarrell.democracyos.org (SF) benkallos.democracyos.org (NYC). Would love to know your thoughts. pia@democracyos.org

gvilarino3• 11 years ago

typo :)

it's markfarrell.democracyos.org

gus_massa• 11 years ago

When this is successful, I don't understand how you will combat the capture of the platform form the traditional parties.

A traditional party can ask their supporters to vote for them in the elections, and then ask them to vote for the same laws in this platform. They don't ever need to discuss, or they can discuss and discuss and vote for the official party decision nevertheless. So the party gets double votes, unless the other parties also try to abuse the system. (If everybody abuse the system, the biggest party get double votes.)

In the comments sections of the newspapers is very usual to see very politized users and real or alleged accusations of astroturfing, shills, suckpupets, meatpupets, 50-cents-army, choriplaneros, ...

gvilarino3• 11 years ago

Super-valid concern. The truth is that very-politically-involved people aren't that big a percentage of the overall population (at least from the numbers I've seen - usually around 10%). So we're trying to find ways of making it easy for that other 90% to engage in civic participation. If we get to nail that, then even any 'arranged' participation would not account for a significant part of the votes for a given issue.

Also, from our experience with DemocracyOS, users actually participate in stuff they actually care about, and not equally on every sort of issue. So it's interesting to see how larger userbases would unfold with apps like DemocracyOS or similar.

dataker3• 11 years ago

As a Brazilian, I find this initiative to be extremely important.

However, I've recently seen 'democratic' videos urging for a military dictatorship. Millions of Facebook users shared the message and ~1M people protested last sunday, while trying to kick out our president.

So I wonder if, contradictorily, some might exploit DemocracyOS to install anti-democratic regimes.

Is there a way to ensure such thing won't happen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HR9vqx9oTQ

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Check the implementation of DemocracyOS done here: http://euvoto.org

piamancini13• 11 years ago

It's crazy what's happening in Brazil these days, as a close neighbour(Argentinean) it pains me to see such upheaval. To your point, we could set up a protocol that the SaaS version of DemocracyOS can only be used inside the limits of a constitution, but we have no control over the Open Source version. It's like twitter it's a platform for expressing oneself and it's content moderation is v. limited. It's all our responsibility to make the best possible use of the tools we create.

dataker3• 11 years ago

Spot on. I still believe the beauty of the project is that it's open-sourced, so our community of developers would be able to make wiser choices for the country.

Infinitely better than corrupted politicians.

PauloManrique• 11 years ago

So, let's all ignore all the crimes she made. Great idea.

crdoconnor• 11 years ago

However, I've recently seen 'democratic' videos urging for a military dictatorship.

How is that democratic, or even 'democratic'?

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

The idea of "open source governance" is hardly new. I'd imagine such a system in the form of a web app would be swamped with irrelevant queries. Assuming an idealistic direct democracy where citizens draft new laws or modify existing ones, the feedback loop of constantly changing legal information to its application would be overwhelming. On the flip side, too much unaddressed issues and slow or wasteful processes would create apathy.

Personally I always thought the most attractive model for such an endeavor is to store laws in a markup format, and go through the old school route of mailing lists and patches. You'd be making use of highly tested infrastructure and actually require for participants to put a little effort in learning.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

I agree, we did a lot of research on a decent markup formar for law making (LML!). There are some efforts out there like (search for Akomantoso)

But the real challenge is getting TRACTION on a technology like this. It's not just the protocol (which I think it should be based on the Blockchain).. but also the product that makes citizens engaged with political participation.

saraid2169• 11 years ago

Well, this has the fun distinction of actually being functioning code in active use. I'm pretty happy to see some "open source governance" that isn't just talk. I'm only aware of one another project that has crossed that line.

kpatrick• 11 years ago

I'm actually pitching a similar idea to a major corporation.

Here is a reading list if you are interested in the subject. There have been (at least) four conferences on the subject of online deliberation.

https://www.loomio.org/

http://wikis.evergreen.edu/civicintelligence/index.php/ELibe...

http://odbook.stanford.edu/static/filedocument/2009/11/15/Ch...

http://www.publicsphereproject.org/ncn/

http://online-deliberation.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_deliberation

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=134286...

http://www.virtualagora.org/

http://parliament.sourceforge.net/ftf-paper.pdf Parliament: A Module for Parliamentary Procedure Software

http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/IS/archive/henry/RobertReport.pdf Prakken, Henry. 1998. Formalizing robert’s rules of order: An experiment in automating mediation of group decision making. Tech. Rep. REP-FIT-1998-12, GMD.

jonnybgood4• 11 years ago

So, this platform allows policy to be decided by a "technorati"[1] class?

Are there individuals with low-income, little to no internet access, don't know what a blockchain or open source is, have hectic work schedules with the addition of raising a family participating on your platform?

From what I can tell this platform is giving more power to those who already have some sense of power. This platform does not alleviate the problem of those in society who do not have any power or say in political processes. It may even be argued this platform may contribute to the problem.

[1] Those who have the privilege, time, and monetary means of internet access, acquiring/have knowledge of internet technologies, and being a participant.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

The only people that believe that internet access is only for the rich, is rich people.

We come from Argentina, a latinamerican country and we are very aware of the social challenges we face.

But it's not just a technological solution, we ALSO created a Political party that does a lot of offline activism helping society understand the power they have using digital technology.

The Net Party ran for elections in 2013 and got 1.2% of the votes in Buenos Aires, it was an incredible first election for a small party and that led to DemocracyOS being implemented officially by the Congress.

Thanks to that, a lot of bills got attention. For example: Nureses now have better working conditions thanks to the action taken on DemocracyOS for the Congress of Buenos Aires.

Read more about it here: http://democracyos.org/about-us

jonnybgood4• 11 years ago

"Its candidates are committed to always vote in Congress according to what citizens vote online."

You've built a system that requires privilege. And you're giving power only to those who have that privilege.

You didn't address the fact there are those who do not have that privilege. Helping people understand the power of digital technology is meaningless if there are those who do not even have the digital technology.

Are you going to buy them the digital technology? Are you going to pay for their internet access? How are you going to provide equal privilege?

EDIT: Who is your demographic?

seppo00108• 11 years ago

The only people that believe that internet access is only for the rich, is rich people.
The Net Party ran for elections in 2013 and got 1.2% of the votes in Buenos Aires

How do you justify that most of the votes came from wealthy neighborhoods of the city?

https://twitter.com/seppo0010/status/578031940651118593

nanna• 11 years ago

Why employ the means of a party though? Isn't that the 19th century political form par excellence? In particular - why the one party?

I get that you're trying to reinvigorate the notion of the political party, but there is an argument to be made that a form of politics which reflects the internet itself would have no parties, and certainly not one party - no universal representation of particularities, since, as you write in the manifesto, the 'peers' are themselves singularities, and by definition singularities cannot be subsumed. (Kant 101.)

mmelody• 11 years ago

At first glance I find it very similar to the idea of Liquid Democracy of the Pirate Parties. Is there any significant difference? Days ago at HN, I heard that such systems failed greatly due to endless quarrels and external mistrust.

alizhd• 11 years ago

I wish people in Pakistan used this. it would really help that country.

santisiri34• 11 years ago

try starting a democracy here: http://hub.democracyos.com

codyh12• 11 years ago

How will this assist with those not readily capable of engaging with technology? Or perhaps I'm not fully understanding all of it.

moe4• 11 years ago

This looks like Liquid Feedback[1] done right.

Liquid Feedback was a "liquid democracy" platform developed by the german pirate party. Both the software and the party are now largely dissolved; ironically killed by their over-zealous interpretation of democracy, which resulted in a lack of direction and rabid dilettantism.

[1] http://liquidfeedback.org

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Yep, you got it. We actually started contacting them, but they were already doing private consulting + all the source code of LF is in german, impossible to understand. And the UX, well, it wasn't very usable.

But it was a great initiative that we researched 3 years ago when we began.

vannevar• 11 years ago

I've seen a few of these now over the years, and I've come to believe a successful implementation should combine argument mapping, consensus building, and a trust network. Just framing an issue and having a comments section isn't enough; that form is ubiquitous across the Internet yet hasn't proven a viable way on its own to actually make decisions.

piamancini13• 11 years ago

I agree, we have a long roadmap ahead and all your points should be in it. If you wish to contribute, by all means github.com/democracyos. It's an open source project.

sharp112• 11 years ago

This is very inspiring stuff and very exciting that YC is backing it! A key thing that Pia said in her TED talk: technology is only a tool here, cultural change and reinvention is necessary. I haven't had a chance to play with DemocracyOS yet, but the focus does somewhat seem to be on "direct democracy" (as opposed to "representative"), and as others have pointed out, that's fraught with problems.

But I hope and believe this is just a first, experimental step. And I hope that next steps will be informed by the rich tradition of experimentation in "participatory, deliberative democracy". This includes things like citizen assemblies, citizen juries, participatory budgeting, wisdom councils, etc. What these approaches have in common is a blending of citizen participation with informed deliberation, often including a random sampling (of citizens).

As two superb examples of this, I would point to the Citizen's Assembly on Electoral Reform (British Columbia, Canada, 2004) and the Dialogue with the City (Perth, Australia, 2003). Some really useful books: Tao of Democracy (Tom Atlee), Deliberative Democracy Handbook (Gastil & Levine), Deliberative Democracy in America (Ethan Leib).

piamancini13• 11 years ago

We met Tom Atlee lately, he is fantastic. His insights on how to move forward, the importance of diversity in the process, where super sharp. I would add to the list, When People Speak by Fishkin and check Marina Gorbis' book on The Nature of the Future, specially the chapter on the future of government. Her proposal of a new large, agora of randomly chosen citizens is super interesting and challenging.

sharp112• 11 years ago

Glad to hear you met Tom! He's our secret national treasure. It's awesome to hear that you are already plugged in to this area of thinking. Thanks for the Gorbis reference, sounds similar to Ethan Leib's proposal for a fourth branch of federal gov't.

fiatjaf• 11 years ago

Votes? Really?

santisiri34• 11 years ago

More than willing to figure out the ways of doing consensus. Yet any enforcement on the need to consent some perceive it as a dangerous dictatorial pattern.

lucio• 11 years ago

There's some information, you need to know. In Argentina, people has no representation. You don't vote for a "district representative" as in the USA. Here people vote on a "party-list" called here "lista sabana" (http://babeldigital.com.ar/data/img_cont/img_imagenes/img_gr...)

The "lista sabana" is a large list of party-candidates (in 6pt font) headed by the "leader" or "caudillo" name (in 62pt font).

If the "caudillo" has a 40% approval rate, the first 40% of people on the 6pt-font list WILL enter the congress, so the firsts spots on the lists are literally SOLD beforehand, based on the "leader" popularity index. The spots can also be exchanged for "popular support" with labor union leaders (to herd people into political rallies).

So, here the "congressman" have no direct relation to the voters, they've only a direct dependency on the "leader". They do as they're told or else they will not be included in the list on the next elections.

There is no such thing as "constituents" in this system.

That's a reason why DemocracyOS and the "Net Party" are viable here. When representation is completely broken, direct-democracy sounds good.

Here's a quote from a document on Paraguayan system (the same system):

"But what if the elected representatives of the legislature were not voted in directly by the people? Would that discredit the authority of the legislative branch? The actual voting method in Paraguayan politics for a legislator to enter government is to lobby for their name to enter a “lista sabana,” a list of names on a sheet that represents the party candidates. The people then vote for that party list, rather than for the individual. Party leaders can then decide which positions to give to the party faithful. In this way the political class can make deals, play at back room politics to add their name to the list, exchange favors with voters and backers, and conduct business behind closed doors. The Congress can then vote to apportion more funds from the Treasury to fund their election campaigns, increase their salaries and benefits, and buy their votes with political largesse. The system reinforces the worst excesses of political cronyism, including links to crony capitalism. Ultimately it erodes the social trust between the governed and the governors and creates inefficiencies in a country’s economics. Attempts have been made to remove, or “unblock,” the “lista sabana” by allowing voters to choose individual candidates to the legislature, but so far these attempts have failed."

mudil• 11 years ago

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. -- Oscar Wilde

jordanpg• 11 years ago

I like the sentiment very much and I think the demo platform looks like a solid foundation. Not crazy, like others, about the "OS".

That said, I think that, as far as revolutionizing elections/politics in any important sense, something far more drastic than this will be required. Finding new ways to debate hot political questions of the day, as a function of what is coming out of the news (any news outlet), is missing the point.

There is a lack of disengagement with politics, and moreover, it is absolutely justified. The manner in which most of the discussions are conducted are nonsensical. There is an abject lack of nuance and thoughtfulness. Discussions are necessarily vague and always conducted with superlative certainty.

Here is a fact: there is not enough information on this page[1] to form a reasoned opinion about the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act. There probably isn't enough information on 20 pages. Yet that is the script. Learn about a complex issue in 60 seconds, and then decide where you come down on it. It's patent nonsense.

If there is to be a revolution, it will need to deal with the reality that there is a facade between the machinations of governments and corporations and the people, and that facade is the news. The news is our window into vast, vast complexity and the basis for making choices that supposedly affect our local quality of life all the way up to the direction of history. So long as the important decisions are organized in this top-down hierarchy of power, a website isn't going to change much.

No, the most promising ideas about upending hierarchies try to actually redistribute the power from the top. Imagine a politician running for office in the context of some website like this, who, through some formal, public process, granted certain levels of access to online advocates, in the event of a win. For example, someone able to marshal something in the order of 10 votes would be promised one lunch in the first 2 years.

The details are less important than the inversion of power hierarchies that new technologies enable. Until that can be practically harnessed, approaching electoral matters along conventional axes is unlikely to get much traction.

[1]http://demo.democracyos.org/law/54766690be6cbe0c0023e08f

santisiri34• 11 years ago

Very insightful, there's no doubt we have a lot of work to do.

jpetersonmn• 11 years ago

Maybe I'm slow, but I've seen this a couple times now and went to the website, read the "about" section and I still don't understand what this is or what problem it's solving. I think OS in the name lead me to immediately assume it was another operating system. So considering I thought it was a new operating system, the more I read the more underwhelmed I am. Good luck on the project, but IMO you've not named it appropriately nor described how it uniquely solves any problem. Sorry if that sounds harsh, just giving honest feedback.

gaigepr• 11 years ago

"We support real browsers and IE10+" -- https://github.com/democracyos/app#browser-support

I chuckled.

seppo00108• 11 years ago

The technical quality of the project has been so far debatable[1][2].

The Partido de la Red results seem to reveal a problem that is obvious at first sight: the underrepresentation of those who need representation the most[3].

I have doubts about whether direct democracy is a good idea, at all[4]. Summarizing, dividing the burden of decision making is inefficient for the population at large, and it does not guarantee better results.

People behind this project admit that this does not fully solve the problem it is attempting to solve[5].

Even if I could ignore the previous statement (which of course I can't), I wonder if the advantages of moving from an indirect democracy to a direct democracy are enough to even try to solve the problems. I think the cost of switching is high, and I cannot see any benefit.

In USA the main problem with democracy is the lack of interest of population in government elections. Does micromanaging decisions make this problem better or worse? The question is valid. It could be better if the feeling is that no matter who wins nobody will represent the voter; it could be worse if people do not care about the decisions that have to be make. There are other possible options, of course, but I don't really know if this solves problems or makes it worse.

I wonder how selection bias would affect decision making. People will mostly vote on subjects they feel passionate about, and ignore the others. Which will probably lead to what programmers know as bikeshedding[6].

Now I would like to highlight the positive of thinking about this problems and attempting a solution. Also following up Congress's debates and actions is something that should happen more often, for example Congressional Dish[7] attempts to do so.

[1] (Spanish) https://medium.com/@alejandrocrosa/votarias-a-un-partido-que...

[2] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/576422593244299264

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245536

[4] (Spanish) https://catdevmind.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/democracia-direc...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244628

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Trivialit...

[7] http://www.congressionaldish.com/

santisiri34• 11 years ago

It's not "direct democracy". It's just democracy. If you trace back the term used by the Greeks, they called both the technology and the concept agora. Etymologically, agora means "speaking in public", "thinking with others" and in many verses it's used as antonym of war.

Democracy is always a work in progress. Otherwise it would be a totalitarian concept.

So what we are trying to understand is simply democracy but for the digital age. Using computers and networks, and the power of software. Open source, collaborative free software.

seppo00108• 11 years ago

It's not "direct democracy". It's just democracy.

Uh? I think we are in a Representative Democracy[1] and what DemocracyOS proposes is a Direct Democracy[2]. It is not "just democracy" since both Representative and Direct democracies are forms of democracy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy

kang• 11 years ago

Bitcoin is the real democracy of the internet era.

DemocracyOS

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