48 Hours that reinvented democracy for the world
Riga, Latvia, 20/11/1985 — It took a team of 8 young people from 5 different countries just 48 hours to completely transform the meaning of democracy.
At a programming start-up event known as Garage48.org where teams are formed to deliver finished products within 48 hours, the team managed to create a service that they call Groupocracy.org.
Radical as it may be, they brought to life a product which enables citizens of any country to not only vote on any parliamentary decision, but to also collaborate and successfully draft and revise documents.
Using an interactive voting system they provide an easy to understand overview on the popularity of issues, documents and even segments and clauses within the documents. They also gathered data on every political decision in Latvia from 2009 and can show exactly how each member of parliament votes, coupled with a high number of very interesting statistics.
What is even more fascinating is that the first country of choice – Latvia is already well on the way to making such services legally binding. Should the law pass, any online petition with 10,000 or more votes will have to be discussed in the parliament.
The team consists of Dmitri Dimitrijev, Armands Leimanis, Eriks Remess, Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, Konstantinos Anagnostopoulos, Kirils Solovjovs, Vitalijs Gaicuks and Andrejs Jurcenoks. With their plan to introduce wiki-like collaboration and to maybe even start a political party, this project is the one to watch in the coming year.
Contact: Dmitri Dimitrijev Groupocracy.org +3725138135 dmitri.dimitrijev@gmail.com www.groupocracy.org
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