* there is NO https://democracyos.org/ - how deep are your tec guys sleeping???
* please remove the privacy invading tracking links from your website. All of them. Now.
These two issues would be most important to gain some credibility in Europe, where most people still do not accept to have their web privacy delivered to x companies without being asked. This is especially true for a site that offers discussion about political issues - a very heavy fauxpas and you should stop doing anything else and prioritize fixing these issues, these are absolutely vital things for a "democracy enhancing platform".
* I can not download your manifesto pdf without logging into slideshare.
Here again I am forced to pay for your pdf by giving user account information. Why are you letting a third party company take your pdf documents as hostages? I am sure your web servers will not die if you just let people download the pdf from e.g. https://democracyos.org/manifesto.pdf
These things should change before you open your site to the wider public - too many people will see these as proof for "business guys hijacking democracy software market".
2) Good point, will look into that.
3) Will put the PDF as you suggested.
Thanks!
See this talk from 31C3: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_...
If you still believe that online voting is doable and a great thing, please contact Mr. Halderman and talk to him or read about his work: https://jhalderm.com/
Also I recommend to do some research what the german pirate party is using regarding democracy tools - they have a lot of experience not only coding such tools, but also with real life usage.
A good start could be https://liqd.net/en/ here you can find the adhocracy platform: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/
which seems to be in a much better developed state than what I see on democracyOS - but maybe there are many things not visible right now to me, so sorry for this criticism.
Adhocracy is currently in use by several organizations and they have lots of real life experience, especially with user adaption.
An interesting application of adhocracy is https://offenekommune.de/
Another interesting tool for organizing (really big) meetings: http://openslides.org/en/
and of course the brilliant idea of Bundes-Git, a law-making platform: http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/12/13/bundesgit-german-laws-on...
Maybe the best way to get some overview would be to contact the awesome people at https://okfn.org/ - good luck!
You'll probably end up in some upcoming startup books as an unusual MVP (is it M?). "Found a political party".
Good luck, political change is really hard and I do like the concept of more direct wisdom of the crowd like politics. I'm not sure about your product but access to governments and understanding how they work is pretty valuable. Government tools tend to be internally-viral (one community usues it, it spreads). I'm curious if the fact that you are also a party might be dangerous for the product though. Pretty often useful stuff is blocked on principle so for example if your party seems "left", conservative city councils might not use your tool due to that (likewise the other way around). Pretty interesting problem to have.
I think they built this tool (or considered using) Agora Voting[0] (Django/Python) which as far as I know, has put A LOT of effort into security and fraud-prevention (PKI, Mix-net's, etc), IMO the biggest issue here.
It's a soft derived from the Spanish Internet Party, I guess it's the equivalent of the argentian side from which DemocracyOS came into existence, or at least both draw a lot of parallelisms.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better for all these DD parties [1] to just unite forces and focus on a single tool... The idea is certainly interesting.
[0] https://github.com/agoravoting
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_direct_democracy_partie...
And by the way, they are no longer a "legal" political party, they lost the legal representation because they didn't reach the electoral law requirements it would be irrelevant information if they would have something beyond the software, but they don't.
[1] http://partidopirata.com.ar/ [2] http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Org%C3%A1nica/en
Anyway, I've got not problems with experimental politics, I do study anthropology and believe me, I have a good idea what a social experiment is. I personally consider you a very smart person and I know you understand which is my concern about The Net Party. The Net Party is not what it says it is. There's no transparency, you're not looking for political agreements in order to use DemocracyOS in other way than a poll, you're not using the money to develop a software oriented to the principles you say it has, you do not define your ideology and anyone with slight knowledge of politics and history can see which it is.
You operate like a startup company and not like a political organization. I have not problems with your ideas (I personally don't share them, but I think it is an open discussion), I have problems with your actions. You're cheating people and you know it.
[1] http://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate-...
The Pirate Party never got more than 20 affiliates so they where never able to run.
A long time ago I worked on Interlegis, which is a tool for legislature workflow automation that's used, as far as I know, widely in Brazil. I see some interesting synergies there for you at a later evolutionary stage.
1) The name 'The Net Party' isn't going to cut it in the US. Think beyond the fact that you must be connected to participate (e.g. The Popular Party).
2) Don't stay in SV for too long. You can't risk losing touch with the people who are using the software.
3) Your fate will be decided by how easy it is to use your interface. It needs more simplification. The call to action on every page needs to be more clear (e.g. the voting buttons on the /law page ought to be fixed).
4) Look to history for examples. German Pirate Party's LiquidFeedback and Switzerland/Estonia are obvious examples, but there's more. What can you learn from Mondragon in Spain or SEMCO in Brazil? Labor movements that operated on direct democracy? Quaker decision-making?
I understand it's probably not a top priority, but it'd be amazing if prediction markets on the impacts of policies could be included in this tool. It wouldn't even need to be real money, just a way to keep track of people's performance, and weight their impact on later markets accordingly. This would enable true access to the "wisdom of the crowd", and allow citizens to have a proper insight into how candidates and citizens perform in terms of forecasting the impact of policies, and making decisions based on that information.
So most voters either have no access to it, or they're told expedient lies by the media.
The US has an large organised mass of 'think tanks', 'foundations', and other propaganda fronts which exists solely to lie to the public and directly influence policy makers.
Debate is not the answer to this. You can only restore real democracy by making the distortions explicit. That means logging and listing all lobbying efforts, making sure no off-record cash transactions go unreported, and removing anyone who lies to the public for profit from any kind of political influence.
DemocracyOS is tinkering around the edges of this. Local democracy is a start, but it won't start to have an effective influence until national policy power is distributed more intelligently.
The Net Party is a political party that ran for elections in Argentina with a very simple promise: its candidates are committed to always vote in Congress according to what citizens ask for in DemocracyOS.
In 2013 it got 1.2% of the votes. Wasn't enough to put the candidate, but the software got officially adopted by the Congress. Since then over 350 bills where debated by citizens online.
After that, political parties, NGOs and governments from a wide range of places like Tunisia, Kenya, Brazil, Spain, Ukraine, Chile, Mexico adopted DemocracyOS.
We are part of the new batch of Y Combinator and in the US we launched with councilmembers from New York, San Francisco, Boston and other cities agreeing to use DemocracyOS.
We need to learn the right checks & balances for an app like this to protect minorities and avoid abuse.
And remember: it's only the legislative power. The executive has veto power ;)
I'm assuming the long term goal is to connect all of these together to have a global state after they're already embedded in each country's government. All hail the internet state we build together (or our benevolent leaders who backdoor the version of DemocracyOS we're running)!
In all seriousness, it's great to be able to think about using fairness algorithms [1] to literally write social contracts.
I understand the basis of democracy, but you can't ask a lumberjack to legislate deforestation.
I think there's at least enough evidence from other areas (broadly wisdom of the crowds) + technology is good enough these days to quickly vote on stuff to invest in more direct alternatives.
The big problem with technocratic approaches like Democracy OS or the pirate parties' liquid democracy is the amount of the population you exclude by introducing this technological barrier to political participation for e.g. old people. But as empirics trump reasoning (quite in the spirit of Popper), I hereby make the case that the net party won't have an economically compelling pension concept or health care plan for the elderly in Argentina within the next 10 years. Now we just have to wait and see ;)
I would rather be governed by a few intellectuals than by a stupid majority.
Could it be that representative democracy produces part of the political disinterest and lack of knowledge?
If we assume that entering a war tends to be more of a rash impulsive, decision than in abstaining from violence, then building DemocracyOS in such a way so as to encourage deliberation could reduce the odds of people voting for war (or, if they do vote for war, assure others that the war is being waged for careful, thought-out reasons).
Also, the Lawrence Lessig refrain that "code is law" seems particularly applicable here.
The types of wars and foreign policy decisions the US has been engaged in are more or less inconceivable with an informed and educated electorate that could vote on them.
If I'm not mistaken public opinion in the US did not support a declaration of war against Germany before Pearl Harbor, obviously in the case of WWII the US really wasn't left with a choice after declarations of war by both Germany and Japan.
Public sentiments are often swayed in favour of war, and have far less reason to take into account its consequences, because the public isn't punished at the ballot box if "our patriotic duty" turns out to be a farcical mistake.
And when it comes to influential minorities, can we even rely on the 59% of Argentines (Yougov survey, 2012) that think military action over "las Malvinas" would be inappropriate to keep the ultra-patriotic 26% that would favour a hypothetical military solution in check? Especially with a substantial majority of that anti-war grouping believing those islands rightfully belong to Argentina anyway. The 1982 war, after all, was a desperately unpopular dictatorship's attempt to appeal to public sentiment.
[1]though due to the quirk of Florida being an essential swing state in the electoral college system they've had a disproportional influence in policy under the existing system anyway...
It's great to to give citizens a forum for debate and anything that encourages communication between government and the governed is generally a good thing. Not sure how much I like the idea of making major changes to the basic process of government though, at least here in the United States. I can think of many examples of good things that might not have passed in congress if representatives had to vote the way that citizens using a particular software app wanted them to vote (slavery, income tax, segregation, healthcare).
I wish you good luck and it sounds like you're doing good things. Experimentation is good, even if it poses risks.
The arguments against expanding the electorate from land owners to all males in many countries were the same.
The arguments against allowing women to vote, again largely along similar lines.
As was the resistance to steadily lowering the voting ages.
As I'm sure you can tell, I don't really buy that this would be such a huge problem.
Sure, some decisions will end up different. It's not clear it will be better or worse. But personally I believe that giving people more direct ownership of decisions is valuable in itself. As is improving representation - with current systems (even proportional ones), a lot of people are very poorly represented because finding a party or candidate that fits their views and that has a chance of getting elected is near impossible.
There are many mechanisms to counter the issues of an uninformed electorate, such as for example allowing people to delegate votes to representatives (possibly with indirection, so you can e.g. delegate your vote to the candidate from some minor party you agree with, knowing they'll be able to try to parlay a voting block into influence with the parties with seats), or vote "I don't care / I don't know enough about this issue to want to influence it, so I want my representative to count my vote the way they prefer", and many others, while still allowing people to take control and override for things where they do care about deeply about the outcome.
And let's not even get started on the dangers of a tyranny of the majority.
Wikipedia is a great example of how bottom-up approach works better in practice than in theory.
Jesus that's scary, I hope you guys fail spectacularly and fast (nothing personal).
And you (from the Pirate Party in Argentina) never got more than 20 affiliates to join.
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/common/briefing/Senate_le...
This concept applies to the government as a whole as it relates to the general population.
Everyone is focused on their daily lives. The point of electing a representative government is to have a group of people whose daily lives are focused on the task of running the government, and figuring out where it will go next. People outside of the government only have so much time to think about legislation, even when it's really important.
This is post-facto rationalization for why the government operates the way it does. Most governments transitioned from a dictatorship to representative democracy because the masses reached breaking point over a particular issue and demanded greater power, together.
Representative democracy exists due to the compromise that was brooked at these points between the ruling classes and the ruled. If anything, it exists as a sop by the ruling classes, who from the very beginning tried to exclude people from voting as they introduced it (only property owners, no blacks, no slaves, no peasants, etc.)
Direct democracy is in no way incompatible with the idea that "we don't have enough time to think about legislation", provided you are given the option to delegate your votes to somebody whom you trust who does have time. Any sensible system would do this and let you revoke or move your delegation at any time on any topic.
And no, that is not just representative democracy reinvented. I would delegate most of my votes in a direct democracy to my retired parents.
Only administrators can upload new bills, and there're a lot of comments here explaining why it is a awful piece of software.
And you really don't understand how a representative system works in practice if you keep thinking it is possible to get elected and tell your legislative what to do from a software. It is one of the most naive thoughts I read in my life.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_%28Spainw%29 [2]https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails
They rather miss the point though, if they're concerned about democracy and politics.