Introduce e-voting at elections, and feasability of direct democracy.

[PaulJRobinson]

This pull request has been automatically generated by prose.io.

[Floppy]

👍

I read a very interesting thing about Liquid (or Delegative) Democracy the other day, which I think we should investigate further and maybe propose later.

[stringfellow]

I think I favour @Floppy's Liquid Democracy over Direct Democracy because I don't believe most of the population are well informed enough (myself included) to have an opinion about things for which facts may speak loud enough alone... Aside from that, people are far too influenced by centrally controlled mass-media for this to not be easily biased. @dangerousbeans and I had quite a good discussion about this which resulted in the idea of a tool to control how this might work. A very tech-heavy solution, though.

Liquid Democracy is probably not impervious to the same problems, but has a much more capable balance mechanism because you can defer your opinion on an issue to your favourite expert. That reduces the cognitive burden (and eventual accumulated apathy) on the lowly person trying to decide if they agree that food should have a blue elephant printed on it or not or whether we should fund a particle accelerator to find some new fundamental particle which may or may not solve all world energy problems (when all they care about, really, is living until next week).

[Floppy]

Yes - I'm going to write up a Liquid Democracy thing at some point, but I'm happy to accept the more general 'direct democracy' description here for now.

[philipjohn]

I think we ought to take a look at The Pirate Party here. @Floppy mentioned the other day about their tools. I'd read that they can 'delegate' their vote on an issue-by-issue basis to different people.

That might mean we end up with candidates for individual ministerial posts, and people voting accordingly. 👍

[PaulJRobinson]

Yeah this article touches on it
http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid-democracy-works

with kind regards,
Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 18:29, philipjohn notifications@github.com wrote:

I think we ought to take a look at The Pirate Party here. @Floppyhttps://github.com/Floppymentioned the other day about their tools. I'd read that they can
'delegate' their vote on an issue-by-issue basis to different people.

That might mean we end up with candidates for individual ministerial
posts, and people voting accordingly. [image: 👍]

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//pull/42#issuecomment-31863049
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[Floppy]

I'd see liquid as a refinement of direct as used here, so I'd be happy to approve this one and open a separate PR for a proper liquid democracy proposal, which will need some proper detail in it.

👍

[PaulJRobinson]

Apparently the German Pirate Party use http://liquidfeedback.org/ as the
tool for this. Without wishing to disrespect the wonderful system that has
been built from the ground-up here, can you technical folks see anything in
the Liquid Feedback system that would be useful for us discussing/approving
our policies on here? Can we incorporate any of their
processes/methods/software features?

with kind regards,
Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 19:18, James Smith notifications@github.com wrote:

I'd see liquid as a refinement of direct as used here, so I'd be happy to
approve this one and open a separate PR for a proper liquid democracy
proposal, which will need some proper detail in it.

[image: 👍]

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//pull/42#issuecomment-31867771
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[PaulJRobinson]

As they mentioned in the article I posted earlier: their existing online
discussion tools were fine when they had just 50 members but didn't work
once they hit the first thousand. Might be one to put in our back pocket
for further down the line.

with kind regards,
Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 19:26, Paul Robinson robinson.pauljames@gmail.com wrote:

Apparently the German Pirate Party use http://liquidfeedback.org/ as the
tool for this. Without wishing to disrespect the wonderful system that has
been built from the ground-up here, can you technical folks see anything in
the Liquid Feedback system that would be useful for us discussing/approving
our policies on here? Can we incorporate any of their
processes/methods/software features?

with kind regards,
Paul Robinson

about.me/pauljrobinson

On 8 January 2014 19:18, James Smith notifications@github.com wrote:

I'd see liquid as a refinement of direct as used here, so I'd be happy to
approve this one and open a separate PR for a proper liquid democracy
proposal, which will need some proper detail in it.

[image: 👍]

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//pull/42#issuecomment-31867771
.

[Floppy]

Useful links, thanks, and definitely something we can look at when this starts to creak. However, this PR (to get back on track) is about the process of national democracy, not merge policy, so let's merge this one in and we can improve the writeup to talk about liquid democracy later on.