DemocracyOS

The most powerful political action is human engagement. 

Coming soon...

A project to allow participation on the most literally global problem of all times: Climate Change. 

DemocracyOS members and friends from all around the world are working on this big challenge.

Climate change is a complex political and technical issue that can’t be tackled nor addressed in its complexity by any currently existing institution. Clearly, a challenge for collective intelligence, since beyond decisions it requires strong collective action. 

Debate about online participation in Brazil!

We’re thrilled by the insights and comments we got during an amazing conversation about #EuVoto (Brazilian DemocracyOS) with Marina Silva, hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation of Brasil. 

Highlights of the debate (which you can find in Portuguese/Spanish here: Democracia em Internet)

Politicians are getting conscious of the great influence the Internet can have on politics. Every candidate, every campaign, every government and party have a presence online and even interact with their followers sometimes. But the potential impact of this new information technology can be way greater.

Consider that every mobile phone with access to the Internet is power in a pocket. This distributed infrastructure is allowing the emergence of new shapes for political action, because information flows and people have more chances to find each other and coordinate action. 

Today, picking a candidate every four years seems like picking one single emoji for communication, while we could be sending a lot more information, even new options, and interacting with the political system in more complex ways: making choices with lower costs from the perspective of infrastructure.

EuVoto demonstrated in Sao Paulo that distributing decision-making power and expanding the possibilities of taking part in debates for problem solving is the way to go towards healthier democracies for Latin America. 

We share the interesting case study of an Ethical Code composed by many voices.

Democracy is not only being able to pick between pre-set options. It is also the ability to design new options.

DemocracyOS can be used for collaboratively drafting documents. That’s what seven organizations and parties proved when they decided to complement offline sessions of debate with online ways of participation using the platform.

The goal was to craft and validate the drafts of an ethical code for the city of Barcelona. The main challenge: allowing as much people as possible to take part in the process, since such an important document was to be made upon the voices of the citizens. 

These political groups quickly understood that material presence shouldn’t become a barrier for those who belong and have the right to participate in decisions, and so they decided to open another space for deliberation besides the traditional workshop.

Giving a close look at the experience, we got two main insights that could help other groups to make the most out of DemocracyOS:

We’re making a live hangout to talk decentralized protocols tomorrow:

Why blockchain support for DemocracyOS?

Institutions exist with the purpose of building trust. But what happens when people can’t trust their governments? 

In democratic systems, delegating power is essentially about trust. Candidates promise future actions and ask for people’s trust in the shape of votes. 

In exchange, their role is to use government institutions to build more trust: a base of certainty that is the key factor of success for policies, economic activities and security. And now, public trust in institutions hits an historical record low.

Lately, nor government or other institutions (NGOs, political parties) have been able to inspire trust in citizens, mostly because of corruption scandals, poorly delivered public services, faltering economies and violations to privacy.  How is not the system to fail when all the power is concentrated in 0,00016% (representatives) of the population?

We need to design a political system that works as a distributed network, where people can delegate power to peers they can trust and hold accountable.  With every power transaction (votes) registered on the Blockchain and allowing people to delegate on peers, a blockchain-backed DemocracyOS would become a more trustworthy and democratic way of building power and institutions in a society.

EVoks

One of the biggest DemocracyOS communities, in Hungary.

Debates very often happen in opinion bubbles. Like-minded people go to the same forums to cement existing opinions. But the way a society approaches political issues is way more complex than that.

Like in almost everywhere, political parties have the monopoly of opinion-representation. Their actions are supposed to mirror their voter’s visions, interests and willings. As if it was possible to channel multiple contradictory voices just by looking what they pick in the ballot boxes.

EVoks​, one of the biggest DemocracyOS communities based in Hungary, saw that and decided to open a democratic and plural space for political deliberation. That's how evoks.hu powered by atlatszo.hu​ was born.

Atlatszo.hu is a watchdog NGO and online news site for investigative journalism that promotes transparency and freedom of information in Hungary.

Slides week. 

Pia Mancini at the Budapest Brain Bar: what do innovators have to do with governments? Presenting DemocracyOS as intersection between technology and humanity.   Santiago Siri at the Personal Democracy Forum, telling the story of the Net Party, the first political party that compromised to vote in every law according to what citizens say in DemocracyOS.

Pictures of a great meetup with DemocracyOS France.

Laughs and jokes around mixed with conversations about the nature of power and the future of democracy.

Pia will be in Paris this May 21-22, speaker in the Oui Share Fest 2015 of collaborative economy. 

But if you want to have a conversation on Open Source politics and democracy, the best way to reach out to her is joining the #1 Meetup of DemocracyOS France, our chapter in Paris. Come play if you’re near.

Changing the logic of leadership

“It would take gods to give laws to humans” said one great philosopher of modernity. But instead of thinking the excerise of sovereignity as a way to aggrandize men, he argued we needed a god-like man to dictate the rules for the others. Aristocrats in disguise, politicians, intellectuals and experts (whatever that means), lock themselves in conference rooms pretending to solve the future of global challenges which they seem to consider simple enough to hack alone. They miss the very same essence of democracy, which is the principle of accepting and accomodating difference rather than correcting deviation.

We’ve been taught to think politics as something reserved for the great men whose passions are fully controlled by sharp minds, the wise ones whose brightness is more illustrated than the other’s. 

But chances are if you give that much power to a single individual and put on them the pressure of excelling at all the greatest virtues, they’ll break. The potential of corruption is bigger where power is highly concentrated because the power of a god and the power of a beast are deshumanizing.

Decentralization of power is key to improve politics. It will re-define representation and legitimacy by taking back lost dimensions of proximity and diversity. It will change our leadership styles forever by allowing achievable accountability, taking pressure of a few’s shoulders.

Most important is the need of a system that won’t depend on the virtue of a man, either making or following the rules. We wouldn’t need institutions if we were all perfect, so why make one that depends on a man’s moral?

A showcase for open-source civic engagement apps.

Open governments, activists, communities and organizations around the world have made impressive progress towards better civic tools for democracy. 

This site is a showcase for those open-source civic apps that can help upgrade democracies and communities around the world.

civicstack.org

They have opened datasets and visualized them, uploaded online govt information, allowed people to report problems, find services, communicate with politicians and even make better democratic decisions.

And a great bunch of them have made their tools open-source, as a service. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel when there’s so much great work that was collectively designed and can be collaboratively improved. 

Californa debates marijuana’s full legalization.

Legalization is close to be a reality and policy-makers are getting serious about *how*. 

Who sells, who buys and how to produce protecting the environment are some of the questions the Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy and Gavin Newsom open to public debate in:

  cannabis.democracyos.com

Will France embrace a Patriot Act of its own?

The new bill for French secret services, defended by the Prime Minister, is said to <<protect the french while respecting their liberties>> , but some think the reality is far from that statement.

After Charlie Hebdo attacks, this bill appears as the consequence of the logic of trauma, meant to give all legal means to the intelligence services to use extensive surveillance practices of law enforcement.  But right in front of the argument in favor, stands the post Snowden activism, which considers mass surveillance the symptom of a State that no longer bothers to limit its power for the sake of aknowdledged boundaries such as privacy and intimacy.

Is terror a fake excuse? Would really more surveillance be effective to prevent terrorism? What does political liberalism have to do in this debate?  The French chapter of DemocracyOS is ready to put this on the table to have a large conversation about surveillance. 

“It is not possible to give quality service to 4,6 million people without technologies.” The ITPAMI team uses several open source technologies to give their affiliated all the information and enable them to have a conversation with the organization. 

Along with the opening of their many datasets, in their constant effort to increase accountability they're now using DemocracyOS to communicate and get feedback on their decisions. “The idea —  they say —  is that public issues can get a collective solution and so become more transparent, sensible, responsible and efficient.”

This use case is particulary interesting for us in many aspects. The universe of users and the complement with other open data technologies make this implementation a new way to use the tool for making decisions within large communities.

Blockchain support for DemocracyOS

We want to add a new feature, using blockchain technology to make elections more accountable and efficient. Is that possible? Help us face this challenge here.

25 years ago, the Internet gave us a technology of a different order than anything we knew: the Web. For over 25 years now, the world wide web has connected people around the world, drastically lowering the costs of producing and sharing information as peers. The web brought democracy to culture, becoming the biggest library and the

Today, the Internet gives us another monumental technology: Blockchain. Another peer-to-peer distributed network to change the way we think and certificate value. So, what the Web represented for culture in terms of decentralization and openess, blockchain can be for bureaucracy.

Online voting requires independent accountability. Blockchain is the best available protocol to guarantee that: a decentralized ledger that can certify any kind of event that happens online.

Trust without third parties can become the begining of the end of corruption. We can create institutions like never before.

Pia Mancini on designing new institutions for democracy.

On Sour Grapes.

Pia Mancini analyzes the institutional scheme designed by the Founding Fathers, its roots and arguments, and raises the question for institutional design in the XXI century.

Can we have a system to allow citizens to govern themselves designing their own options instead of just letting them choose between pre-set options?