5 ms·

I haven't become depressed, but I've become angry, and thoughtful. I often have new software ideas, and my more recent ideas have turned to ways to organize vot

I haven't become depressed, but I've become angry, and thoughtful. I often have new software ideas, and my more recent ideas have turned to ways to organize voters to democratically overthrow the corrupt incumbents. Basically, I imagine a political party, defined by the software it runs on. The first incarnation of the software (website) focuses on organizing party members (users) to win elections, but it then gets iterated to include tools for distributed, direct democracy (i.e. the site will let the party members cast votes on what the elected leader votes on, but I also imagine most people proxy their power to others, which is a feature of the site). The website first needs to get a few local leaders elected... city council, uncontested state positions, maybe a state senator if the v1.0 launch goes well. We need to both recruit people to run for office, then build the software to help them get elected, then build tools to allow transparent governance with direct oversite from the people. It's hard to imagine capturing national congressional seats or the presidency on the first go, but I think that applying iterative processes to the formation of a political party and its infrastructure is one possible way to overcome the existing machine.

droidist2 13y ago
Very interesting. I've also had similar ambitions. I found this essay inspiring (although pretty long): http://www.holisticpolitics.org/NewParty/NewPartyManual.php http://www.holisticpolitics.org/NewParty/NewPartyManual.php It basically outlines strategies for how a new political party can realistically gain traction. As you allude to, an important factor is focusing on elections that can be won rather than just running to make a statement. Perhaps it's possible to write software to analyze past election results, polling, etc. to find races where a third party has a chance and would be the best to allocate resources to, kind of like a Moneyball of politics.
- canvia 13y ago
  Someone should hire Nate Silver to do that kind of analysis.
robbiep 13y ago
If you weren't already aware you will probably be interested to read about the 5 star party, a new Italian political party that is concerned with direct democracy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement
- andrewljohnson 13y ago
  It's important to note that the system I want isn't in the end "direct democracy." I want "distributed democracy." Most citizens will not participate in day-to-day votes, because they will have proxied their votes to other party members they trust. This will bear some resemblance to the power structure of modern day political parties, but it will be transparent, accountable, and easy to change. Some people will still be influential and hold big swaths of votes in their district, and then continue to command this power after the election. In some cases, the candidate might have such faith that he/she holds the majority of the proxies in the district, meaning they have broad power to make all decisions.
  - jaggederest 13y ago
    sounds a lot like anarchosyndicalism if you leave out the economic side.
    - nakedrobot2 13y ago
      cue a quote from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"....
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Congratulations, you're an anarchist! (or at least an autonomist of some sort...) You may really, really enjoy David Graeber's recent book, 'the Democracy Project.'
  - quadhome 13y ago
    This system exists, is open source, is behind the German Pirate Party, and needs your support! http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/
bnr 13y ago
The German Pirate Party worked with this concept, calling it "Liquid Democracy"[0] and using the software LiquidFeedback[1]. AFAIK they abandoned it when discussions grew too large. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy [1] http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/
siddboots 13y ago
IMHO, the work that has the most chance of making the difference is not in new software, but in new cryptographic techniques, and ultimately a standard protocol. Anonymous end-to-end auditable voting can and should be distributed, rather than relying on a centralized website on which to cast votes and present arguments.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Basically, I imagine a political party, defined by the software it runs on. You realize you are essentially proposing that we switch from the Republican Party vs. the Democratic Party, to the Vim Party and the Emacs Party- right? We all know how vim vs. emacs debates go down.
- canvia 13y ago
  iOS vs Android Mac vs PC There are some interesting parallels there.
cturner 13y ago
The Australian Democrats had a deliberate structure along those lines, although less revolutionary than what you're proposing. They'd been a successful minor party for about thirty years, but imploded from in-fighting about ten years ago. They're a useful case-study for talking about ideas around direct democracy. See http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf The causes of the party's decline is controversial. My take - that they ran into scaling problems when their parlimentary party grew large. Parts of their parliamentary party felt hamstrung by a membership who were free to take positions on issues that weren't well-considered or practical. They needed to move quickly on issues, and the direct democracy process stalled them. The federal parliamentary party went rogue, and a large section of the membership felt betrayed. This killed the collaborative culture that was the heart of what they stood for, and the party collapsed in infighting. I'm pretty frustrated with the way freedoms are being eroded in the west, but direct democracy is not a strong response to this. It's complicated, ripe for gaming and diffuses responsibility - bad qualities. When it fails, people will look to a "strong leader" who "gets things done" to replace it. Danger. Keep thinking though, because there will be better models out there. I suspect that if you could draft a new constitution, you could produce a free society with strong real democratic qualities using a structure similar to the old Icelandic Commonwealth - basically lots of statelets. The major weakness of this kind of system is that it's hard to fight big wars, even to defend yourself. That's a reason that the awesome original Articles of Confederation were replaced with the current US system.
- demallien 13y ago
  Actually, I was fairly heavily involved with the Dems at the time (it's the "dem" in my pseudo!), and what actually happened is worse. They had no structure in place at all to gauge what the party rank and file wanted, no structure for debate, and pretty much no structure at all. They got to be the maximum size that a party can be before internal strains make them implode I think. So when the Howard Government proposed the GST, the Democrat Senators achieved a consensus amongst themselves on what would be an acceptable form of the GST (they, in particular Natasha Stott Despoja, added in many of the exemptions, such as on books, fresh food and so on). There was no mechanism for the rank and file to state their resistance in a timely fashion in a way that the leadership could hear, and of course the membership itself was deeply divided on the issue - once again, there was no mechanism for dissension amongst the membership to be dissipated. The result was that the party blew up in spectacular fashion at the next elections, unable to get the membership enthusiastic enough to put boots on the ground to run election activities, with a consequent massive drop in the polls, leading to a drop in funding, leading to extinction. I was in the NSW branch and as a result of this mess became policy manager and tried to put in place what we would call a crowd-sourced policy creation system. But this was in the early 2000s, the Internet was still not entirely ubiquitous, and management in NSW decided that we had to do this thing on paper, not on the Web. It was slow, painful, and I moved countries before getting to the end (and anyway, it was too little too late, the writing was on the wall). All of that to say that I don't think we can use the Australian Democrats as a counterexample for direct democracy. They never really had the processes in place to give such a system a chance. Today the story might very well be different if a direct democracy party was tried with a correct set up of tools to allow the rank and file a chance to meaningfully participate in policy creation. I've often thought about trying to set one up on that basis, but since I live in a country now where I'm not even a citizen, I've never tried.
dwiel 13y ago
An idea i've heard and liked is to allow direct democracy like you've described, but also allow anyone to select any representative that they want (they're brother, someone with a good history, etc). Allow them to override their representitive wherever they want, and change their representitive whenever they want. This gets you direct democracy without as much tedium.
00rion 13y ago
I've had the exact same idea and would be willing to work on open-source technology to make this happen.
btbuildem 13y ago
My friend built something along these lines: http://democratize.ca http://democratize.ca

droidist2 13y ago

Very interesting. I've also had similar ambitions. I found this essay inspiring (although pretty long): http://www.holisticpolitics.org/NewParty/NewPartyManual.php http://www.holisticpolitics.org/NewParty/NewPartyManual.php It basically outlines strategies for how a new political party can realistically gain traction. As you allude to, an important factor is focusing on elections that can be won rather than just running to make a statement. Perhaps it's possible to write software to analyze past election results, polling, etc. to find races where a third party has a chance and would be the best to allocate resources to, kind of like a Moneyball of politics.

canvia 13y ago
Someone should hire Nate Silver to do that kind of analysis.

robbiep 13y ago

If you weren't already aware you will probably be interested to read about the 5 star party, a new Italian political party that is concerned with direct democracy http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement

andrewljohnson 13y ago
It's important to note that the system I want isn't in the end "direct democracy." I want "distributed democracy." Most citizens will not participate in day-to-day votes, because they will have proxied their votes to other party members they trust. This will bear some resemblance to the power structure of modern day political parties, but it will be transparent, accountable, and easy to change. Some people will still be influential and hold big swaths of votes in their district, and then continue to command this power after the election. In some cases, the candidate might have such faith that he/she holds the majority of the proxies in the district, meaning they have broad power to make all decisions.
- jaggederest 13y ago
  sounds a lot like anarchosyndicalism if you leave out the economic side.
  - nakedrobot2 13y ago
    cue a quote from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"....
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Congratulations, you're an anarchist! (or at least an autonomist of some sort...) You may really, really enjoy David Graeber's recent book, 'the Democracy Project.'
- quadhome 13y ago
  This system exists, is open source, is behind the German Pirate Party, and needs your support! http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/

bnr 13y ago

The German Pirate Party worked with this concept, calling it "Liquid Democracy"[0] and using the software LiquidFeedback[1]. AFAIK they abandoned it when discussions grew too large. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy [1] http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/

siddboots 13y ago

IMHO, the work that has the most chance of making the difference is not in new software, but in new cryptographic techniques, and ultimately a standard protocol. Anonymous end-to-end auditable voting can and should be distributed, rather than relying on a centralized website on which to cast votes and present arguments.

sliverstorm 13y ago

Basically, I imagine a political party, defined by the software it runs on. You realize you are essentially proposing that we switch from the Republican Party vs. the Democratic Party, to the Vim Party and the Emacs Party- right? We all know how vim vs. emacs debates go down.

canvia 13y ago
iOS vs Android Mac vs PC There are some interesting parallels there.

cturner 13y ago

The Australian Democrats had a deliberate structure along those lines, although less revolutionary than what you're proposing. They'd been a successful minor party for about thirty years, but imploded from in-fighting about ten years ago. They're a useful case-study for talking about ideas around direct democracy. See http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf The causes of the party's decline is controversial. My take - that they ran into scaling problems when their parlimentary party grew large. Parts of their parliamentary party felt hamstrung by a membership who were free to take positions on issues that weren't well-considered or practical. They needed to move quickly on issues, and the direct democracy process stalled them. The federal parliamentary party went rogue, and a large section of the membership felt betrayed. This killed the collaborative culture that was the heart of what they stood for, and the party collapsed in infighting. I'm pretty frustrated with the way freedoms are being eroded in the west, but direct democracy is not a strong response to this. It's complicated, ripe for gaming and diffuses responsibility - bad qualities. When it fails, people will look to a "strong leader" who "gets things done" to replace it. Danger. Keep thinking though, because there will be better models out there. I suspect that if you could draft a new constitution, you could produce a free society with strong real democratic qualities using a structure similar to the old Icelandic Commonwealth - basically lots of statelets. The major weakness of this kind of system is that it's hard to fight big wars, even to defend yourself. That's a reason that the awesome original Articles of Confederation were replaced with the current US system.

demallien 13y ago
Actually, I was fairly heavily involved with the Dems at the time (it's the "dem" in my pseudo!), and what actually happened is worse. They had no structure in place at all to gauge what the party rank and file wanted, no structure for debate, and pretty much no structure at all. They got to be the maximum size that a party can be before internal strains make them implode I think. So when the Howard Government proposed the GST, the Democrat Senators achieved a consensus amongst themselves on what would be an acceptable form of the GST (they, in particular Natasha Stott Despoja, added in many of the exemptions, such as on books, fresh food and so on). There was no mechanism for the rank and file to state their resistance in a timely fashion in a way that the leadership could hear, and of course the membership itself was deeply divided on the issue - once again, there was no mechanism for dissension amongst the membership to be dissipated. The result was that the party blew up in spectacular fashion at the next elections, unable to get the membership enthusiastic enough to put boots on the ground to run election activities, with a consequent massive drop in the polls, leading to a drop in funding, leading to extinction. I was in the NSW branch and as a result of this mess became policy manager and tried to put in place what we would call a crowd-sourced policy creation system. But this was in the early 2000s, the Internet was still not entirely ubiquitous, and management in NSW decided that we had to do this thing on paper, not on the Web. It was slow, painful, and I moved countries before getting to the end (and anyway, it was too little too late, the writing was on the wall). All of that to say that I don't think we can use the Australian Democrats as a counterexample for direct democracy. They never really had the processes in place to give such a system a chance. Today the story might very well be different if a direct democracy party was tried with a correct set up of tools to allow the rank and file a chance to meaningfully participate in policy creation. I've often thought about trying to set one up on that basis, but since I live in a country now where I'm not even a citizen, I've never tried.

dwiel 13y ago

An idea i've heard and liked is to allow direct democracy like you've described, but also allow anyone to select any representative that they want (they're brother, someone with a good history, etc). Allow them to override their representitive wherever they want, and change their representitive whenever they want. This gets you direct democracy without as much tedium.

00rion 13y ago

I've had the exact same idea and would be willing to work on open-source technology to make this happen.

btbuildem 13y ago

My friend built something along these lines: http://democratize.ca http://democratize.ca