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Why Y Combinator Funded a Radical Political Party in Argentina

127 points by santisiri 12y ago

santisiri 12y ago
Hi everyone, I'm one of the founders of DemocracyOS.org and The Net Party (partidodelared.org). Let me know what you think about DemocracyOS as an open source vote & debate tool, and our political strategy with The Net Party where we have candidates committed to vote in congress according to DemocracyOS.
- wslh 12y ago
  Please ELI5, tl;dr, etc.
  - santisiri 12y ago
    DemocracyOS is an application where you can get informed on what happens in congress, debate with other citizens in a platform that rewards the best argument and vote. 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.
    - wslh 12y ago
      Imagine a country entering in a war. People vote using DemocracyOS and decide to start the conflict. Is this good or bad?
      - santisiri 12y ago
        We know that we need to learn from experience. That's why DemocracyOS has only been adopted at local city-level where 99% of the issues debated have to do with every-day life in the city. 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 ;)
        wslh 12y ago
        Good answer. I am looking forward to the next candidates!
        rgbrgb 12y ago
        Interesting to think about it that way -- you jack it into just a single branch of the US government and you have some built in QA process. 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. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionally_fair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionally_fair
      - throwaway934848 12y ago
        Most people don't know what they're doing or don't possess enough knowledge to take good decisions on most subjects. Democracy is a stupid ruling scheme. I understand the basis of democracy, but you can't ask a lumberjack to legislate deforestation.
        kriro 12y ago
        That's a pretty cynical point of view. And what's the alternative, handing the decisions over to a "ruling class" of elites? One could make a somewhat compelling argument that current democratic systems are pretty much a "curse of Plato" (term taken from Open Society by Popper) type of system with an extra layer of indirection above it and. 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.
    - karmacondon 12y ago
      The Net Party seems like it defeats the purpose of representative democracy. The system was designed to let congress people differ from their electorate on certain matters. If you take the Net Party concept (as I understand it) to it's logical conclusion, isn't that changing the basic form of government from representative to direct democracy? Or in essence saying "Nice try James Madison, but we have something different in mind"? 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.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - vidarh 12y ago
        One of the arguments against representative democracy at all was basically the same: People were supposedly too uninformed, and someone else needed to moderate their wishes. 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.
    - roel_v 12y ago
      " its candidates are committed to always vote in Congress according to what citizens ask for in DemocracyOS." Jesus that's scary, I hope you guys fail spectacularly and fast (nothing personal).
      - seykron 12y ago
        It already happened, they lost the legal status this year. It was expected, they're only entrepreneurship bullshit, they never would get real engagement from people.
        mairwilliams 12y ago
        Oh, the guys at the Net Party would love to prove you wrong. If you are in Buenos Aires you are invited to their meeting today at 20 in Belgrano, reach them via twitter DM.
        santisiri 12y ago
        Let me just say that we got 1.2% of the votes in a 2 million electorate election in 2013. And you (from the Pirate Party in Argentina) never got more than 20 affiliates to join.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      > An oft-quoted story about the "coolness" of the Senate involves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was in France during the Constitutional Convention. Upon his return, Jefferson visited Washington and asked why the Convention delegates had created a Senate. "Why did you pour that tea into your saucer?" asked Washington. "To cool it," said Jefferson. "Even so," responded Washington, "we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it." https://www.senate.gov/legislative/common/briefing/Senate_legislative_process.htm 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.
      - crdoconnor 12y ago
        >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. 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.
    - seykron 12y ago
      Bullshit. 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.
      - piamancini 12y ago
        we are launching the hub now where everyone, even the pirate party in argentina can have their own democracyos and raise their own issues. Stay tuned
    - bglusman 12y ago
      You mention spain, is the Spanish Internet Party[1] using DemocracyOS? Are you considering incorporating Liquid Democracy features/ideas into DemocracyOS? They have an open source Rails app aimed at this idea[2] that I was very excited about/helped out on... curious how you see Liquid Democracy's problems/potential [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_%28Spainw%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_%28Spainw%29 [2]https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails
- kriro 12y ago
  Are you in contact with the Pirate parties of different countries? Your party sounds like it uses the idea of "liquid democracy" which is discussed quite a bit by the Pirate parties if memory serves right. I think the German one at least discussed some tools to use/build for the entire vote/poll mechanism which I assume is built into your collaboration product. 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.
  - th0br0 12y ago
    They even went ahead and implemented a 'liquid feedback' tool. Which seems quite similar to democracyOS? http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/
    - orbifold 12y ago
      While they were doing that they squandered all their political potential by failing to elect strong, media competent leaders and consequently were dismantled by mass media. Of course the media was relatively keen on doing that anyways, with a few exceptions in the more intellectual news papers.
      - th0br0 12y ago
        I agree, but the parent was referring to this tool I believe.
  - joeyspn 12y ago
    > I think the German one at least discussed some tools to use/build for the entire vote/poll mechanism which I assume is built into your collaboration product 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 https://github.com/agoravoting [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_direct_democracy_parties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_direct_democracy_partie...
- slackson 12y ago
  This is the sort of place real change is going to come from. Transparent public information, that at the very least will shame politicians into voting in the interests of the people. 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.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    There's already plenty of accurate forecasting available, but it's suppressed and distorted by elite interests. 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.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- rbanffy 12y ago
  Wishing you good luck and hoping (rather selfishly) this luck is contagious to Brazil (where I live). 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.
  - zby 12y ago
    There is http://partidopirata.org/ http://partidopirata.org/ there :)
  - santisiri 12y ago
    Good news: check http://euvoto.org http://euvoto.org it's a start in Sao Paulo!
- UserRights 12y ago
  From your description I am missing one important idea that you should communicate clearly: you, we and nobody else currently wants to have online voting - what we want to have, are tools that enable transparency and gathering of information, also discussions and preparation of decisions, but the final decision is something you do NOT want to do online. See this talk from 31C3: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281400_-_security_analysis_of_estonia_s_internet_voting_system_-_j_alex_halderman.html 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/ 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/ https://liqd.net/en/ here you can find the adhocracy platform: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ 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/ https://offenekommune.de/ Another interesting tool for organizing (really big) meetings: http://openslides.org/en/ 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-github.html 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/ https://okfn.org/ - good luck!
- UserRights 12y ago
  Well, I have to come back to you with a few very basic things that should change immediately if you want to show respect to users and their privacy and would like your business to be taken serious by NGOs and political activists around the globe: * there is NO https://democracyos.org/ 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 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".
  - santisiri 12y ago
    1) You're right, we got the SSL certificate ready and we'll be deploying it ASAP. 2) Good point, will look into that. 3) Will put the PDF as you suggested. Thanks!
- zby 12y ago
  Why it is 'Open Source' and not 'Free Software'?
  - dublinben 12y ago
    More palatable to investors, probably. It's harder to turn around and sell out when you've just been offering "open source" rather than truly free software. They rather miss the point though, if they're concerned about democracy and politics.
  - santisiri 12y ago
    It is both. But still the OS in the title plays with the idea of Operating System or Open Society among other interpretations. Read it how you want it.
    - zby 12y ago
      I was actually referring to http://democracyos.org/ http://democracyos.org/ - it says "Open Source Join a community that's hacking the future of democracy today. We are 100% open source with an MIT license."
- mintplant 12y ago
  What's to stop you from fudging the results on DemocracyOS and making whatever choices you want with The Net Party?
- maceo 12y ago
  As a long-time supporter of your efforts, I have a few suggestions. 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?
dschiptsov 12y ago
Because in politics there is always an "investment" side.
- smcl 12y ago
  Hey, sorry I downvoted you accidentally when switching windows due to my laptop being slow and stupid :)
  - dschiptsov 12y ago
    Hey, thanks)
nraynaud 12y ago
This is extremely risky to fund a political party with foreign money, in particular in the CIA's backyard.
- seykron 12y ago
  It is actually forbidden by the Argentinian Electoral Law.
  - piamancini 12y ago
    make up your mind, are we or are we not a party? if we are not, as you got tired if claiming then it's not illegal.
- santisiri 12y ago
  The title says that, but its not the reality. The funded The DemocracyOS Foundation. The founders have also created a political party in Argentina to prove their model and ran for elections in 2013 (1% of the votes).
thomasfoster96 12y ago
I've got a few issues with this sort of idea, and to be frank, Internet-based pseudo-direct democracy has been raised many times before, although DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political consultation software. 1. I don't see anyway that direct democracy by way of an online poll or consultation is any better than the representative democracy that many countries already have. Such an approach will result in a representative in a legislature who will be biased towards a more technical and engaged audience than the wider community. 2. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread, why not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or decades for the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of jurisdictions. Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true direct democracy, which will probably take the same amount of time. 3. In a (my) perfect world, a mixture of representative and direct democracy works best. I'm not sure turning representative democracy into a pseudo-direct democracy will have good long term consequences. I doubt (putting cynicism aside) that every voter in a democracy has the time and energy to put as much into politics as a paid politician puts into it nowadays, hence I think we'll always need a bit of representative democracy.
- jdc 12y ago
  Regarding (3), you have the success of Swiss direct democracy to content with.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Switzerland is often portrayed as this political paradise of neutrality and civil liberty, but the truth is nowhere near as rosy. There's plenty of dark spots and inefficiencies in Switzerland's history that can potentially put the idea of pure direct democracy into question. I can list some if you'd desire and are unaware.
- seykron 12y ago
  > although DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political consultation software Agree, as long as the legislatives have not a legal commitment with a system, it is just a very sophisticated poll. > 2. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread, why not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or decades for the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of jurisdictions. Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true direct democracy, which will probably take the same amount of time. I'm a member of the Pirate Party of Argentina, and we're trying to do just what you're saying. We've got a direct democracy platform[1] and we use our processes to collaborate with different social movements and government institutions. For instance, the previous year we participated in several actions and discussions about national bills using our transparent and open process[2]. In our experience, direct democracy works very well as a bridge between real people problems and the representative system. It encourage people participation and it provides real engagement within the organization. Thanks for pointing out these points! [1] https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en [2] Here is an article about what we done the last year: https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate-party-ga/ https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate...
zby 12y ago
Update: It looks like it is not just polls - there is also a debate tool (although does not look very sophisticated). Still the article talked mostly about polls. I don't know - maybe it is a step in the right direction - but I have the feeling that polls are not very good way to make decisions. There is a lot of thought put into stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making - and hey - there are even very pretty web apps that claim to be based on this: https://www.loomio.org/ https://www.loomio.org/ And by the way: http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-controversy/2014/07/what-we-expected-all-along-nsa-hacked-online-polls-we-suspect-that-voting-machines-and-ballot-counting-scanners-are-also-hacked-and-rigged-2480144.html http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-controversy/2014/0... - I don't know, maybe the current parliaments are not very good - but at least they are real - not armies of sock puppets.
- makeitsuckless 12y ago
  I used to feel that way, and was strongly against the argument of using tech for direct democracy. For years I worked on leveraging tech to improve the transparency of (local) government, and to close the gap between the voters and their representatives. I believed in the representative democracy (unlike many other techies), I just believed it needed to be improved. I unfortunately came to the conclusion that party politics have completely corrupted the current systems. Over generations the establishment has learned to game the system so perfectly that the elite will remain in charge no matter what happens. Even new "anti-establishment" parties are quickly absorbed or corrupted. I've come to believe that the essence of renewing democracy is change itself. Not because one system is fundamentally better than the other, but because it will break the stranglehold the current political elite has on the existing system. Change is the essential ingredient. Undermine the power of the establish parties by any means necessary, even if that means decision making will initially get "worse". At least it will be a return to actual democracy. That, and transparency. Pretty much any political system can benefit from much more transparency
  - seandhi 12y ago
    I think I would be okay with a direct democracy as long as any legislation passed through direct means underwent a judicial review for constitutional issues before someone was directly harmed by said legislation. The current system of requiring locus standi before a law can be challenged is bad enough with representatives who are supposedly more educated on legal matters passing laws of questionable constitutional legality - I could only imagine how much worse it would be with a largely uneducated (on legal matters) population. What's that saying? Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner or something?
marianov 12y ago
I hope they use the money to ditch the code and do a clean start because last time I checked the system was not safe, transparent,secret or auditable http://demos.legislatura.gov.ar/ http://demos.legislatura.gov.ar/ Buenos Aires City Legislature installation https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app
- santisiri 12y ago
  The Buenos Aires Legislature never agreed to install an SSL. We are doing it. Feel free to contribute to the code.
seykron 12y ago
The difference between Pirate Parties which use liquid democracy and "the Net Party" is that Pirate Parties actually use software to support their political platform. The Net Party has not even something that may look like a political platform, they use politics to sell the software. And by the way, The Net Party lost the legal status this year.
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
because they are scammy crooks? duh?
viciousambition 12y ago
I like this idea, but I don't know if a trojan horse in the footer sends the most positive political message.
dguaraglia 12y ago
Man, even if well intentioned, this is bad. This kind of "passive" intrusion (combined with the not-so-passive, government sponsored intrusion) is why some South American countries have a deep-settled distrust of the United States. Disclaimer: I was born in the US but grew up in Argentina. I have a pretty good grasp of the subject, but I'm obviously not free of bias. "What could possibly be bad about a young party of people looking to introduce some liberal, progressive changes?" you ask. Well, the problem is that helping a party that caters to younger people (read: rich and middle class young people; the working class in Argentina doesn't care about getting pot or being able to ride the Subte back from the clubs) can be seen as anti-government. And to a certain extent, it is. I won't go into what I believe about the current government or the opposition, but having foreign money influence a very vocal sector of the population is definitely meddling with the country internal affairs. At the end of the date, this is drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money channeled through the State department, but if you put all like efforts in the same bag then you have a very strong case to support the theories that the US government is actively trying to get Kirchner and her allies out of power. It's not as overt as a coup, but it's still bad.
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  At which point does it become bad intrusion? Is sharing ideas bad? Money? Offering, rather than being asked? What about something like the concept of democracy. Or, since the intrinsic value of a concept may be difficult to understand, let's consider the US constitution. It likely cost quite a bit to produce in inflation adjusted dollars. What if they ask us for it, they seek it out themselves, or we give it to them? I'm very confused. This is a very gray area with a fantastically slippery slope.
  - s73v3r 12y ago
    "At which point does it become bad intrusion?" When it starts. "Is sharing ideas bad? Money? Offering, rather than being asked?" Ideas? Probably not. Money? Very yes. And before you try, there is a huge difference between ideas and monetary support, and money is not speech. "What about something like the concept of democracy." You're not a member of that democracy. It's like Israel donating to political campaigns here in the US. "I'm very confused. This is a very gray area with a fantastically slippery slope." No, it really isn't.
elemenofi 12y ago
Hello, I am an argentinian and the reason why I dont like DemocracyOS is because it just adds another middleman. I am sick and tired of representative democracy. It is a hoax and an illusion that we must get rid of as soon as possible. Adding another layer of abstraction between voters and politicians just adds to the noise of this already abandoned channel of communication. I want to vote on the laws myself and ask politicians for advice and briefs of the projects, not the other way round. Cheers
- santisiri 12y ago
  The idea is to make that middleman (the representative) committed to the people. We cannot go against the Constitution, if you like that approach there are other political alternatives you might want to consider.
touseonce 12y ago
> Why Y Combinator Funded a Radical Political Party in Argentina The title made me laugh. If I told you some wealthy Ivy League guy/gal who used to be an intern for the Bush administration was building a political party... you would figure out this new party would end up far from being "radical". > Mancini's Partido de la Red—"Net Party," in English—is a wild experiment in direct democracy that seems to take inspiration from both Occupy Wall Street and Reddit (a Y Combinator alum and ongoing investment). "Net Party" has nothing to do with occupy Wall Street. The founders are a few wealthy Argentinians. I find hard to believe they are building a tool to change the status quo in any way (this would mean a risk of losing some of their privileges). It looks like a great self-promotion project though. Also, the article later mentions: "DemocracyOS already had some revenue when Mancini applied to YC". Now, that makes a little more sense: DemocracyOS is a for-profit endeavor, after all. Gotta give them some credit: mounting a mock political party (and then selling it as a product) is one hell of a marketing stunt! The fact that there is some money making future behind the initiative also explains the backing from YC.

127 points by santisiri 12y ago

Hi everyone, I'm one of the founders of DemocracyOS.org and The Net Party (partidodelared.org). Let me know what you think about DemocracyOS as an open source vote & debate tool, and our political strategy with The Net Party where we have candidates committed to vote in congress according to DemocracyOS.

wslh 12y ago
Please ELI5, tl;dr, etc.
- santisiri 12y ago
  DemocracyOS is an application where you can get informed on what happens in congress, debate with other citizens in a platform that rewards the best argument and vote. 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.
  - wslh 12y ago
    Imagine a country entering in a war. People vote using DemocracyOS and decide to start the conflict. Is this good or bad?
    - santisiri 12y ago
      We know that we need to learn from experience. That's why DemocracyOS has only been adopted at local city-level where 99% of the issues debated have to do with every-day life in the city. 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 ;)
      - wslh 12y ago
        Good answer. I am looking forward to the next candidates!
      - rgbrgb 12y ago
        Interesting to think about it that way -- you jack it into just a single branch of the US government and you have some built in QA process. 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. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionally_fair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionally_fair
    - throwaway934848 12y ago
      Most people don't know what they're doing or don't possess enough knowledge to take good decisions on most subjects. Democracy is a stupid ruling scheme. I understand the basis of democracy, but you can't ask a lumberjack to legislate deforestation.
      - kriro 12y ago
        That's a pretty cynical point of view. And what's the alternative, handing the decisions over to a "ruling class" of elites? One could make a somewhat compelling argument that current democratic systems are pretty much a "curse of Plato" (term taken from Open Society by Popper) type of system with an extra layer of indirection above it and. 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.
  - karmacondon 12y ago
    The Net Party seems like it defeats the purpose of representative democracy. The system was designed to let congress people differ from their electorate on certain matters. If you take the Net Party concept (as I understand it) to it's logical conclusion, isn't that changing the basic form of government from representative to direct democracy? Or in essence saying "Nice try James Madison, but we have something different in mind"? 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.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - vidarh 12y ago
      One of the arguments against representative democracy at all was basically the same: People were supposedly too uninformed, and someone else needed to moderate their wishes. 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.
  - roel_v 12y ago
    " its candidates are committed to always vote in Congress according to what citizens ask for in DemocracyOS." Jesus that's scary, I hope you guys fail spectacularly and fast (nothing personal).
    - seykron 12y ago
      It already happened, they lost the legal status this year. It was expected, they're only entrepreneurship bullshit, they never would get real engagement from people.
      - mairwilliams 12y ago
        Oh, the guys at the Net Party would love to prove you wrong. If you are in Buenos Aires you are invited to their meeting today at 20 in Belgrano, reach them via twitter DM.
      - santisiri 12y ago
        Let me just say that we got 1.2% of the votes in a 2 million electorate election in 2013. And you (from the Pirate Party in Argentina) never got more than 20 affiliates to join.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    > An oft-quoted story about the "coolness" of the Senate involves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was in France during the Constitutional Convention. Upon his return, Jefferson visited Washington and asked why the Convention delegates had created a Senate. "Why did you pour that tea into your saucer?" asked Washington. "To cool it," said Jefferson. "Even so," responded Washington, "we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it." https://www.senate.gov/legislative/common/briefing/Senate_legislative_process.htm 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.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      >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. 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.
  - seykron 12y ago
    Bullshit. 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.
    - piamancini 12y ago
      we are launching the hub now where everyone, even the pirate party in argentina can have their own democracyos and raise their own issues. Stay tuned
  - bglusman 12y ago
    You mention spain, is the Spanish Internet Party[1] using DemocracyOS? Are you considering incorporating Liquid Democracy features/ideas into DemocracyOS? They have an open source Rails app aimed at this idea[2] that I was very excited about/helped out on... curious how you see Liquid Democracy's problems/potential [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_%28Spainw%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_%28Spainw%29 [2]https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails
kriro 12y ago
Are you in contact with the Pirate parties of different countries? Your party sounds like it uses the idea of "liquid democracy" which is discussed quite a bit by the Pirate parties if memory serves right. I think the German one at least discussed some tools to use/build for the entire vote/poll mechanism which I assume is built into your collaboration product. 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.
- th0br0 12y ago
  They even went ahead and implemented a 'liquid feedback' tool. Which seems quite similar to democracyOS? http://liquidfeedback.org/ http://liquidfeedback.org/
  - orbifold 12y ago
    While they were doing that they squandered all their political potential by failing to elect strong, media competent leaders and consequently were dismantled by mass media. Of course the media was relatively keen on doing that anyways, with a few exceptions in the more intellectual news papers.
    - th0br0 12y ago
      I agree, but the parent was referring to this tool I believe.
- joeyspn 12y ago
  > I think the German one at least discussed some tools to use/build for the entire vote/poll mechanism which I assume is built into your collaboration product 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 https://github.com/agoravoting [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_direct_democracy_parties http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_direct_democracy_partie...
slackson 12y ago
This is the sort of place real change is going to come from. Transparent public information, that at the very least will shame politicians into voting in the interests of the people. 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  There's already plenty of accurate forecasting available, but it's suppressed and distorted by elite interests. 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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
rbanffy 12y ago
Wishing you good luck and hoping (rather selfishly) this luck is contagious to Brazil (where I live). 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.
- zby 12y ago
  There is http://partidopirata.org/ http://partidopirata.org/ there :)
- santisiri 12y ago
  Good news: check http://euvoto.org http://euvoto.org it's a start in Sao Paulo!
UserRights 12y ago
From your description I am missing one important idea that you should communicate clearly: you, we and nobody else currently wants to have online voting - what we want to have, are tools that enable transparency and gathering of information, also discussions and preparation of decisions, but the final decision is something you do NOT want to do online. See this talk from 31C3: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281400_-_security_analysis_of_estonia_s_internet_voting_system_-_j_alex_halderman.html 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/ 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/ https://liqd.net/en/ here you can find the adhocracy platform: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ 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/ https://offenekommune.de/ Another interesting tool for organizing (really big) meetings: http://openslides.org/en/ 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-github.html 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/ https://okfn.org/ - good luck!
UserRights 12y ago
Well, I have to come back to you with a few very basic things that should change immediately if you want to show respect to users and their privacy and would like your business to be taken serious by NGOs and political activists around the globe: * there is NO https://democracyos.org/ 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 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".
- santisiri 12y ago
  1) You're right, we got the SSL certificate ready and we'll be deploying it ASAP. 2) Good point, will look into that. 3) Will put the PDF as you suggested. Thanks!
zby 12y ago
Why it is 'Open Source' and not 'Free Software'?
- dublinben 12y ago
  More palatable to investors, probably. It's harder to turn around and sell out when you've just been offering "open source" rather than truly free software. They rather miss the point though, if they're concerned about democracy and politics.
- santisiri 12y ago
  It is both. But still the OS in the title plays with the idea of Operating System or Open Society among other interpretations. Read it how you want it.
  - zby 12y ago
    I was actually referring to http://democracyos.org/ http://democracyos.org/ - it says "Open Source Join a community that's hacking the future of democracy today. We are 100% open source with an MIT license."
mintplant 12y ago
What's to stop you from fudging the results on DemocracyOS and making whatever choices you want with The Net Party?
maceo 12y ago
As a long-time supporter of your efforts, I have a few suggestions. 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?

dschiptsov 12y ago

Because in politics there is always an "investment" side.

smcl 12y ago
Hey, sorry I downvoted you accidentally when switching windows due to my laptop being slow and stupid :)
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  Hey, thanks)

nraynaud 12y ago

This is extremely risky to fund a political party with foreign money, in particular in the CIA's backyard.

seykron 12y ago
It is actually forbidden by the Argentinian Electoral Law.
- piamancini 12y ago
  make up your mind, are we or are we not a party? if we are not, as you got tired if claiming then it's not illegal.
santisiri 12y ago
The title says that, but its not the reality. The funded The DemocracyOS Foundation. The founders have also created a political party in Argentina to prove their model and ran for elections in 2013 (1% of the votes).

thomasfoster96 12y ago

I've got a few issues with this sort of idea, and to be frank, Internet-based pseudo-direct democracy has been raised many times before, although DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political consultation software. 1. I don't see anyway that direct democracy by way of an online poll or consultation is any better than the representative democracy that many countries already have. Such an approach will result in a representative in a legislature who will be biased towards a more technical and engaged audience than the wider community. 2. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread, why not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or decades for the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of jurisdictions. Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true direct democracy, which will probably take the same amount of time. 3. In a (my) perfect world, a mixture of representative and direct democracy works best. I'm not sure turning representative democracy into a pseudo-direct democracy will have good long term consequences. I doubt (putting cynicism aside) that every voter in a democracy has the time and energy to put as much into politics as a paid politician puts into it nowadays, hence I think we'll always need a bit of representative democracy.

jdc 12y ago
Regarding (3), you have the success of Swiss direct democracy to content with.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Switzerland is often portrayed as this political paradise of neutrality and civil liberty, but the truth is nowhere near as rosy. There's plenty of dark spots and inefficiencies in Switzerland's history that can potentially put the idea of pure direct democracy into question. I can list some if you'd desire and are unaware.
seykron 12y ago
> although DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political consultation software Agree, as long as the legislatives have not a legal commitment with a system, it is just a very sophisticated poll. > 2. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread, why not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or decades for the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of jurisdictions. Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true direct democracy, which will probably take the same amount of time. I'm a member of the Pirate Party of Argentina, and we're trying to do just what you're saying. We've got a direct democracy platform[1] and we use our processes to collaborate with different social movements and government institutions. For instance, the previous year we participated in several actions and discussions about national bills using our transparent and open process[2]. In our experience, direct democracy works very well as a bridge between real people problems and the representative system. It encourage people participation and it provides real engagement within the organization. Thanks for pointing out these points! [1] https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en [2] Here is an article about what we done the last year: https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate-party-ga/ https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate...

zby 12y ago

Update: It looks like it is not just polls - there is also a debate tool (although does not look very sophisticated). Still the article talked mostly about polls. I don't know - maybe it is a step in the right direction - but I have the feeling that polls are not very good way to make decisions. There is a lot of thought put into stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making - and hey - there are even very pretty web apps that claim to be based on this: https://www.loomio.org/ https://www.loomio.org/ And by the way: http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-controversy/2014/07/what-we-expected-all-along-nsa-hacked-online-polls-we-suspect-that-voting-machines-and-ballot-counting-scanners-are-also-hacked-and-rigged-2480144.html http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-controversy/2014/0... - I don't know, maybe the current parliaments are not very good - but at least they are real - not armies of sock puppets.

makeitsuckless 12y ago
I used to feel that way, and was strongly against the argument of using tech for direct democracy. For years I worked on leveraging tech to improve the transparency of (local) government, and to close the gap between the voters and their representatives. I believed in the representative democracy (unlike many other techies), I just believed it needed to be improved. I unfortunately came to the conclusion that party politics have completely corrupted the current systems. Over generations the establishment has learned to game the system so perfectly that the elite will remain in charge no matter what happens. Even new "anti-establishment" parties are quickly absorbed or corrupted. I've come to believe that the essence of renewing democracy is change itself. Not because one system is fundamentally better than the other, but because it will break the stranglehold the current political elite has on the existing system. Change is the essential ingredient. Undermine the power of the establish parties by any means necessary, even if that means decision making will initially get "worse". At least it will be a return to actual democracy. That, and transparency. Pretty much any political system can benefit from much more transparency
- seandhi 12y ago
  I think I would be okay with a direct democracy as long as any legislation passed through direct means underwent a judicial review for constitutional issues before someone was directly harmed by said legislation. The current system of requiring locus standi before a law can be challenged is bad enough with representatives who are supposedly more educated on legal matters passing laws of questionable constitutional legality - I could only imagine how much worse it would be with a largely uneducated (on legal matters) population. What's that saying? Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner or something?

marianov 12y ago

I hope they use the money to ditch the code and do a clean start because last time I checked the system was not safe, transparent,secret or auditable http://demos.legislatura.gov.ar/ http://demos.legislatura.gov.ar/ Buenos Aires City Legislature installation https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app

santisiri 12y ago
The Buenos Aires Legislature never agreed to install an SSL. We are doing it. Feel free to contribute to the code.

seykron 12y ago

The difference between Pirate Parties which use liquid democracy and "the Net Party" is that Pirate Parties actually use software to support their political platform. The Net Party has not even something that may look like a political platform, they use politics to sell the software. And by the way, The Net Party lost the legal status this year.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

because they are scammy crooks? duh?

viciousambition 12y ago

I like this idea, but I don't know if a trojan horse in the footer sends the most positive political message.

dguaraglia 12y ago

Man, even if well intentioned, this is bad. This kind of "passive" intrusion (combined with the not-so-passive, government sponsored intrusion) is why some South American countries have a deep-settled distrust of the United States. Disclaimer: I was born in the US but grew up in Argentina. I have a pretty good grasp of the subject, but I'm obviously not free of bias. "What could possibly be bad about a young party of people looking to introduce some liberal, progressive changes?" you ask. Well, the problem is that helping a party that caters to younger people (read: rich and middle class young people; the working class in Argentina doesn't care about getting pot or being able to ride the Subte back from the clubs) can be seen as anti-government. And to a certain extent, it is. I won't go into what I believe about the current government or the opposition, but having foreign money influence a very vocal sector of the population is definitely meddling with the country internal affairs. At the end of the date, this is drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money channeled through the State department, but if you put all like efforts in the same bag then you have a very strong case to support the theories that the US government is actively trying to get Kirchner and her allies out of power. It's not as overt as a coup, but it's still bad.

abandonliberty 12y ago
At which point does it become bad intrusion? Is sharing ideas bad? Money? Offering, rather than being asked? What about something like the concept of democracy. Or, since the intrinsic value of a concept may be difficult to understand, let's consider the US constitution. It likely cost quite a bit to produce in inflation adjusted dollars. What if they ask us for it, they seek it out themselves, or we give it to them? I'm very confused. This is a very gray area with a fantastically slippery slope.
- s73v3r 12y ago
  "At which point does it become bad intrusion?" When it starts. "Is sharing ideas bad? Money? Offering, rather than being asked?" Ideas? Probably not. Money? Very yes. And before you try, there is a huge difference between ideas and monetary support, and money is not speech. "What about something like the concept of democracy." You're not a member of that democracy. It's like Israel donating to political campaigns here in the US. "I'm very confused. This is a very gray area with a fantastically slippery slope." No, it really isn't.

elemenofi 12y ago

Hello, I am an argentinian and the reason why I dont like DemocracyOS is because it just adds another middleman. I am sick and tired of representative democracy. It is a hoax and an illusion that we must get rid of as soon as possible. Adding another layer of abstraction between voters and politicians just adds to the noise of this already abandoned channel of communication. I want to vote on the laws myself and ask politicians for advice and briefs of the projects, not the other way round. Cheers

santisiri 12y ago
The idea is to make that middleman (the representative) committed to the people. We cannot go against the Constitution, if you like that approach there are other political alternatives you might want to consider.

touseonce 12y ago

> Why Y Combinator Funded a Radical Political Party in Argentina The title made me laugh. If I told you some wealthy Ivy League guy/gal who used to be an intern for the Bush administration was building a political party... you would figure out this new party would end up far from being "radical". > Mancini's Partido de la Red—"Net Party," in English—is a wild experiment in direct democracy that seems to take inspiration from both Occupy Wall Street and Reddit (a Y Combinator alum and ongoing investment). "Net Party" has nothing to do with occupy Wall Street. The founders are a few wealthy Argentinians. I find hard to believe they are building a tool to change the status quo in any way (this would mean a risk of losing some of their privileges). It looks like a great self-promotion project though. Also, the article later mentions: "DemocracyOS already had some revenue when Mancini applied to YC". Now, that makes a little more sense: DemocracyOS is a for-profit endeavor, after all. Gotta give them some credit: mounting a mock political party (and then selling it as a product) is one hell of a marketing stunt! The fact that there is some money making future behind the initiative also explains the backing from YC.