DemocracyOS: An online space for deliberation and voting on political proposals | Hacker News Reader

DemocracyOS: An online space for deliberation and voting on political proposals

github.com

53 pointselkingtowa23 comments

How does this compares to Agora Voting[0], already used by 2 of the top 5 spanish political parties? I'm specially concerned about the security/encryption of the system... Agora is a very powerful tool in this regard.

[0] https://github.com/agoravoting/agora-ciudadana

Agreed. It might need some UX love, but there are hundreds of person-hours from intelligent folks that have gone into the technical underpinnings.

I'm guessing a main feature is that it's being used by, let's see..., Mexicans, Brazilians, and Tunisians.

The name was confusing, expected to see something about an Operating System? Does OS stand for Online Space?

OS stands for operating system, I think, but euphemistically in the sense of "Our vision is that DemocracyOS will become the operating system of a more open and participatory government" as opposed to an actual OS.

I agree. I was very confused at first, and almost did not click on the link because I don't see the need for whatever a democracy "OS" could be.

However, this seems like a really neat organization management solution. Voting and discussing formal proposals has never been a sexy proposition; and this is the first tool that I've seen that attempts to improve that.

Now, it's going to require some much more serious security guarantee to be used to govern any important organizations (governments, public corporations, etc.). But as a way to manage smaller communities (e.g. online communities, clubs, anything with smaller-scale voting, even potentially smaller municipalities), I see great potential.

> Now, it's going to require some much more serious security guarantee to be used to govern any important organizations (governments, public corporations, etc.).

I don't think that's the real hurdle for scaling up. The issue for large-scale democracy has always been that, because an individual's time is limited, it's very hard for them to make a reasonable appraisal of everyone else's opinion. If these comment threads were merely thousands of posts long, could you read through more than one of them and still have a life? And that's only thousands; the voting population of the US is a bit over 200 million.

I'm really, really looking for the tool that lets you successfully absorb thousands of opinions around an issue within a reasonable time frame, without intermediaries. That's the killer app for democracy.

One first step might be to filter out all opinions that are contrary to a set of known facts.

Who controls the facts?

Good point. Maybe thinking of a debate in steps? Some way of aggregating main positions and then allowing users to frame themselves in these if they want to or post an alternative, not yet aggregated opinion.

That's "Liquid democracy"

No, liquid democracy is still letting other people do your thinking for you.

I believe the challenge is not only security but a successful identity validation protocol. We've been working on different approaches, including looking at blockchain. How to distribute securely id validation is our main concern.

From the Contributing doc:

> "Do not make a pull request withouth having run the app on your own. This means, you have to manually test (at least) that everything works."

Lack of automated testing for large projects makes it difficult for others to contribute and it slows the development process down if manual testing is required. I don't even see a document that outlines specifically what "everything" is. How would you know what to test?

I think that may have been referring to formatting that is correctly formatted to be visually appealing. I may be wrong though..

There is some "delegation" implementation inside, ala "liquid democracy". This is a nice mix of "direct" & "representative" democracy, a mix that I believe is very promising to avoid corruption with representatives and lack of participation with direct voting. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

Yes, that is the key in many ways. It allows for a dynamic configuration of preferences that the current system doesn't. It is on the roadmap but we haven't developed it yet. Suggestions are naturally more than welcome.

If an "example" is a "suggestion", you may want to have look at my Kudocracy attempt: https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy

This sounds ok, but the lack of a secret ballot could be a problem. Having your name associated with a particular vote for a particular decision or party can have repercussions if you do not belong to a privileged group.

OTOH corruption & fraud is much easier with anonymity.

>Browser support

>We support real browsers and IE10+

Had to laugh at this

Ironically, for all their efforts to make government decisions inclusive, they're choosing to marginalize those who don't meet their tech standards - and being kind of dickish about it. "Sorry Grandma, but you don't use a 'real' browser or a smartypants-phone so bye." "Oh hey José, they only have IE8 at the public library? Tough."

If you'd let your grandma use IE then you're a terrible grandchild.

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