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Comment by ddoolin | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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