Please ELI5, tl;dr, etc.
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.
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.
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.
And let's not even get started on the dangers of a tyranny of the majority.
Wikipedia is a great example of how bottom-up approach works better in practice than in theory.
Jesus that's scary, I hope you guys fail spectacularly and fast (nothing personal).
And you (from the Pirate Party in Argentina) never got more than 20 affiliates to join.
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.
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.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Party_%28Spainw%29 [2]https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails
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 ;)
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.
If we assume that entering a war tends to be more of a rash impulsive, decision than in abstaining from violence, then building DemocracyOS in such a way so as to encourage deliberation could reduce the odds of people voting for war (or, if they do vote for war, assure others that the war is being waged for careful, thought-out reasons).
Also, the Lawrence Lessig refrain that "code is law" seems particularly applicable here.
I understand the basis of democracy, but you can't ask a lumberjack to legislate deforestation.
Could it be that representative democracy produces part of the political disinterest and lack of knowledge?
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.
The big problem with technocratic approaches like Democracy OS or the pirate parties' liquid democracy is the amount of the population you exclude by introducing this technological barrier to political participation for e.g. old people. But as empirics trump reasoning (quite in the spirit of Popper), I hereby make the case that the net party won't have an economically compelling pension concept or health care plan for the elderly in Argentina within the next 10 years. Now we just have to wait and see ;)
I would rather be governed by a few intellectuals than by a stupid majority.
The types of wars and foreign policy decisions the US has been engaged in are more or less inconceivable with an informed and educated electorate that could vote on them.
Public sentiments are often swayed in favour of war, and have far less reason to take into account its consequences, because the public isn't punished at the ballot box if "our patriotic duty" turns out to be a farcical mistake.
And when it comes to influential minorities, can we even rely on the 59% of Argentines (Yougov survey, 2012) that think military action over "las Malvinas" would be inappropriate to keep the ultra-patriotic 26% that would favour a hypothetical military solution in check? Especially with a substantial majority of that anti-war grouping believing those islands rightfully belong to Argentina anyway. The 1982 war, after all, was a desperately unpopular dictatorship's attempt to appeal to public sentiment.
[1]though due to the quirk of Florida being an essential swing state in the electoral college system they've had a disproportional influence in policy under the existing system anyway...
If I'm not mistaken public opinion in the US did not support a declaration of war against Germany before Pearl Harbor, obviously in the case of WWII the US really wasn't left with a choice after declarations of war by both Germany and Japan.
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.