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Comment by santisiri | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

The trouble is people are quite rationally in favour of more spending (especially for people like me) and against more taxes (or in favour of taxes for "the rich" i.e. people who are richer than me).

And let's not even get started on the dangers of a tyranny of the majority.

Think about how our current (200 year old) representative democracy scales: you have only 500 people for a population of 300 million. Power certainly needs to be a little bit more decentralized.

Wikipedia is a great example of how bottom-up approach works better in practice than in theory.

" 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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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_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.

>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.

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 [2]https://github.com/PartidoDeInternet/AgoraOnRails

Imagine a country entering in a war. People vote using DemocracyOS and decide to start the conflict. Is this good or bad?

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 ;)

Good answer. I am looking forward to the next candidates!

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

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.

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.

No, that view could only be seen as cynical if we would be an a either-or situation - which we aren't. Another plausible path would be bolstering education, especially for the underprivileged that usually are exactly the part of the population not integrated into the political process (e.g. Germany too has a problem with continually declining voter turnout, but if you look closer that only affects the working class, for the upper classes it's still 80%).

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 ;)

The alternative would be for the governing class to be the most intelligent of the country.

I would rather be governed by a few intellectuals than by a stupid majority.

Many Swiss would disagree with you. Turns out if you give people a lot of responsability, they'd rather use it responsibly.

Could it be that representative democracy produces part of the political disinterest and lack of knowledge?

Even trying their hardest, decisions made by "less intelligent" people will be bad.

I agree with you. We've outsourced citizenship and thinking for a long time. It's a long road ahead the one to reverse this.

There's been some research on adding a "deliberative" component to the entire process. http://cdd.stanford.edu/. This apparently results in different outcomes than mere voting does. There's obviously the question of whether "different" is in fact "better" and how the deliberative process is structured, but given that debate and discussion appears to be an important part of DemocracyOS, I wonder if there's any way to build upon the existing research here.

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 think it has been an established fact that the only way to convince people to go to war has been through catastrophic Pearl Harbor type events, massive propaganda and lies. It also helps to have a professional army and no draft, so that only certain sections of the population are really affected.

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.

So you think that the US wouldn't have entered WWII if the US electorate had been more informed?

I believe that if people are not influenced by war propaganda they generally favor peaceful resolutions of conflict. This is definitely true for the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but probably also true of Vietnam, US support for Saddam Hussein, the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam and so on.

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.

An informed and educated public's decision to vote is also skewed by how much they care about the issue, which gives certain factions a big say in running it. Cuban Americans[1] and fanatical anticommunists care a lot more about not normalising diplomatic relations with Cuba than the general public cares about export contracts, holiday destinations and Cuban human rights not being any worse than many other countries the US has diplomatic relations with.

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...

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.

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

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