Choosing the type of governance you want is by itself a political act

[nicobao]

Hi there! Amazing initiative...

I have a little concern however. Not everyone have the same notions of how we should be governed, or how we should govern ourselves. Even among pro-democracy people.
I mean for example, I believe ideally, that someone that have more insight about one particular subject/field should have more weight in choosing the new laws in this particular field... (in the voting process), unlike in current democracies. In an ideal world, I don't believe in democracy where every vote for a particular subject is equal.

Similarly, your proposition with the pool of votes is interesting, but it can never be 100% consensual. The type of government a nation chooses is by itself, a political choice. In our case, it is a political choice that is made "arbitrarily" among the persons involved in constructing democracy.earth.

How do you to cope with this problem? I think this is the main force that would be a deterrent to using democracy.earth. I feel like the technical side is very hard to implement (and it is really cool that you are getting your hands dirty with the blockchain and the voting system), but it ultimately will not be the main issue.

Or maybe I understand it wrong, and democracy.earth is an open-platform or an open-framework, where group of people can choose the set of rules they want to abide to. The set of rules that would define their own view on democracy. For example, the pool of vote could be suggested but not enforced. Similarly, my suggestion on making different people have different weight on their vote depending of their major field of experience, could be an optional feature.
One could choose a more or less direct democracy with more or less concentrated power and delegation. This way, it would enable groups/governments to be the actor of the creation of their own democracy - except that in practice it would mean configuring a software ;).

No offense though, I love the concept, and I am even thinking of contributing!

Kind regards,
Nicolas

[Jean-Baptiste-Lasselle]

Hi @nicobao , I read with interest your issue, and :

• First, I believe what you are talking about is :
  • this "sovereign" software, implements workflows, which are "engraved" into the software
  • any organization wants her own workflows, in particular gov. so : how can we design a software where workflows are configurable ? Well, if you know a bit about software today, you then know i have almost answered the question, just by wirting the question with chosen words.
  • maybe I am wrong in what I understood of what you wrote
• Now, I want to point out one thing :
  • I believe that the nastiest problem with this software, is that, while it calls himself sovereign, it tries and do it s best, to hide that on the contrary, it makes you very, very nastily dependent.
  • How ? Well first things first :
    • this software cannot prove anything at all, to anyone, about any fact. Only a blockchain can, and no repo in the whole DemocracyEarth github organization provides any kind of blockchain.
    • And there is the very, very nasty thing : if you try and provision the sovereign software, you will verify that you will have no choice in the blockchain, but one blockchain that is proprietary, and a SAAS, https://infura.io.
  • In other words, the most important part of their so called "idea", is absolutely not opensource, absolutely not owned by people who try and use democracy.earth, if there are any who could ever run the thing anywhere (just look at the docker file, mentioning node:4, it is like ridiculous, almost an insult to intelligence

Well and the only answer from @santisiri was "C'est la vie", about the blockchain.

I wrote a whole analysis on Democracy Earth, and I would be curious to find out what your opinion is : https://github.com/pokusio/le-defi/blob/master/the-broken-list/democracy-earth/README.md

And by the way, my repo https://github.com/pokusio/le-defi.git is a challenge to anyone in this world, and no one has found a way to make me say I was wrong, stating what I stated, and that I will keep stating :

All the biggest open source projects provide automated provisioning recipes that can work in an entirely private infrastructure, and there is no open source Blockjchain project able to do that today, absolutely none.

And there is a reason for that : Blockchains do not want you to spawn your own blockchain, they want you to use their own, so that what they own, their blockchain, allow them to raise investment, real money this time.

And in my opinion, Democrcy Earth is the perfect example of that : completely fake, just a web client that does not even work, and certainly never explains to "people" what they are dependent on (https://infura.io)

Am I the only one that had that kind of doubts ?

• There's is you, but I think you missed the main, nastiest point (the blockchain)
• and there's A bit confused about the blockchain part... #222: an issue where the issuer seems to be "a bit confused about the blockchain part"
• and there probably others

[RyanCwynar]

Hey @nicobao ,

So like you I've found myself really interested in this set of concepts and plan to get involved and start contributing thought and code here shortly and for the foreseeable future.

I had my own set of ad hoc thoughts on the subject and came to the same conclusions as you did, that it's really about the "rules that make the rules" which cracks open whole cans of crazy concepts.

Luckily, none of us here is first on the ground, and this is a train of thought that has some shape already. It's called Liquid Democracy and it includes some useful ideas like Quadratic Voting to balance the common good against the "tyranny of the majority" and things like that. It also includes "revokable delegation" where you can delegate your vote on some or all policy areas to another person.

Now some of those concepts might even be providing more structure than you'd like, but where you draw the line between hardcoded parts of the legislative workflow those chosen by the community being governed is certainly a whole topic.

I'm already convinced that some version of these concepts are pre-destined to be the future of nation-state governance. It's just a matter of building the tools up to the requisite levels of sophistication and deploying enough pilot programs validate that these types of principles perform acceptably in practice and that they are actually suitable mechanisms for binding decisions that people live under.

There's also a report that democracy earth put out covering some small pilot programs they've been involved with implementing liquid democracy tools that I found fascinating