This document is part of a proposal to create a digital platform for voting with a so-called 'liquid' representation system. The proposal is divided into three parts. Each part will serve as a platform for facilitating and focusing discussion of the part following it. The decisions and ideas of those discussions will then be incorporated into that part when it's written.
The first describes the scope of the project, which users and organisations might find use for it, and why it's important.
The second part is a specification for the user experience and the basic functionality of the project.
The third part is a specification for the implementation details. The back end – the technology stack and the APIs. (TBD)
It was a surprise when I first looked into this topic and found no examples in existing software at all. One would expect at least some hobbyists to have made some effort to build a demo or example project. There may still be such projects that I have not yet discovered. If you, the reader, happens to know of any, please let me know. I have no intention of reinventing the wheel, and as I will discuss in detail below, there is a serious need of real world testing in this topic.
It seems the reason that there are so few projects along these lines is that pretty much everyone with an interest in the topic of fluid direct democracy also has an obsession with using it to reform modern parliamentary democratic governments. This goal is wildly ambitious and somewhat unrealistic. There are three major issues with this goal. They are Identity, Anonymity and Inertia. These will be discussed in detail after the scope of this proposal is laid out. People who look into this goal quickly realise that these issues are a major impediment to reforming modern governments. This is a common phenomenon in software development, where a developer or designer will try to create something that is wildly ambitious. When they realise that the project is unrealistic, or it's pointed out to them, their reaction is often to abandon the project. I think that is what we are seeing here.
But if the project is worthwhile, there is another route. Rather than abandon the project, we just need to abandon the goal. A new, more realistic goal can usually be worked out. That is why this proposal is not for reforming government democratic institutions.
The ability to make collective decisions based on a fair system where every person has an equal voice is not solely useful for government institutions. In fact we should aspire for this to be the case everywhere in our lives. Whether one is a member of a sports team, a social club, an online community, a business or a family, the benefit of ensuring that all interested parties get to have their voice heard and considered in a decision-making process is clear. This proposal is about making software for these groups and organisations, and any other collection of people who feel that it would be useful to them – an easy-to-use framework that allows existing communities to easily transition their decision-making processes to one that is more fair, inclusive, effective and transparent.
The problems that make such a project over-ambitious with regard to parliamentary systems are nowhere near as significant or difficult to tackle in this context.
Identity is still a problem in smaller communities. An individual needs to somehow prove that they are a member with an interest that qualifies them to vote. But in smaller communities and organisations this is a problem that we have ready-made solutions available for. Online communities have user accounts; sports teams, social clubs and families just know each other by sight. Businesses and companies can use those methods too, or issue stakeholders with cryptographic keys, ID cards, or any number of other security and identity measures already in use in those organisations. In fact there is very little to say on the subject here, as the science of identity verification in this scope has been written about thousands of times in great detail, and this proposal has nothing significant to add to that discussion. As long as this project supports the most common and widespread means of identity verification, there should be no problem.
Anonymity in digital voting is deeply tied to identity. Of course if it were not necessary to verify the identity of a voter, anonymity would be easy. But if there is an identity system, and someone has access to the records it contains, then anonymity can't be guaranteed. In small organisations like the ones this proposal aims to make software for, this is not so important however. In small groups in which people know each other well, anonymity is not just a technical difficulty, it's a logical impossibility. If a family or a group of friends vote on something, and one vote is an outlier, everyone usually knows who it was. In larger, less personal groups like businesses or online communities, a trusted person or group of people can be selected by a non-anonymous vote, to be the administrator(s) of the identity system. The risks of voter intimidation or coercion is pretty low in such low-stakes organisations, and there are plenty of simple checks and balances that can be put in place to increase the reliability of administrators.
In many cases anonymity may not even be desirable, and transparency might be more useful. In fact many advocates of reforming collective decision making processes argue for consensus building rather than majority voting. While of course one could conceive a system of consensus decision making which is also anonymous, this is not usually proposed as anonymity makes consensus building extremely difficult and unwieldy. In situations of relatively low-stakes decision making, especially among peers that share mutual respect and regard, transparency in voting is often preferable. Such transparency increases the efficiency and effectiveness of representative selection and debate.
That is not to say that the system proposed here should not support anonymity, quite the opposite is true. But the system does not have to be and bulletproof in the same way it would have to be for a state government, and it should be optional for communities that do not wish to use it.
Inertia is the current entrenched way of operating of the organisation in question; how difficult it is to change existing power dynamics and authority hierarchies. With most state governments, this is actually a far bigger and more insurmountable challenge than either of the other two, but it's also one that is rarely discussed. Everyone wants to imagine that if someone came up with a better system, it would eventually get accepted and implemented. With governments this is rarely true. Large established organisations spend so much of their resources on preserving their own structure, that changing something as large and complex as a government without first destroying it or waiting for it to collapse on its own is virtually impossible.
With smaller organisations however, this can be relatively simple. In fact there is no real need to even outline solutions for this problem for the current proposal. Some companies, clubs, families, etc. will be too set in their ways. This is fine, there is no need to consider them at all. Those that are more flexible, interested and willing to try a new way of making collective decisions need only to be offered the tools to do so.
There has been much discussion recently regarding moderation and administration of digital public communication. Many people are undergoing a period of upheaval in their lives because one or more online communication platforms they use are being administered in ways they are not comfortable with. On platforms where the administration or moderation is mostly okay, this discussion is largely absent, and only when things fall apart do people start to ask questions.
Most online communities are effectively set up along the line of petty despotism. One individual or small group has absolute power over all the users. Even communities that portray themselves as being democratic and user-focused generally fall into this model. In cases such as mastodon and the rest of the fediverse, these despotic kingdoms are very small and people can easily migrate between them, putting pressure on despots to consider the wishes of their users. In other cases like reddit there is something more akin to feudalism. The main platform is divided into thousands of little baronies, each with its own baron or group of ruling council. The whole platform has a central group of corporate administrators at the top, who have power over the individual barons simlar to the power those barons have over individual users. There are many other models, of which the most common is the simple corporate model where the whole platform is simply a giant kingdom ruled by corporate decree, but there are few, if any, where moderation and administration is decided on a democratic basis.
Our online lives, our social and political communication, and the future record and legacy of our individual existence is governed in a way that is more than 500 years behind the current cutting edge of political science. We criticise and scorn political dictatorships world wide, and we do it using communication tools with which we can be censored, blocked and silenced at a moment's notice. If such a thing happens, we usually have no recourse. If there's an appeals process it's to ask the despots to please reconsider. All of this is only mitigated by the ability to migrate to another despotism, which is not nothing, but it's also not enough. Why do we accept this situation?
The value of collective decision making is fairly well established. Here is a literature review for those looking to dive deeper on the topic. This is just an example, there is a lot of research into this and it makes for fascinating reading. There are some who maintain that individual decision making is better, and that groups can't be trusted. It is not within the scope of this document to convince such people of anything. Rather it should be asked: For those of us who agree that collective decision making is preferable, where are the software tools that would enable us to use it in our day-to-day lives?
Lastly, for all those who do wish for fluid direct democracy as an institution of state government – would you really wish to give over the power of a nation to an untested and theoretical system? Even if you think this is the best use of the technology, it seems rash and irresponsible not to test it out on smaller organisations, where the stakes are not as high. Only after it has been used for several years in many different contexts, and has been through the inevitable security breaches and controversies, is it sensible to try to use it in such a serious context as national elections.
The overall goal of this project is something like a democratic singularity. It's not up to one person to decide how systems like this should function. We need to design a basic working system and then use that system to refine and reshape it democratically. The initial system needs to only be good enough to allow users to democratically improve it.