Loomio
Fri 13 Mar 2020 3:06PM

Let's play with Digital Democracy!

WF Will Franks Public Seen by 169

In light of COVID-19, many of us are staying home and sitting on our computers. XR Future Democracy would like to use this as a chance to get stuck into some digital democracy tools.

We'd like to field suggestions for tools we can use, and invite this community to get going with them!

We'll have a pol.is survey up shortly, to get us started.

R

Ruth Fri 17 Apr 2020 1:36PM

Hi I am super interested to hear about experiences with different digital tools, for organising deliberative processes in particular (e.g. People's Assembly) . It would be great to gather all the experiences of problems and solutions so that we can share them across XR and make some recommendations for tools / ways to deal

AC

Alex Cooper Sat 18 Apr 2020 8:58AM

Loomio and pol.is are meant to be those platforms ...

On Loomio, decisions are made by submitting proposals for discussion.

I don't have any experience of democracy.os but Pia Mancini made a great case for it in her Ted talk in 2014

I'm sure there are many other operational platforms and other works in progress - including my own - free.vote (I really need to develop an "elevator pitch" for that, but maybe that's premature as it's still a work in progress). I'm aiming for something between the ease of Twitter and the features of Loomio.

I've also registered break-out.group for capturing ideas developed in small groups to feed back into the main group and into the national/global debate. (no groups or points yet - you'll get a better idea of the first draft at free.vote (tweet-like points only right now)

But it would be really great if one of the other platforms took off and engaged many more people in mainstream politics to give our moribund representative democracies a digital boot up the rear end.

(Also worth a mention is simpol.org, not digital democracy, but worth supporting)

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Ruth Sat 18 Apr 2020 2:23PM

Thanks Alex! Interesting - I'd love to hear about people's experiences with using various tools, to see how effective they are in reaching democratic goals. I actually do a bit of coding myself when I have time - what frameworks are you using?

AC

Alex Cooper Sat 18 Apr 2020 2:34PM

Thanks Ruth,

Database in SQL Server
API is .NET Core
SPA is Angular

If only I didn't have a full time job, I'd spend a lot more time on this! (I did run a coders group in Manchester for a while in the hope that I'd recruit some contributors to an open source project, but unfortunately everyone's too busy on their own (for profit) startup projects)

What stack do you work with?

... I'm in contact with someone at TalkShopUK - very early days, but a possibility of a future collaboration (maybe!)

JM

Joe Milton Sun 19 Apr 2020 5:32PM

  • Polis - deliberative - AI - interactive technology/ platforms - This is expensive to get hold of, although it also exists on Github. I (Joe) theorize that ‘we’ could experiment with replicating what the AI part of Polis does (which is to find proposals that have a common agreement between groups who normally tend to disagree with each other). So for this, you create two groups; those who tend to agree with a proposal and those who tend to disagree. For example, group 1 - those with concerns with proposal  X, and group 2 - those with creative ideas about going ahead with X. Each group decides what concerns (group 1) or ideas (group 2) to write onto a slido, which then gets sent to the other group who gets to vote. Group 1 gets to vote on the ideas from group 2 and vice versa. The proposals with the most votes potentially suggest where areas of consensus might exist between the two groups. However, further collaboration, deliberation, and rewriting of proposals will also be needed; including re-integrating the two groups with each other via active listening.

VTawain https://participedia.net/method/4678

AS

Aleksandar Sarovic Sun 19 Apr 2020 6:27PM

First of all, one needs to understand that discussions about the future of democracy are censured everywhere by the elite who want to rule the world forever. Here I present a new form of democracy that will completely change the world and make it a wonderful place to live: https://www.sarovic.org/home/the-best-life-possible

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Joanna Mon 20 Apr 2020 12:28AM

"I don't have any experience of democracy.os but Pia Mancini made a great case for it in her Ted talk in 2014" Alex Cooper.--

Alex, thanks so much for sharing this.

I am so proud because Pia Mancini is Argentina, me too.

But It´s so frustrating, Democracy.os exist from 2014 and no one uses this tool.

Another woman, young and genius, who ends up going to live in another country because of the oppression of the power system.

PA

Peter Anderson Mon 20 Apr 2020 2:18PM

Some info on VocalEyes https://about.vocaleyes.org if you haven't seen it already .. Enabling community organising (prioritisation, organisation and implementation) and coordinated collective action around social and environmental initiatives on a national/global scale within communities, schools, colleges & other organisations.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JfTcnD-G9Bn4rQQZPCexHrMIJ1KIc8YL3prd-DK-GbY/edit