Flux
= "Flux is a political movement which aims to replace the world's elected legislatures with a new system known as Issue-Based Direct Democracy (IBDD)".
URL = https://flux.wiki/index.php/Getting_Started
"aim to use technology to let people participate directly in politics, at scale" [1]
Description
"Flux is a movement toward a new form of democracy. Currently Flux exists as a political party which aims to give the voice of their elected representative back to the people they represent. This is achieved through allowing members to participate in voting on every piece of legislation, although not every member needs to vote on every piece of legislation. Flux implements a new form of democratic decision making known as Issue Based Direct Democracy (IBDD). Briefly, participation in IBDD allows citizens to cast a vote on an issue they care about, delegate a vote to a trusted member of the community for an issue they feel their delegate is better informed on, alternately participants may chose to receive "political credits" from not voting. The credits allow the participant to cast a second participants vote when the second participant elects not to vote on a different issue.
Flux aims to implement a new form of democracy which is less centralised, more responsive and designed for the lives we lead in the 21st century.
The Flux political party of Australia was founded in 2016 by Max Kaye (deputy leader) and Nathan Spataro (leader)." (https://flux.wiki/index.php/Getting_Started)
Discussion
Adele Peters:
"Representative democracy, which ideally solves that problem, also struggles with size. “One of the key problems of the U.S. political system is that it runs into scaling limits,” says Bryan Ford, a computer scientist who leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Sixteen years ago, Ford began thinking about what he calls delegative democracy, now also known as liquid democracy. “The whole idea of delegative democracy is to try to create a representative system that responds to the needs of individuals but also scales,” he says. “In some sense, delegative or liquid democracy is an approximation to the completely impractical idea of fully participatory, direct democracy.”
It works like this: Rather than asking citizens to vote on every issue, it gives each person the power to vote or to appoint a delegate to vote for them. Unlike a typical representative, that delegate could be changed at any time depending on the issue.
If you feel like you understand a particular issue, you can choose to vote on related proposals. For subjects you don’t know much about, you can appoint a friend or a known expert in the area. It solves the problem of education; no single person–including representatives in the current government–can be well-versed on everything.
“It’s just not possible to educate millions of people in these kinds of issues,” says Spataro. “So what we do is leverage the skills and talents that people in society have already got to make policy decisions. If a piece of legislation came up about aeronautical engineering regulation, would you want pilots and engineers voting on that, or your local butcher or lawyer?
...
For those, like Flux, that are trying to insert liquid democracy into the current system, the challenge is winning elections, though it seems unlikely they’ll prevail in this most recent one. Some of the changes that would make it easier for candidates to win, such as limits on campaign spending, are difficult to enact without already having a seat in government.
But if it works–even, initially, at a small scale–it has the potential to make progress happen more quickly. “Right now, we have a society that is every day coming up with great ideas to a lot of the problems that we’re facing,” says Spataro. “Government is actually one of the biggest barriers to implementing some of these solutions . . . for us, Flux is trying to empower people to take personal responsibility for making a difference in their societies.”
He also believes that the current system of representative democracy has to be fully replaced, but thinks that the best way to do that is by getting people elected to parliament who can then lead a full shift to a new system. He’s optimistic that it can happen relatively soon.
“I think technology and society are advancing far too fast for this change to not happen sometime in the next century,” says Spataro. “We certainly hope much sooner than that . . . we hope to start converting at least smaller, more forward-looking countries to this model within two decades.”” (https://www.fastcompany.com/3068382/world-changing-ideas/can-technology-save-democracy)
Status
Flux originated in and is most active in Australia, but it is also active internationally, with a group existing in Brazil. [2]
More Information
- voting technology for direct democracy XO.1: see XO 1 (check if XO.1 is the technological base of Flux ?)