Liquid Democracy

See also: Liquid Feedback

Definition

"Liquid Democracy is a fast, decentralized, collaborative question-answering system, which works by enabling chained answer recommendation. It occupies the middle ground somewhere between direct and representative democracy, and is designed to ensure that the things we all hold in common stay properly maintained." (http://seed.sourceforge.net/ld_k5_article_004.html)

Description

1.

'The basic idea is a democratic system in which most issues are decided (or strongly suggested to representatives) by direct referendum. Considering nobody has enough time and knowledge for every issue, votes can be delegated by topic. Furthermore delegations are transitive and can be revoked at any time. Liquid Democracy is sometimes referred to as Delegated or Proxy Voting." (http://liquidfeedback.org/)

2. Luis Daniel:

"Think about how you would vote on where to go to dinner when hanging out with five of your friends. The five of you would sit around the living room, discuss what each of you are in the mood for and then vote on a place that would suit most people’s cravings. This is a very simplified version of a direct democracy. However, what if instead of 5 friends, you’re hanging out with 30 friends? You might not remember the last time you had to discuss and agree on where to eat with 30 people, and that would be because as a group grows larger, discussions get longer and reaching a consensus gets harder. Also consider that Billy and Jane are from out of town, and what do they know about local food?

Direct democracy — one person one vote — does not scale well. The voters might not always be knowledgeable on the matter being discussed. That is why today, many governments use a form of representative democracy, where people vote on representatives they trust who will represent them when voting on policy decisions.

As most voters can attest, however, your representatives may not have expertise on every topic and won’t always share your same opinions on every single issue. We don’t want Billy and Jane choosing the restaurant.

Liquid democracy tries to take the best of both direct and representative democracy by allowing the voter to decide whether to delegate her vote to a representative on a given issue or simply vote on her own. Say you’re an expert on education, wouldn’t it be great if you could have your representatives vote for you on all health care issues, but when it came down to education issues, you could cast your own vote? This is what liquid democracy attempts to do. This video, by German designer Jakob Jochmann, provides a great introduction to liquid democracy. Liquid Democracy would have been unworkable prior to the Internet but is becoming a reality today and ready for prime time testing." (http://www.thegovlab.org/democratizing-policymaking-online-liquid-feedback/)

Projects

Project 1

"Liquid Democracy is a theoretical concept of redefining decision-making procedures to enable a broader participation. The idea behind this is a fusion of direct and representative participation opportunities in order to make them accessible to preferably all areas of society. Within the Liquid Democracy Association this concept is being advanced as “Direct Parliamentarism“ and is applied to the participation software Adhocracy." (http://liqd.net/en/about/einfuehrung/)

Project 2

URL = http://wiki.uniteddiversity.com/liquiddemocracy

Josef Davies-Coates:

"United Diversity's wiki contains an article by the original articulator of the idea titled Liquid Democracy In Context or An Infrastructuralist Manifesto.

It's rather long but it's key points are bolded and those bolded points are repeated here to give "the gist":

While LD would work great in contexts like shareholder meetings, city councils, and online forums, it was initially designed for one very specific purpose: To render obsolete traditional military hierarchy. Our civil infrastructure currently depends on our society's institutional underpinnings, which have failed, and will continue to fail, to adapt to radical change. To stave off societal collapse, then, we have but one path available to us: We must systematically render our most vulnerable (and perhaps cherished) institutions unnecessary, and our less vulnerable institutions more adaptable. Only then can have we any hope for the future. Perhaps instead of revolution through violence, or art, or music, or culture, maybe we could live to see a revolution through institutional design...?

Liquid Democracy is a fast, decentralized, collaborative question-answering system, which works by enabling chained answer recommendation. It occupies the middle ground somewhere between direct and representative democracy, and is designed to ensure that the things we all hold in common stay properly maintained (by small, stealthy, distributed teams of anarchist kung-fu badasses, if need be), even in the face of radical technological change." (http://technologyandsocialaction.org/node/190)

More Information

1. See also http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Liquid_Democracy for more recent round up of discussion.
2. Decision-Making Tools

Characteristics

==Transitive Delegations

"It’s not always possible for everyone to make a well-founded decision on every topic. To overcome this problem of direct democracy, LiquidFeedback provides the possibility to delegate your vote to someone else – and to revoke those delegations at any time. This leads to

   transparent division of work within the democratic process, while keeping everyones ability to directly participate in any issue at any time

   nondiscrimination of those people who do not have the time or ability to vote for each issue themselves

Delegations in LiquidFeedback are transitive. That means, if you don’t know who is the most skilled person to decide about a particular topic, you may delegate your vote to someone else you trust. If your trustee feels confident to participate in the subject him- or herself, your voting weight may be used directly. But if your trustee knows another person, who is better suitable to decide about the issue, then he or she can further delegate your vote to someone else, and so on. Knowing that these rules are in effect, people are not obligated to delegate their vote directly to a final decision maker (e.g. a prominent politician known for dealing with a given issue).

Do transitive delegations lead to a concentration of power?

Transitive delegations create chains of trust.

As delegations are revokable at any time, each person within such a chain of trust can break the chain and reclaim the power, taking away many votes from the final representative at once.

Yet it is sometimes argued that transitive delegations can still lead to a few delegates, who over-rule many other directly voting individuals. While at a first glance it might appear undemocratic, it is a desired effect: Only if delegating members are counted in the same way as directly voting members, their vote is taken into account equally. Treating directly voting members in a different way than delegating members (i.e. canceling the voting weight of delegating members under certain predefined conditions) would actually undermine the democratic principle of “one man, one vote”." (http://liquidfeedback.org/2012/07/07/transitive-delegations-in-liquidfeedback/)

Discussion

Liquid Democracy is not a voting system

"iquid Democracy has been getting a lot of attention around here recently, and much of that attention seems based on dodgy assumptions, and dangerously inadequate metaphors. For example, although Liquid Democracy was originally described as a voting system for the sake of convenience, and although it resembles a voting system in some ways, I designed it as a distributed, scalable, question-answering algorithm... And I think the difference matters.

In this article I'd like to explain that design decision, among others things. I'd also like to explain how Liquid Democracy has especially interesting implications for k5. I hope you'll find my rationale interesting, and even if you don't accept LD as useful in any sense, hopefully this essay will inspire you to design something better.

In essence, Liquid Democracy works by chaining recommended answers to questions, like so: Lets say I think you really know your stuff with respect to medical policy issues. Every time a question about medical policy issues is raised, I ask you (or my computer asks your computer) for a recommendation about how to answer that question. I might collect recommendations from multiple sources, pass some on to other people, review the ones I like, and answer the question accordingly - or I might just set up my Liquid Democracy software to automatically answer the question in the way you recommended.

When described this way, LD seems to belong to a more general class of things then voting systems. Would we call representative democracy a voting system? Usually when people say "voting system", they mean a specific implementation of representative democracy, rather then representative democracy itself. The same distinction comes in handy here. Liquid Democracy stands as an alternative to direct and representative democracy, but they each can be implemented in 17 hojillion ways - all kinds of voting systems can be designed which use direct, liquid, or representative democracy.

Liquid Democracy can be thought of as a function, if you will, which takes a question as an argument, and returns a list of answers to that question, sorted in order of popular preference (via approval voting - an integral but often-overlooked aspect of LD).

Also, I'd to clarify the distinction between answer recommendation and vote proxying. People need to see what answers are being recommended to them before they decide how to answer the question at hand. With vote proxying, they can't do that! Vote proxying puts the power in the hands of the proxy - answer recommendation keeps the power in the hands of the people (or, at the edges of the network) where it belongs.

With answer recommendation, I can decide to ignore your recommendations if I don't like them - or I can quietly pass them on to other people, with or without your permission. Contrast this with vote proxying (as traditionally understood), where I can't do either of those things. Vote proxying seems far too similar to representation in traditional democratic systems - rather then a mechanism through which we are informed by others, vote proxying (and traditional democratic representation) acts as a mechanism through which we cede power to others.

This seems like a very important distinction, with interesting technical (with respect to implementation strategies) and social (with respect to means of discouraging vote buying/coercion) implications." (http://seed.sourceforge.net/ld_k5_article_004.html)

Examples

• Liquid Feedback