= an open-source software created to facilitate Liquid Democracy. It enables policy discussions and decision-making with a kind of proxy voting system.

LiquidFeedback is an open source project of Public Software Group e. V. See also: Liquid Democracy

Description

"LiquidFeedback is an open-source software, powering internet platforms for proposition development and decision making.

LiquidFeedback is an independent open source project published under MIT license by the Public Software Group of Berlin, Germany. The developers of LiquidFeedback have joined together in the Interaktive Demokratie association to promote the use of electronic media for democratic processes.

Concepts

Liquid Democracy | 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.

Proposition development process | Structured feedback is intended to organize communication between an initiative and the voters. Initiatives shall get an idea how successful a proposition is likely to be and what to change in order to gain more support. Likewise voters can try to influence propositions by their feedback or instigate a new initiative with an own proposition if they so wish.

Preferential voting | We neither want to force people to compromise in case they may not want this nor encourage them to vote based on majorities and chances rather than political objectives. In order to allow voters to express preferences we implemented a very advanced voting system based on Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping (CSSD) also known as the Schulze method.

Interactive Democracy | LiquidFeedback introduces a new communication channel between voters and representatives, delivers reliable results about what the participants want and can be used for information, suggestion, or directive depending on the organizational needs and the national legislation." (http://liquidfeedback.org/)

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/)

How It Works

BY DAVID MEYER:

"f PiratePad is about collaboration and discussion, Liquid Feedback is about competition and decision-making. Any of the 6,000 members that use it can propose a policy. If the proposal picks up a 10 percent quorum within a set period, such as a week, it becomes the focus of an almost 'gamified' revision period. Any member can also set up an alternative proposal, and over the ensuing few weeks these rival versions battle it out, with members voting their favorites up or down.

"In the ideal case you have five or six people working on alternative initiatives, and everyone tries to be the better one so they can win the poll in the end," Berlin Pirate Party spokesman Ingo Bormuth explains. "We hope it's healthy competition, but we want people to compete against each other so they stay [involved] in the topic."

Each member has one vote, but most are not interested in marking up endless reams of policy papers. So the system allows every vote to be entrusted to another member – for everything, or for certain topics or specific proposals, or not at all. What's more, the person who has been delegated the votes of others can then re-delegate all those votes, plus their own, to someone else.

It's a trust-based approach and the nearest thing Liquid Feedback has to a reputation system. Members don't get points-based kudos for their involvement and expertise; they collect real votes. In theory, votes being passed up the chain like this could lead to a crony elite or even a dictator, but there is a failsafe mechanism. Every delegated vote can be reclaimed at any time, so no high-flying Pirate can operate without a continuous mandate. "We want effective people to be powerful and do their work, but we want [the grassroots] to be able to control them," Bormuth says.

This is liquid democracy: a sliding scale between direct democracy and representative democracy, where each member can decide where they sit in the spectrum at any given time." (http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid-democracy-works)

2.

Luis Daniel:

"Any member can propose policy. For the proposal to be taken to a revision period, it needs to gather 10 percent quorum within a certain amount of time. Once in the revision period, any member can set up an alternative proposal and over the next few weeks members vote up or down on the available proposals until a winner emerges. The voting is where it gets interesting. A member can decide to vote individually on an issue, but it would be a daunting task to read and go through every policy paper available.

Liquid feedback allows you to give your vote to someone you trust would vote on your side of the issue. Additionally, the person you delegate your vote to can also give his vote, along with all of his votes, to someone else. Very quickly, people could gain a lot of voters and hence a lot of power, but the system allows members to reclaim their votes at any given time, so if someone wants to keep their voters, they need to keep constantly working for them. “We want effective people to be powerful and do their work, but we want [the grassroots] to be able to control them,” says Ingo Bormuth, the spokesman for the Berlin Pirate Party.

Liquid Feedback allows members to delegate their votes in three ways. Global delegation is where members give their vote to a representative on every issue. The second is subject delegation, where people give their vote on specific subjects only, like health or education. The last one is issue delegation, where a member only entrusts another member with their vote on specific issues.

Limitations

The software does have its limitations. In its mission statement, Liquid Feedback says it is an “online system for discussing and voting on proposals in an inner party (or inner organizational) context and covers the process from the introduction of the first draft of a proposal to the final decision.” This means that the software is only intended to be used to decide on policy papers within a party, and is not meant to replace a legislative body’s core function. Germany’s Pirate Party is one of Liquid Feedback’s largest adopters. For now, the software is only used by the party to finalize position papers that then inform decisions at the party’s conventions. Some members would like to see it used to make decisions within the party, but for now, it seems the software is still in its trial period for the Pirate Party. This doesn’t mean only few users have tried out the platform. Almost 10,000 pirates are LQFB members. Yet for now, use of the platform is limited to condensing results and bringing them to a vote at the party’s convention.

There also seems to be a small tech literacy barrier. As is typical of open-source software, the interface and user experience are far from award-winning. Political science professor, Christophe Bieber, says the interface may be “seen as ‘nerdy or geeky’ by many new recruits, especially when compared with the familiar mechanisms of wikis and collaborative text editors. It has an interface only a developer could love”. If Germany, with a high digital literacy might find it a little challenging to gather participants, countries with low digital literacy might be long ways away from adopting such technology." (http://www.thegovlab.org/democratizing-policymaking-online-liquid-feedback/)

Examples

Tu Parlamento, Italy

Status

1. Penetration of LF, October 2012, by Axel Kistner:

"Q: As far as I am aware only the German Pirate Party is using the software at present. Is this correct? Have you spoken to other groups about the software?

A:There is Slow Food Germany, an association with more than 11,000 members, some pirate parties outside Germany, the youth organization of the F.D.P. (liberals) in the state of Baden-Württemberg (for the latter we don’t know exactly what they are doing because their system is in private mode), there are some test instances in NGOs and there are enterprises using it for allowing employees to create, discuss and vote on ideas for the board to finally decide. We gave presentations for the SPD (social democrats), Grüne (green party) and a commission of the German parliament." (Facebook excerpt 10/2012)

2. June 2013:

"After its initial deployment by the German Pirate Party, the software has gained a lot of popularity over the past few years, and most recently it has been adopted by several M5S groups in regions such as Lombardy, Lazio and Sicily. True to their principles of participatory democracy and free access to the internet and information (and in response to criticism about how they run their business), it is no surprise that these two parties have been searching for a platform to engage their members more directly." (http://www.thegovlab.org/democratizing-policymaking-online-liquid-feedback/)

3.

"Simone Weiss says Liquid Feedback has always been “intended as a prototype for a future version of democracy” and they are currently experimenting with it themselves. But Liquid Feedbacks problems might be evident already. By October 2012, Der Spiegel wrote “In North Rhine-Westphalia, meanwhile, the Pirate Party’s parliamentarians have used the software to gather general opinions on just two issues so far. A poll of Pirate Party voters there concerning a proposed law to regulate circumcision showed … 20 votes in a federal state with nearly 18 million inhabitants. It’s a grassroots democracy where no one is showing up to participate.” It seems that we cannot know for certain whether the software can scale or not because we have not seen a large enough participation by LQFB members to know for sure." (http://www.thegovlab.org/democratizing-policymaking-online-liquid-feedback/)

Discussion

Liquid Feedback is no miracle cure

Evgeny Morozov:

"Where exactly would Johnson’s “liquid democracy” lead us? In a footnote, he notes that “the German Pirate Party has implemented ‘liquid democracy’ techniques with some success in recent years.” “Some success” is a gross overstatement, as their unlikely success in Germany appears to have been rather short-lived. Yet in many ways, the Pirates have self-consciously adopted all the imagery and rhetoric of the Internet; they are the living embodiment of Internet-centrism. Obsessed with process—decentralized and horizontal, of course—they offer little by way of goals and policy positions. Worse, they think that such vacuousness is actually an asset; as the party’s spokesperson declared in 2011, “What we’re offering is not a program, but an operating system.”

A party with no strong stance on issues beyond copyright, censorship, and privacy, the Pirates remain a mystery to most German voters, who have lost their early enthusiasm for the cool young kids. Once polling in the double digits, the Pirates today are unsure of even passing the 5 percent threshold needed to get into the Bundestag in the upcoming elections. The lack of leadership and basic discipline within the party—some of its members show up at legislative sessions in shorts—has turned them into a national joke.

The Pirate Party of Western Germany finds itself losing political power. (Getty/Patrik Stollarz) The Pirates’ rhetorical embrace of “liquid democracy,” where everyone can participate and delegate votes to each other, has not worked in practice; even almighty software cannot excite ordinary citizens about the humdrum and arcane issues of which most politics is made. By October 2012, in North Rhine-Westphalia—a region with eighteen million inhabitants—the Pirates used their trademark Liquid Feedback software to gather opinions on only two issues. A poll on one such issue—the controversial ban on circumcision—attracted only twenty votes. As Der Spiegel dryly put it, “It’s a grassroots democracy where no one is showing up to participate.”

Anyone familiar with critiques of direct democracy would not find this surprising. The attempt to reform politics needs to start with some basic account of the very limitations of politics itself, and not just salivate over the infinite opportunities of digital technologies. The Pirates took the idea of the Internet seriously—only to discover that the rhythms and rituals of old-school politics do not stem merely from inferior technologies, but rather reflect assumptions about human nature, power, and justice. Relations among humans have many more layers of complexity than those among ants; there are inequalities, asymmetries, and grievances to be found at all layers—and what might seem like inefficiencies or gaps in participation or transparency might, on second look, prove to be the very democracy-enabling protective tissues that allow liberal societies to function." (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112189/social-media-doesnt-always-help-social-movements)

More Information

Visualization: http://cdn4.spiegel.de/images/image-323133-galleryV9-svsf.jpg How the Liquid Feedback System Works
Interaktive Demokratie e. V., Verein zur Förderung des Einsatzes elektronischer Medien für demokratische Prozesse
info@interaktive-demokratie.org
Liquid Democracy

Liquid Feedback

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