Liquid Democracy
See also: Liquid Feedback
Description
'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." (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.)
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
- See also http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Liquid_Democracy for more recent round up of discussion.
- Decision-Making Tools
Characteristics
"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/)