At the end of 2014, an unlikely group—public hospital nurses—was able to force the government of Buenos Aires to pass a bill that has been dormant for many years, resulting in better conditions for them. And they did it without a strike. Instead of walking off the job or taking to the streets, they organised on a new digital platform that the city was piloting, DemocracyOS.
DemocracyOS is an open-source voting and debating platform, with which citizens can learn about proposals, debate them and declare how they would like their elected officials to vote. The nurses’ bill, sponsored by a small party with only one seat in the legislature, got 10 times more votes and comments than a version presented by the majority party. Through an open, transparent public debate on a collaborative decision-making platform, a constituency on the fringes of society put their demands right in the middle of the congressional floor.
The story shows how adding some old-fashioned democracy can give new life to both our governments and the online platforms we use every day.
I am part of the group of Argentinian activists and developers who began creating DemocracyOS in 2012. Since January of last year, it has been successfully used by a local NGO in Tunisia to debate the constitution and by activist groups in Ukraine, Spain, Australia, Canada, France, Chile, India, Puerto Rico and Perú. It has also been adopted by Yes in My Back Yard (YIMBY), a grassrooots organization in San Francisco advocating for issues such as affordable housing. Amy Weiss of YIMBY is organising to run for mayor of the city later this year, and thanks to platforms like DemocracyOS and Nation Builder, she is waging an Internet-driven fight against machine politics.
While the most visible application of a collaborative platform like DemocracyOS is government, other organizations will benefit greatly from them. One example is the growing number of distributed workforces—Uber and Lyft drivers are a prime example—born of online platforms and lacking the protection of traditional workforces. These distributed workforces need ways of making decisions as a group that are equally distributed. In a more traditional way, companies facing an extremely dynamic workforce of people that change jobs every couple of years, can use platforms like DemocracyOS to build a culture of participation and engagement, empowering employees to be stakeholders of a common project.
A lot has been said about the impact of the digital world on science, technology and the entertainment industry. However, little attention has been paid to innovation—or lack thereof—in the political system. The Internet is already bringing about a sea change in how citizens expect to be represented. Governments, however, have failed to keep up. The world changes by the second, yet our governments are still receiving citizen input only every two, four or five years, depending on the system. We are 21st-century citizens trying our best to interact with institutions from the 19th century.
One way of innovating in the political system is to rethink and rewire it, using tools like DemocracyOS in combination with a new kind of cooperative political party. Such a party plays by the existing rules—running for elections, and so forth—but it radically changes the way in which it makes decisions in government by taking advantage of new tools for collaboration with citizens.
The same group that developed DemocracyOS in Argentina created Partido de la Red, the Net Party, to hack the political system, and to rethink it. Partido de la Red ran for election in 2013 in Buenos Aires, having made a public commitment to vote in Congress in line with the decisions of citizens that have engaged with DemocracyOS. The party has yet to win a seat in Congress, but by gaining 1.2 percent of the vote in 2013, it won a seat at the table, making possible the pilot that the nurses used to surface and achieve their demands.
Our project is a work in progress. Democracy cannot be reduced to a system for aggregating preferences, one on top of each other. All citizens are not equally equipped to vote on all issues, nor do they have time to do so. But whether in government bodies or corporate boards, there has to be an alternative to abdicating our right to decide to a set of professional citizens.
DemocracyOS takes advantage of an approach called liquid democracy, a highly dynamic institutional arrangement. If someone does not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue, they can delegate their vote to another citizen for that particular topic. The goal is to produce a dynamic and emerging social leadership, in which representation is not based on territory but on trust and knowledge. For example, a person could choose to assign their voting power on health-care issues to a well-known medical practitioner at a public hospital, while retaining votes on economic matters and delegating environmental decisions to a trusted organization.
Part of the effect of this approach is to build trust in society.
Trust in our existing institutions is continually eroding, and any institutional innovations need to aim to rebuild trust in governments and businesses. Distributed organisations and protocols for decision-making, such as DemocracyOS and the Partido de la Red, face the challenge of generating trust in a distributed way, without depending on a centralized authority. They do so using some of the same horizontal, participatory mechanisms that we’ve seen in recent social movements around the world.
New peer-to-peer technologies, such as the distributed “blockchain” that underlies Bitcoin, make it possible to do decision-making without the need for a central authority to ratify them. Decisions made over a blockchain-based system would be mutually checked and confirmed by the users of the system themselves. Not only can this approach lend more public trust to the existing institutions that use it, it can give rise to new kinds of purely virtual institutions altogether.
The DemocracyOS team is now in the process of incorporating blockchain technology into our platform.
As the Internet evolves as a medium for human organizations of all sorts, online decision-making platforms can help restore people’s trust in the institutions that affect their lives. We can’t wait any longer to bring our 19th-century institutions into the 21st century.
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