The italian-based Telematics Freedom Foundation promotes a more direct and participatory idea of the democratic process.

Some of the immediate targets are

– user-controlled telematics services

– self-management of democratic organizations and

– national and constitutional legislative changes

to support the widespread introduction of software-based democratic interaction.

Direct Democracy or ‘Continuous Democracy’ is promoted through the development of tools (software, methodologies and infrastructure) that make it possible for citizens to continuously discuss and to directly express preferences on important political questions.

A first concrete step to promote this change “on the ground” is the Lista Partecipata per la Democrazia Diretta, an electoral list based in Rome.

Their software for consensus-building, which allows simple democratic discussions and provides easy decision-making procedures is called Rule2gether and it is available under a GPL public license.

A proposed hardware solution to the problem of allowing those who do not have routine internet access to participate is a TV set-top box running free open-source software that would make communications possible. It is called the Freedom Box or Z-Box.