The advent of the Internet, the ICTs and the collective intelligence enabled by them point to the rise of a networked democracy that promises, among other things, the protagonism of the common citizen in relation to the State and to the distribution of power. In recent years, there have been a number of initiatives in this area that, somehow, advanced towards this goal, but the promise remains unanswered.

One reason may be the fact that, advocating for a leading role to the ordinary citizen and the distribution of power, one is severely threatening the interests of politicians, political parties and companies that have been benefiting from an autocratic and centralized paradigm for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. So, we are aware that the mission we have before us is one that will take some time and effort to be accomplished, as it is inscribed in the great transition we are all going through.

Believing in the digital culture statement that “technology is everywhere, the people is what matters” seems adequate to avoid the fetish of technology itself and the creation of solutions that do not realize the potential of a distributed network, responding to the challenge of consolidating autonomous collective action processes that would ultimately lead to the distribution of power.

It was the promise of common citizen protagonism and distribution of power that, in 2008, sparkled the development of Instituto Cidade Democrática’s free software. Four years latter, new functions were added to the digital platform to respond to the human dynamics of autonomous collective action, modeling unique experiences such as the challenges: Amazonian Webcidadania Xingu (2013), São Paulo state city Jundiaí Cidadonos focused on social accountability (2015), Brazilian National Youth Conference digital process (2015) and São Paulo city Free Laboratories of Social Participation(2016), which promotes the appropriation of open source applications by cultural social movements for autonomous political action.

Still, in our perspective, the social participation ecosystem as a whole is far from delivering initiatives that significantly advance into the construction of this networked democracy. In this post, some of the lessons learned in recent years are presented to help us understand the complexity of obtaining some of the necessary elements for this answer: scale without intermediation, financial sustainability for ICD from a hard to measure value created, debate quality without exclusion, permanent changes in state institutions and building commons.

The answer to the above issues seems to reside between softwares’ interaction architectures, initiatives’ business models and projects’ impact and the likelihood of social participation technology ecosystem initiatives to engage in collective impact. Below are some of our latter reflections. We hope that you enjoy and that our learnings will help you work better and make the promise to come true.

1) Audience success is good for democracy?

The widespread use of social media platforms brought the promise of horizontal communication from many to many and the possibility of mobilization without media control. Groups organized around communications and campaigning tools would be able to spread their messages, becoming strong actors to influence the course of action towards their interests.

This promise has given rise to initiatives that select ‘relevant’ agendas through content curation to be offered to the ordinary citizens, producing incidence masses that act via automated systems (e-mail, phone calls or social media publications) to urge decision makers to act towards these initiatives intermediaries’ interests. Together with leading social media algorithms, this strategy only strengthens the logic of audience competition, increasing the chances of the chosen agendas to get attention and be adopted by decision makers.

The above-mentioned initiatives, almost always based on proprietary software and nontransparent algorithms, have shown to be effective at putting messages through targeted audiences, sometimes achieving positive political results and, most often, producing promising return on advertising investment. Products’ campaigns (political or non-political) are benefiting from new and effective tools to influence the public, allowing new combinations of feelings and emotions with products and messages. On the other hand, those tools are definitely not suited for the political debate. For this purpose, the strategy must include interaction architectures and algorithms that value cultural and democratic dynamics, are transparent and efficient in identifying noise and establishing minimum consensus.

That is why we keep wondering: where will this audience success lead us in the long run? Must we conform to a refashioned logic, able to mobilize ordinary citizens through impactful messages, as the next step towards a networked democracy?

Our answer is no and, therefore, we have been working on a more adequate change theory to respond to common citizen protagonism and distribution of power, stimulating autonomous collective action to surpass the limits of audience oriented social participation and enabling arrangements that strengthen each one willing to participate in the decisions on the common good. We will talk about this in the end of this post.

2) Qualifying the debate leads to exclusion?

As summarized in the previous section, this issue is not new. Several organizations, governments and open source communities have been developing and using applications based on interaction architectures and algorithms that foster informed and autonomous debate between different ideas. Some examples are: Liquid Feedback (Pirate Party), collaborative public consultations based on Dialoga and Delibera (Marco Civil da Internet, Pensando o Direito, Participa.br), Cidade Democrática (contests of ideas, Webcidadania Xingu), Decide Madrid (Cónsul), Decidim Barcelona(Dedicim), DemocracIT (Greece). Our close analysis of those initiatives shows that there is a clear desire of governmental and civil society organizations to offer alternatives for democratic dialogue based on the collective intelligence and network intelligence, but these experiences have been having difficulty in scaling or generating the desired impact.

Why, to date were these initiatives unable to scale or impact? Our opinion is that it is because of the engagement limit represented by architectures that required the user-activist to have cognitive resources, time, motivation and training to be able to use these platforms properly. In other words, the unfitted way these solutions were developed requires empowered citizens — a social ‘category’ that has grown very slowly in times when politics and consumer markets still operate in the old autocratic logic of media and political power centralization. These citizens must be able to jump on a discussion with resources and willingness to hold long conversations, often requiring a lot of prior knowledge that are not widely distributed in society. It’s possible to say that we are reaching a kind of “participation elite”, ie people who already have pre-disposition and time to participate.

Moreover, even for those who have mobilized themselves to participate in the traditional tree process, the incentives (proposals/ discussions resulting on improvements in their lives) are far from encouraging: often there is no clear decision-making process that takes advantage of all that information made available by the participants leading participants to feel disempowered. Some examples of tree or mixed mode architectures that present clearer processes of deliberation (Loomio, Cidade Democrática, Decide Madrid, Application of Brazilian Youth Conference, Liquid Feedbackor even the proprietary ConsiderIT) do so at the cost of significant increase to the process complexity, setting stages, rules and obligations which ultimately reduce the engagement potential, despite of the increased effectiveness for those who pass the barrier.

To respond to this barrier that prevents more people to participate, we believe that the design of collective deliberation should take into consideration the pedagogical aspect of interaction. A good example of digital tool with minimalistic and dynamic interface is the one of collective deliberation that we will name here as ‘crowdsourced discussion’ architectures — able to gradually increase the amount of energy that participants need to offer at every step of the engagement process. These kind of applications are able to gather data from different ways in which people participate, almost no information is lost and all is put to good use in the final result.

This research of architectures that allow mass participation in a pedagogical way and facilitate the generation of autonomous collective action motivated us to choose the Pol.is open source software for the challenges of collective deliberation. In the current state, this application can provide a simple interaction architecture and uses advanced machine learning algorithms to foster the creation of groups of people based on how they participate in the proposals. Though Pol.is is very good at identifying these affinity groups, currently it only shows this information and do not progress towards helping these people to organize around autonomous collective action. In our opinion, there are improvements to be made in the application precisely to carry out this type of action.

Media-Lab Prado (Madrid, Spain) selected our proposal for a prototype that incorporates the feature mentioned above in the call for Collective Intelligence for Democracy to be developed together with the creators and main developers of this community in November 2016.

3) Autonomous collective action is enough to change policies?

In the previous reflections we have presented some of the pitfalls of opting for interaction algorithms and architectures that bet on audience as a mean to scale and that operate through events, maintaining broadcast standards, reinforcing a passive form of participation, with strong intermediation structures, maintaining the dominant political culture and stimulating content and agenda consumption instead of autonomous collective action.

To build an effective networked democracy, we must be able to encourage autonomous collective actions as the ones that express singular interests and hyperlocal contexts, stimulating the role of agenda promoter that each one can perform. In the current context, however, there are few chances for these proposals to be highlighted and outreach because they end up being overwhelmed by strong intermediation structures or, also, they do not prevail against evidence brought by social indicators and the inescapable finitude of resources.

So, besides being limited by the small audience provided only by the singularly qualified citizens, proposals created through autonomous processes have an additional risk to be taken off from the agenda setting process as they are the expression of interests of small groups with little chances of being highlighted in the deliberation, planning and prioritizing processes of political institutions. Thus it seems necessary to have some kind of ‘magnet’ for societal agendas arising from autonomous collective action to adhere to State agendas for which there are available public resources (public budget) and which respond to the most critical demands (weak social indicators). When the autonomous collective action consider these two diagnoses in its strategy, it increases the likelihood of its actions to have greater impact and it also leads the State to better plan and execute the public budget and policies in the areas where it is most needed.

To our knowledge, to date, there are no social participation processes implemented by the State or civil society taking into account such evidences. That could be one of the reasons why social participation initiatives have been lacking impact. Designing participatory processes to foster autonomous collective action around the intersection between popular needs/ desires, existing public resources and deficient social indicators seem to be the way to address this problem. This also provides a strong incentive for participants to engage around proposals that, besides of being critical, have better chances of being implemented.

For this to happen, that is, for the autonomous processes of participation to join (magnet) the issues where there is public funds (and also private as far as there are records of the availability of companies and private foundations resources for public affairs) and weak social indicators, we argue towards the articulation of current social participation initiatives with initiatives that map public resources and social indicators (e.g. IPS Amazônia) and present them through data visualization and open data. Thus, open and accessible provision of information on public resources and social indicators will increase the effectiveness of autonomous collective social participation actions.

4) Are society and State ready for joint efforts to build common digital resources?

Another barrier for the common citizen to play a protagonist role and the distribution of power is the dispute between public and societal parties to command the way through which social participation should occur, a matter that can be translated as: who decides which process and application will be adopted. And the quality and effectiveness of the process, as said before, depend on the characteristics (architecture, implicit process and features) of the applications used.

We believe that a plausible way out of this impasse is to join efforts from State and civil society to build common digital resources, with the State participating by adherence to the work of open source software development communities. This has happened to a part of the governmental social participation policies in Brazil, over the last 7 years, benefiting from the efforts invested by Brazilian civil society to build technologies for collaborative social participation on the Internet.

The first of these experiences took place in Marco Civil da Internet consultation that had its technology based on the work of an open source community from digital culture agenda, led by the Ministry of Culture. As an extension of this experience, a number of other public consultations used the same technology or articulated other open source communities developing collective deliberation technologies. This was the case of Participa.br and Pensando o Direito who adhered to at least three different open source communities: Noosfero, Delibera (WordPress) and Allourideas (Pairwise). The common trace of these initiatives is that they were all based on the use and adherence to open source software development communities who had already been working on the creation of innovative technologies for collective deliberation.

Beyond bringing innovative technology into the governmental processes, State’s relationship with those open source communities was also an opportunity for State and society to work together in the construction of shared common digital resources. We believe that the knowledge to build and maintain relationships with open source communities and manage the development and use of software as a common good is a capacity for the State to acquire and incorporate into its formal processes.

This would be a way for the State to develop public policies from the standpoint of the common goods (technologies/ digital resources), ensuring State’s sovereignty (often dependent on isolated processes and proprietary technologies) and, at the same time, preserving the autonomy of society. These institutional changes would significantly reduce the information asymmetry and produce sustainable and democratic policies’ designs. We see this as a clear way of building the bridge to a networked democracy.

5) Conclusions

In this post we have tried to present a synthesis of our recent reflections on the limits faced by the social participation technologies ecosystem. We have analyzed event based advocacy models and other models of qualified deliberation in terms of advantages and disadvantages of each kind. We have put both models on stage starting from a discussion that has, as the background, the promise of achieving a networked democracy that enables autonomous collective actions and distributes power.

Designing engagement processes aiming at the building of a networked democracy seems like the most promising strategy to be taken on days strongly marked by transitions in politics, economy, climate, health, education and other systems that governs our lives. In our perspective, these engagement processes will derive from open source commons arrangements capable of building crowdsourced and easy to use interaction architectures, connected with state resources mapping and public indicators dataviz solutions.

This is a fairly good description of Instituto Cidade Democrática’s change theory, built from our project’s experience in the recent years. This is the result of a wide-ranging reflection, motivated by the burden of perceiving the social participation technologies ecosystem to have low capacity to scale and impact towards a networked democracy. This theory was the basis for the shaping of our next products and prototypes, and sharing it with all of you who follow us and other stakeholders as an invitation to jointly address the challenges posed here, is a contribution that we are proud to offer to the our field of work. We hope that you enjoy it and we encourage you to share your thoughts with us.

The post Clues for building the bridge to a Networked Democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Technology is disrupting outmoded industries at an unprecedented rate. As the gyroscopic effects of the neoliberal model wobble out of control Paul Mason suggests the end of capitalism has begun and even the IMF is questioning whether their capitalist agenda was a 30 year long mistake. This article analyses how platform businesses disrupt industries and suggests how emerging technologies and ownership models are ushering in a fundamentally new, truly democratic economy.

The rise of disruptive platforms

Uber has become the most valuable startup ever and has completely disrupted the taxi industry in every country it has targeted. Similarly, Airbnb has disrupted the hotel and bed and breakfast markets, making massive profits by syphoning fees from customers and suppliers without producing any tangible goods or owning any physical infrastructure. So what are the key ingredients of their successes?

To disrupt an industry you can’t just launch an app, you have to remove pain, improve service or simply better the traditional process of transaction and both Uber and Airbnb have done this in spades. Uber have not only improved the traditional cab booking process but have relocated the payment process from the physical to the digital world. Gone are the days of struggling to find a local cab number, wondering if or when it’ll ever arrive and then fumbling to find the right change whilst you manhandle your luggage. With an Uber you just say thanks and walk away.

Similarly, renting a flat or a room was always tarnished by the payment process. No matter how much people trust others there’s something ‘dirty’ about asking people to pay you. With Airbnb payment happens upfront online so your host can simply drop their keys in your hand confident in the knowledge that payment has already been made.

People like simplicity. These new, disruptive startups have simplified peoples’ lives by utilising technology, which has helped them grow exponentially.

So disruption works. And works particularly well when the target industry is well established, but a bit ‘stuffy’. A bit ‘long in the tooth’ and populated by people that won’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late; by the time the new solution is well on it’s way to usurping the old.

Which makes me think of Whitehall.

Where else can you find such a superb group of ‘stuffy’, old fashioned, single-minded capitalists, who are a bit ‘long in the tooth’? Where else can you find an ‘industry’ that is operating on completely outmoded, outdated and outrageously ineffective processes that would benefit from a little disruption?

Capitalism has subsumed democracy and made it an industry

We don’t really live in a democracy. People argue that we do, but there’s no way it can be true. If we lived in a democracy, we would have a say in at least some of the decisions by which we are affected. But we don’t, not really, not like we should in a democratic society. No matter how hard I try. No matter how much I get involved. No matter how many times I write to my MP, or tweet at him, my opinion does not make any difference to the harsh reality on the ground. The social paradigm we live in is dominated by the interests of big business. Capitalism has subsumed democracy.

Let me give you an example. How, in a democracy, would something like TTIP be possible? For those of you that have been living under a rock for the last two years, TTIP is the best example of rapacious neoliberalism doing its best to gain even more power over the entire planet. The idea is to further empower giant corporates by letting them sue national governments for loss of profits caused by changes in legislation. The fact that this “idea”, which will affect everyone since it aims to gain the power to overthrow any environmental legislation which stands in the way of “free trade”, is being debated behind closed doors by the global elite, illustrates how undemocratic things have become. What happened to our vote? What happened to the voices of the millions and billions of people this legislation will affect? The people’s voices are not welcome in a debate ‘owned’ by big business.

To illustrate how far we have come down this road, let’s look at how big business plays dirty. Big business will use any means at its disposal to get what it wants and lobbying is one of its favourite tools. Neal Gorenflo describes how “death star platforms” like Uber and AirBnb combine lobbying with other influencing strategies to bend the market to their will:

Uber’s David Plouffe, formerly President Obama’s campaign manager, literally besieged Portland’s mayor, ultimately forcing him to create a favorable policy. Bloomberg’s “This is How Uber Takes Over a City” gives an eye opening account Uber’s strong arm tactics. As of this writing this, Airbnb is running an $8.3 million campaign to defeat a San Francisco voter proposition (Prop F) designed to limit Airbnb’s negative impact on the city’s skyrocketing housing costs. This lobbying activity is just the tip of the iceberg. Uber and Airbnb are using a good bit of their $10 billion+ collective war chest to hire a global army of lobbyists. In their language, they’ve put “boots on the ground in hundreds of cities.

The modern world of unfettered neoliberal capitalism is a far cry from the village market that once was… Gorenflo describes the new wave of “professionals” applying their collective aptitude to creating startups as “shock and awe entrepreneurship” in which the rules are being bent, broken and re-written for capitalism’s own benefit!

It’s like 1+1=10. The more money Death Star platforms raise, the more press and customers they get. The more they break the rules, the more press and customers they get, which enables them to raise even more money. Taxi drivers strike? Jackpot! And the cycle repeats. It’s a blitzkrieg. It’s shock and awe entrepreneurship. It’s the sound of a new hegemonic bloc coming to power.

Democracy may not be a traditional ‘industry’, but with campaign contributions at record highs, it’s more like one now than ever before. Democracy as it was and should still be defined, is no longer working as it was supposed to. It is no longer “government of the people, by the people, for the people” it’s more like “government of the people, by the elites, for big business”, with a token ‘vote’ to placate the electorate once every five years, and that is something we can disrupt.

How can we disrupt capitalist democracy?

As we have seen from the Uber and AirBnb examples, successful disruption requires fundamental changes to both the underlying agreements (the T&Cs you don’t read but agree to before using their platforms) and the processes and transactions (what you can do on the app and what happens in the physical world) of an industry.

Our entire economy, in fact the very concept of money itself, is nothing more than an agreement. The words “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…” which are still printed on UK Pounds Sterling encapsulate the basic “agreement” upon which our entire economy is based. Don’t get me started about how banks have run away with that idea but the basic point remains: money is an agreement. If we want a new monetary system we need to found new forms of agreement like Bitcoin, for example.

Similarly, companies are founded on agreements and, since 1976, Public Limited Companies’ agreements include a key objective to ‘maximise profits for shareholders’, which is the main problem with that agreement. It is one cause of the corporate psychosis which manifests as environmental destruction and exploitation whilst driving up inequality.

To disrupt capitalist democracy we need to create new agreements which usurp the present economic and business ownership models AND improve the processes by which ‘the people’ interact with these systems, to make them more attractive, more responsive and more user friendly than what’s on offer today.

When people can obtain the majority of goods or services they need from democratically owned and managed organisations, through decentralised crypto-currencies or other means, more easily than they can through the present system, capitalism will become a thing of the past. Enter the co-operative and it’s digital big brother, the platform co-op.

What’s a platform co-op?

Co-ops are organisations based on the well established Rochdale principles, which are by their very nature open, inclusive and democratically controlled by their members. They can take many forms, and be set up in different ways but the one essential feature that distinguishes them completely from ‘normal’ companies is the member-owned governance structure. Multi-stakeholder co-ops can be structured to be governed by various groups of stakeholders, ensuring that everyone who has a relationship with the organisation (for example, workers, customers, suppliers and investors) has a genuine say in how the organisation operates.

Platform co-ops are online organisations, normally involving a virtual market or meeting place which, just like co-ops, are owned and managed by their members.

Co-ops are not particularly revolutionary, they’ve been around since the 1800s, but what is new is the interest in the co-operative model and how it can be applied to online platforms. We’ve seen how well open source software has usurped proprietary alternatives and now the platform co-op model, which is itself open-source, is spawning a range of new, online, member owned and democratically controlled organisations who aim to usurp the corporate ‘Death Star’ platforms.

How can platform co-ops disrupt capitalist democracy?

The key word here is “ownership”. As Marjorie Kelly points out in Owning our future “Ownership is the gravitational field that holds our economy in orbit”. Traditional, extractive, publicly traded organisations represent 80% of global industrial output, but are controlled by the wealthiest 10% of society. The elite own the organisations which make up our economy and this setup allows them to extract wealth from us to them by design.

Platform co-ops on the other hand, which must always be democratically owned, are the building blocks of an ownership revolution in which power is transferred from the few to the many. Platform co-ops have a natural source of funding through the crowds which make up their networks, they are generative by design, incorporating shared values. Their purpose is to benefit their communities.

All members get a say in how platform co-ops are run and therefore, the things the co-ops do which affect them. Imagine that your local school, shop and pub or restaurant are all co-ops and you own part of each of them. You would be able to influence the things that affect your daily life in ways that are currently impossible through our existing ‘democracy’. You wouldn’t need to write to your MP in the vague hopes that you would get a reply. You would be able to propose ideas, debate others’ ideas and vote directly on matters that concerned you, making real changes in your local community and to your quality of life.

Co-ops also encourage the development of commons, by transferring knowledge from private to public ownership. Look at how Wikipedia has killed Encyclopaedia Britannica and how WikiHouse has enabled open source housing, or how WikiSpeed is working towards producing open source cars. These changes are fundamental to the structure of our economy, knowledge can never be re-appropriated into private hands once it is open source. This is the first element of a commons-based economy, the mutualisation of knowledge and ideas.

Only by redesigning the ownership models of the organisations we buy from, work for and rely upon we will start to disrupt the traditional capitalist model. As Mason notes:

The logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important…

Changing ownership models alone will not be enough

As with the Uber and Airbnb examples, disruption requires a combination of new agreements and changes to the processes and transactions of an industry. The co-operative ownership model presents a viable alternative to the ‘agreements’ on which the majority of businesses are founded, but new agreements alone will not disrupt much. To truly disrupt an industry, especially one as complex and insidious at capitalist democracy, we also need to change how business is conducted, to make the co-op model the default instead of the exception.

For disruption to really work, founding and running co-ops has got to become much easier. Technology can and is being applied but there’s still much work to be done to deliver an Uber-esque experience which encourages the swarm to defect from limited companies and make co-ops the prevalent organisational form.

Out-evolving such a well established system is not going to be easy and such a multitude of challenges require numerous technical innovations. Enter “the open app ecosystem”, a suite of interoperable open source apps designed to facilitate distributed collaboration. The open app ecosystem does not exist entirely yet, but Sandstorm is a good example of current progress and several of the other apps required to run cooperative organisations online already exist elsewhere. Take Loomio for example, the decision making app developed by Enspiral, a co-op from New Zealand, which lets hundreds and thousands of people make collective decisions collaboratively online through a simple web based interface. It’s just one of a suite of apps which we need to run platform co-ops. Combine Loomio with similarly ‘open’ project management software, task management, accounting and fundraising software, websites, shopping carts, and donation systems and the process of running a co-op would be much more Uber-esque. But it still won’t disrupt the norm.

Loomio for voting on decisions.

For co-ops and platform co-ops to become ubiquitous, and the default model for startups worldwide, we need to strip out the bureaucracy and legal barriers and make founding co-ops as easy as catching a cab. The biggest barrier to the formation of collaborative partnerships is nearly always the agreement process. How many times have you seen a good idea between friends, or between small businesses, develop only to see the potential collaboration stall at the ‘partnership agreement’, or ‘joint venture’ agreement stage? We need a process for converting new ideas into real collaborative projects which explicitly avoids ownership issues and allocation of profits, which tend to be the biggest barriers to co-operation. For this to work we need to combine the idea behind One Click Co-ops, with a range of versatile, off-the-peg, and easily understandable organisational options. Ultimately, there are only a few models for sharing profits; by splitting them between stakeholders, according to time and/or resources invested, so cookie-cutter models should work for most new organisations in the first instance. Open value Networks present another viable model for profit sharing in which a ‘value accounting system’ computes equity in proportion to contributions automatically, removing the pain from the profit sharing process.

To disrupt capitalist democracy, founding and running a co-op needs to be as easy as:

1. Logging on to a web service or app and defining who your stakeholder groups and founding members will be

2. Defining if you will want to make profits, raise share capital or perform other financial transactions

3. Picking a model from suggested ‘cookie-cutter’ legal forms, depending on your location and objectives

4. Naming your organisation

5. Picking your required web apps from the Open App Ecosystem

6. Customising and setting up your apps (website, fundraising / payment, project / task / people management / decision making / rewards systems etc) to enable your new organisation

The above process should probably be free too. The above might seem like a fanciful wish list but, with a concerted effort from the open source community, and/or a suitable sponsor, it could probably be delivered a lot quicker than we imagine.

The vision

So, say we have the tech, which enables us to found and run new organisations based on new agreements, how is this really going to disrupt capitalist democracy? There are a few simple elements to this vision, which platform co-ops create.

Decentralised distributed currencies (much like the internal currencies used by multi-nationals to transfer funds between companies and across borders to avoid paying duties and taxes) will change the way our economy works by re-routing flows of capital. For example, if I could earn “co-op coins” in one co-op and spend them in the next, as a co-op member I would be incentivised to do so, since I also receive a share of the profits.

The creation of commons will encourage the shift from scarcity to abundance. Access to information is becoming cheaper, if not free, which is changing the nature of our society, but platform co-ops also enable the development of material (shared ‘stuff’) and economic commons (shared ‘access to finance’). For example, if trade in co-op coins was taxed (at a democratically agreed rate) to form a ‘commons fund’ to which co-op members could apply, we would have a democratically controlled source of funding for new co-operative service.

Liquid democracy will change how communities are governed, from the local to the global.

Since members of co-ops and platform co-ops get to vote on everything and anything by which they are affected, a society populated by a multitude of co-ops would provide an alternative system of governance. Imagine having the option to vote, digitally, on what you liked when you liked according to the voting schedule of the co-ops of which you are a member. This would create a radically different community of interaction and feedback to the ‘one vote every five years’ idea of ‘democracy’ we have today. If you don’t like voting, don’t have time or don’t know about the issue/s, no problem, just delegate your vote to someone else you trust or to someone else who has a good reputation on the subject which is being debated.

A co-op of co-ops could perform organisational duties at any scale whilst ensuring democratic governance by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible levels. If organisations like this existed it is hard to imagine why we would need our current ‘representatives’ and if it was easier to have, and see the result of, your say by voting through the co-operative system why would we need the existing system at all?

To top it off, co-ops are not driven by the extractive, profit making motive, making them less prone to boom and bust. Instead they are normally designed to benefit communities with the long term objectives of sustaining life and increasing well-being through the emerging values of sustainability and fairness which allow life to flourish.

This vision is the simple application of existing technology to an outdated industry which is ripe for disruption. But the only way it will happen is if we the people stop arguing, complaining and campaigning against the present system and get on with designing and building the technology, the agreements, the processes and the ownership models of the generative economy in a concerted and collaborative way.

To stay up to date with the latest news about platform cooperatives and the new collaborative sustainable economy follow @open_coop and join the mailing list (form in the right hand column) and buy your tickets now.

Cross-posted from The Open Coop
Featured image courtesy of encyclopediadramatica.se

The post Disrupting capitalist democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Liquid Democracy Documentation Project – Interviews #37-38 – Axel Kistner and Andreas Nitsche, Interaktive Democratie e.V. from Jose Ramos on Vimeo.

This interview is with two of the lead developers of the Liquid Feedback system, Axel Kistner and Andreas Nitsche. Liquid Feedback was the first software system that operationalized a liquid democracy voting system.

This interview starts with technical questions, but then ends with the story of how Liquid Feedback was born, Berlin’s hacker culture and Liquid Feedback’s integration into the German Pirate Party.

Misconceptions

Axel and Andreas start by addressing some misconceptions about Liquid Feedback. The first issue is a question I raise with them at the start: if a liquid democracy system is not binding, does it not effect the legitimacy of that system, and a willingness for people to participate in that system?

A binding voting system is one in which a representative or a policy making body are compelled to put the outcomes of the liquid democracy vote into law. The opposite of binding is a reference system, in which the outcome of a liquid democracy process is used only as a ‘reference’ for the actual legal decision makers.

On this point they are very clear. Liquid feedback was not designed to be a decision making platform that compels binding decisions on a state / statutory basis. Rather it is designed to empower political parties, civic organizations or companies to self organize decision making. Parties or organizations using Liquid Feedback can make it binding if they want to, but do not necessarily need to.

Laws in Germany, and in most democracies, are very specific… that representatives are voted in by an anonymous / secret ballot. Therefore, the transparent way in which liquid democracy allocates votes transitively (everyone can see everything in the liquid democracy system) simply does not work at the state / statutory level of elected representatives. Also, once in, a representative can exercise their conscience on any vote. Thus even if it is binding at a party or factional level, representatives of parliament can still vote how they want. This is why Liquid Feedback is for parties to do distributed decision making on policy development, but is not design to replace the way that popular voting happens during state elections, and it cannot bind party representatives to liquid democracy based decisions.

In addressing this problem, the only exiting answer is that those standing for election in a party using Liquid Feedback or similar, are simply making a promise to their party members that, if elected, they will honor the general will of the results of the Liquid Feedback process.

Liquid democracy can also be used as suggestions to a board or a council of elected people – there is transparency in its use and if a board or council decide not to follow a suggestions, at least it is clear the difference between their decisions and the liquid democracy outcomes. A council can also get feedback that they would ordinarily not get, they can pose governmental or administrative issues to the community and get feedback.

Alex and Andreas are both satisfied with this compromise, as they believe political parties are a key institution for expressing political will. At least in German, parties are indeed foundational. Ben de Biel, another interviewee, told me how in Germany, a party gets elections funds per party member. This differs greatly from other countries where parties or candidates need to reach a threshold to qualify for election funds. They also argued that parties are identifiable – there is a clear boundary between inside and outside a party. They feel Liquid Feedback should not be used where there are not clear boundaries, such as a grassroots social movements or the like, as processes and results can be manipulated. Finally, parties or other organizations also do not require anonymity in voting, unlike the mandatory secret ballot for elected representatives of state elections.

Division of Labor and the Iron Law Of Oligarchy

An important aspect in considering the logic and rationale for Liquid Feedback is how the existing representative democracy systems uses a division of labour in politics. They argue we need this division of labour, as decision making does not scale well when we get to large numbers. But while representative democracy does this division of labor in a static fashion, liquid democracy helps to make this division of labor more fluid.

This issue of division of labour is also related to the idea of the “Iron Law Of Oligarchy”. German sociologist Robert Michels developed the theory of the Iron Law of Oligarchy in 1911. The theory put forth the proposition that all political systems and organizations, even when they start out as democratic, ultimately become oligarchic and ruled by a handful of people. He reasoned that, because systems that grow become large and complex, they cannot function as direct democracies, and power must be delegated; power eventually accrues within a small group of people, a “leadership class” that specializes in modes of administration. Even when democratic systems exists, this leadership class will over time dominate, as they can control the flow of information, use the system to reward personal loyalty among members and control the procedures used to make decisions. Michels theory is related to bureaucracy. Because any large system needs a bureaucracy to function effectively, this centralization through bureaucracy leads to an Oligarchy who’s primary motivation is to maintain its power.

Thus, division of labor in a representative democracy is subject to this “Iron Law”, by virtue of the fact that a representatives job is removed from voters for longish periods. They argue that this division of labor via liquid democracy helps to break the Iron Law, by reducing the prevalence of a specific decision making class – everyone is the politician.

I asked them if liquid democracy style transitivity leads to an uncontrollable accumulation of power, as some people in the system can be delegated hundreds of votes from other members in their own system. They responded that it actually does the opposite, it is the key to break the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

They argued that every step in a transitive system allows for interventions. Usually someone who is not in the political sphere is excluded by the existing bureaucracy or political administration. In liquid democracy those people who are normally excluded can come up with an idea and be heard and given delegated votes. They also argued liquid democracy taps the expertise across a system – liquid democracy can even be seen as the implicit search for expertise within an organization – it allows a faction to strengthen within an organization, which they see as healthy.

Birth of Liquid Feedback

They explain how Lewis Carroll, the British author of Alice in Wonderland, was the first to propose the idea for transitive voting in a thesis titled “The Principles of Parliamentary Representation” (1884). However, only with the advent of computer technology was liquid democracy technically possible.

Around the year 2000 several solutions to the problems of noisy minorities (over represented minorities who post over and over again) were being developed by those working in the online discussion forums area. Moderation was time intensive, and time based rank was problematic, thus people were looking for other solutions, and different system were being trialled that allowed types of delegation of powers.

In 2009 in the Berlin hacker community, “rumors” (by which they mean discussions) began about liquid democracy, where people actively talked about a computer software that could do this. People would use the term “Wenn liquid wird kommen” as a reference to an expectation that liquid democracy will arrive soon. People discussed this possibility in groups, but there was no software at the time that actually did this. They then talked about coding it and designing it, and then finally decided to do it. It required 4 month of voluntary full time work for the team to get to a first prototype. There was no money – just work as volunteers. Liquid Feedback was thus born.

The board of directors of the German Pirate Party wanted to implement it party wide, and thus they did a test phase from January 2010 (for 2 months) to the end of February. During the party’s general assembly they created new by-laws in which Liquid Feedback was added into their legal statues, not as a binding system, but as reference one as basis for their decisions.

*This research has been supported and draws upon work done at Leuphana University’s Centre for Digital Cultures as part of the Grundversorgung 2.0 Project. This post is part of the Liquid Democracy Documentation Project and http://reinventingdemocracy.org

The post Re-inventing Democracy: “Wenn liquid wird kommen”, an interview with Axel Kistner and Andreas Nitsche appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Rüdiger Weis, a professor of computer science at the Beuth Hochschule University of Applied Sciences, provides a good starting point for understanding the cultural and political context from which Liquid Democracy emerged.

Rüdiger Weis makes several important points in relation to the cultural and political evolution of Berlin. The first point he makes is that over the past two decades Berlin’s hacker culture experienced a fluid mixed between East German and West German hackers, each with different attributes. This mixing goes back several decades and also corresponds to the rather anti-ideological stance taken by some of the contemporary Pirate Party members I have interviewed, which explicitly argued they were neither left or right – that they wanted to make decisions using Liquid Democracy on a policy by policy basis, not based on party line. Importantly, if Germans wanted to opt out of military service (from the time of allied occupation in the 1940s to the fall of the wall), Berlin was a demilitarized zone were they could escape conscription, thus attracting those with counter ideological stances. Another important point he makes is the overall history of Germany itself with its history of totalitarianism, hence an extreme skepticism towards governmental power. A third point he makes is the influx of non-German hackers into the Berlin hacker scene, from the US and elsewhere, fleeing potential persecution. All these factors, he argues, were important cultural and political elements in producing the context from which Liquid Democracy emerged, why it did not emerge in other places, and perhaps addressing some of the problematic questions in its potential transposition to other parts of the world.

He also provides an interesting overview of the Chaos Computer Club, which has been going for thirty years now. The chaos computer club was the hub of this dynamic mixing and exchange, and provided a home and protection for radical hacker culture in Berlin. He provides an important window into the problematic dynamics between governmental power and hacker culture.

Toward the end of the video he talks about the merits of the Liquid Democracy systems, such as Liquid Feedback. He considers Liquid Democracy to be an important innovation that helps make democratic decision-making more transparent and open. He also argues that it is very inclusive, as it does not matter whether a person is elderly or homebound, they can see decisions being made from their computer and engage when and how they want. He also argues that, following hacker culture, when using the systems, people don’t care about titles, but are more concerned about the things that a person produces, which is more focused on policy rather than personality.

*This research has been funded and draws upon work done at Leuphana University’s Centre for Digital Cultures as part of the Grundversorgung 2.0 Project. This post is part of the Liquid Democracy Documentation Project and http://reinventingdemocracy.org

The post Re-inventing Democracy: Understanding the Origins of Liquid Democracy, an Interview with Rüdiger Weis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It has been called “a radical left sensation”; a “fledgling party” born out of the ashes of the Indignados (“the outraged”) or 15-M movement; and “the new-kid-on-the-block” whose success is yet another example of modern technopolitics or, as some experts have put it, “the power of the connected multitudes.”

Podemos (“We Can”), a new Spanish party established in March 2014, disrupted their nation’s political scene when it swept up five seats out of 54 and 1.2 million votes (8% of the total) in the European elections in May even though it was only 100-days-old. With 704,585 likes on Facebookand 321,000 followers on Twitter, it has more online fans than any other Spanish political party.

Founded by left-wing academics, and led by a 35-year-old political science lecturer, Pablo Iglesias, Podemos’ platform strongly advocates for anti-corruption and transparency measures, is supportive of participatory democracy and critical of the two main parties – the PP (the center-right People’s Party) and the PSOE (the Socialist Party) – as well as the government’s austerity measures. As Iglesias told the Guardian, Podemos is about “citizens doing politics.”

Iñigo Errejón, a researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, and the coordinator of Podemos’ electoral campaign, tells techPresident, “The rise of Podemos is about their new way of reading and articulating widespread citizen discontent, which had previously surfaced within the 15-M movement.”

Podemos is considered an offshoot of 15-M, a tech-savvy group that from 2011 to 2012 protested against the country’s political inefficacy, high unemployment and other political and economic woes.According to Cristina Flesher Fominay, founder and co-chair of the Council for European Studies Social Movement and a professor at the University of Aberdeen, Podemos’ popularity was made possible in part by its roots in 15-M as well as the charismatic and media-savvy leadership of Iglesias and the party’s ability to mobilize the youth, unemployed and voters that tend to abstain.

The party’s success also came from deep changes to the way politics has been done, says Errejón, a combination of bold reforms and use of technology to make the decision-making process as inclusive and transparent as possible.

Crowdfunding

Compared to a standard campaign, which in Spain can cost more than 2 million euros per party, Podemos succeeded with hardly any money, initially raising 100,000 euros (US$133,650) through crowdfunding.

Podemos’ charismatic leader Pablo Iglesias speaks at a rally (credit: CyberFrancis/flickr)

“Since the beginning, we believed that we needed to be financially independent from banks and corporations, and for this reason we asked for citizen funding,” Eric Labuske, 26, and Miguel Ardanuy, 23, who are members of Podemos, wrote in a joint e-mail to techPresident. “We have used crowdfunding for specific projects, such as building servers for our web platforms and materials for our political campaigns. We also use a monthly donation system to cover all our expenses.” Labuske coordinates citizen participation activities within the party and Ardanuy is part of a working group that is organizing Podemos’ Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Ciudadana) in October 2014 when members will debate and vote on proposals for an agenda, as well as the future trajectory of the party.

Not only is crowdfunding important in distancing themselves from the sway of corporate funding, according to Labuske and Ardanuy, it also enables citizens to get involved politically and, as a result, forces the party to be as transparent as possible. “As our funding depends on small donations from citizens, we have the obligation of being accountable and transparent, by publishing our accounts and balances online,” they explain. Podemos also documents its crowdsourcing process online.

Even now, crowdfunding is Podemos’ main source of funding, making up more than half of all its resources with the rest coming from regular donations. The party has collected more than 150,000 euros (US$200,450) since March 2014 through more than 10,000 funders.

Some of the money is used for specific projects; for example, when the PP accused Iglesias of associations with the Basque terrorist group, ETA, Podemos raised more than 16,000 euros(US$21,380) in three hours to defend themselves against libelous attacks.

Podemos also met their 23,000 euros (US$30,735) goal for organizing its Constituent Assembly. Any member can participate and anyone can become a member by filling out an online form.

Podemos’ lean crowdfunding model is also reflected in their bold reforms for public spending. It aims to set MEP salaries at 1,930 euros (US$2,580), or triple the national minimum wage, as opposed to the standard 8,000 euros (US$10,690) a month, and use the extra income towards building the party or towards a particular cause. Podemos also hopes to set a minimum guaranteed income and reform financial regulation.

Online voting and decision making

A large part of Podemos’ digital strategy is turning decision-making into an inclusive, citizen-driven process. It used an online platform, Agora Voting, to select their Euro-MPs during the primaries, attracting 33,000 voters who were verified through SMS. While those votes only account for 3 percent of their actual voter base, Podemos was the only party aside from Partido X, a 15-M spin-off founded over a year before them, that used open primaries, which allowed any voter regardless of party affiliation to throw in their support. Podemos also used Agora to select their executive coordination team, a group of 26 in charge of organizing the Constituent Party Assembly.

So far the platform has been used to vote directly for candidates, but in the long run Podemos may use some of the other voting models supported by the platform, such as liquid delegation. This form of voting allows a participant to delegate his or her vote to someone else they feel has more expertise, but the delegation can also be revoked. Agora also supports single transferable voting, a system that seeks to create proportional representation through the ranking of candidates in order of preference on a ballot.

Currently, Podemos is working on an even more ambitious project. LaboDemo (Laboratorio Democrático), a techno-political consulting and researching organization that is focused on how to use Internet tools to optimize democratic processes, began to collaborate with Podemos in June on testing new apps that would allow for instant mass polling.

“We started to test a number of tools after a national meeting of all the ‘Circulos’ on 14th June,” Yago Bermejo Abati, the coordinator of LaboDemo, tells techPresident. The ‘Circulos’ or Circles are local, offline places for citizen participation that are open to all, launched by Podemos in order to fulfil its ambition of being a real citizens’ party. The Circulos have been one of the key factors of Podemos’ success. Today there are around 800 Circles scattered throughout the country. During meetings, members discuss policy issues, such as debating the proposals that will be brought to Podemos’ National Party Assembly. They often use Titanpad, a tool that allows many people to edit one document. “That means that everyone can take part in the building of Podemos. This is democracy,”says a post on one of the local Circulos’ Facebook page.

A screenshot of Podemos’ Circulos map

Podemos also uses the Circulos as a place to test new apps. “Appgree was first tested at the national meeting,” says Bermejo Abati. Appgree is a mobile app that filters proposals by type and can quickly poll thousands of people simultaneously. More than 9,000 participated during the national Circulos meeting in June and more than 5,000 were on the app simultaneously. A number of questions were proposed, for example, like suggesting a collective tweet to the president of Spain.

“We think Appgree will be useful in the future to allow very fast feedback regarding proposals or polls,” explains Bermejo Abati.

Another online platform Podemos just began to use in order to maximise participation is Reddit. “We believe that everyone needs to be part of the construction of Podemos,” say Labuske and Ardanay. “And unlike the other political parties in Spain, we want to use [Reddit] to enforce democracy in our country. We think that transparency and direct contact between politicians and citizens are vital to reach the level of democracy we want.” After LaboDemo suggested it, Podemos decided to use Reddit’s “ask me anything” feature to enable the party’s political candidates to debate with citizens.

“We wanted to create a massive national debate. We have chosen Reddit as our platform and we call it Plaza Podemos,” adds Bermejo Abati.

Plaza Podemos received more than 80,000 unique visits and more than 400,000 page visits since its launch about one month ago. During this time the party also hosted four Reddit interviews with Podemos Euro-MPs Pablo Echenique, Lola Sànchez, Carlos Jiménez and Teresa Rodrìguez, each of them answering hundreds of questions posed by users.

“We conceive Plaza Podemos as a virtual square to deliberate, discuss and visualize all the issues that concern Podemos’ followers,” says Bermejo Abati. “Since these interviews are done directly by the people, they produce truly interesting questions. It is also a great way for the MPs to explain some of their actions in the European Parliament.” Plaza Podemos is also enabling the offline Circulos to connect to each other virtually.

Podemos intends to utilize Reddit to debate the ethical, political and organizational principles that are going to be voted on at their National Citizen Assembly in October. The Reddit debates provide a new way of interacting with a political party and Bermejo Abati believes it will develop into a “new kind of politics.”

Another participatory platform that Podemos is currently experimenting with is Loomio, a collaborative and open source decision-making platform that allows groups of people to discuss issues, propose actions, gauge group opinion and are given a set deadline to vote. It aims to encourage consensus-making rather than the polarization of an issue.

“After Podemos adopted our platform, several thousand Podemos folk have now started 396 groups within the last month,” Ben Knight, co-founder of Loomio, tells techPresident. Some of them are local groups, like Podemos Toledo. Others are thematic, like Podemos Economistas, which as its name suggests, debates the party’s economic policy. “[Loomio’s] user-base and total activity have almost doubled as a result,” adds Knight.

A screenshot of Plaza Podemos on Reddit.

The problem with “e-democracy”

Despite Podemos’ success, it is not without its critics, especially those who pursue similar goals of using online participation to create a more inclusive democratic process.

“[The party] has been very efficient on social networks,” Simona Levi, a prominent former 15-M activist and a co-founder of Partido X, says to techPresident. “However it still hasn’t addressed some problems, such as the risk of clicktivism, of implementing a fallacious idea of participation.” She wonders how Podemos will prevent decisions being made primarily by those with the time to participate or whether people who vote online are really informed before they cast their ballot, especially when it comes to complicated policy issues like political or economic reform.

Levi explains that Partido X tried to address these problems with their own version of online political participation based on the idea that online participation by itself is not enough and that people don’t need to express an opinion on everything, especially if they are not informed enough.

“Our methodology seeks to go beyond clicktivism, introducing the idea of responsibility, competence and scalability in the participatory decision-making process,” she says. For instance, Partido X tried to implement a decision-making process based less on majority voting and more on consensus, less on opinion and more on expertise.

However noble Partido X’s attempt at creating a more meaningful platform for political engagement, it was less effective at communicating its vision to the public. While Partido X was often considered the main heir to 15-M, it was unable to win any seats in the last election while Podemos has become the fourth largest national political force and the third largest in many regions, including Madrid.

Podemos’ founders do realize its methods are far from perfect. “We are always looking to improve our participation systems and looking to find new ones,” say Labuske and Ardanuy. “Improving democracy is one of our main objectives, and we believe that technology is very important in reaching that goal.” And despite its flaws, Podemos is leading the way in online politics in Spain.

Carola Frediani is an Italian journalist and co-founder of the media agency, Effecinque.org. She writes on new technology, digital culture and hacking for a variety of Italian publications, including L’Espresso, Wired.it, Corriere della Sera, Sky.it. She is the author of Inside Anonymous: A Journey into the World of Cyberactivism.

Personal Democracy Media is grateful to the Omidyar Network for its generous support of techPresident’s WeGov section.

Lead image: The Podemos banner asks, “When is the last time you voted with hope?” (Podemos Uvieu/flickr)

The post How Tech-Savvy Podemos Became One of Spain’s Most Popular Parties in 100 Days appeared first on P2P Foundation.