Liquid Democracy
The law condemns the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
In mid-2000 or so, I (sayke), started thinking about social and political structures, and about how to improve on the ones we've seen so far. I know, I know, everybody does it... But I think I stumbled upon some things. Among other things, I thought, can all government responsibility be placed under the rubric of commons (in the "Tragedy Of" sense) maintence? Wouldn't it be nice to have a highly-configurable voting system defined in software, that is focused specifically on resolving questions pertaining to the conservation and maintence of commons? And what if votes could be accurately taken and concluded in minutes, or even seconds? I combined some of the ideas spawned by these trains of thought, and called the result "liquid democracy".
Liquid democracy can be thought of as a function that takes a question as an argument, and returns a list of answers sorted by group preference, but it is probably best thought of as a voting system that migrates along the line between direct and representative democracy. I think it combines the advantages of both, while avoiding their flaws.
Liquid democracy has a few really interesting properties:
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It displays an interesting resistance to centralized control and external manipulation;
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It makes people with a qualitatively special say in decision-making unnecessary (no elected representatives), although some people may have more of an effective, quantitative say in decision-making (with respect to a specific LiquidDemocracyCommons) than others;
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It discourages smear campaigning and encourages issue-focused discussion;
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It virtually rules out the possibility of "rider clauses" (fine print in a law that has nothing to do with the rest of the law);
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Scalability - Being an active participent requires very little actual effort, though more effort can be invested to good effect;
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Speed - Voting can be done in a serious hurry, if need be - given a suitable web of recommendations, it could be nearly as fast as fiat decision-making;
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Flexibility - This system can with equal ease accommodate Quaker-style consensus, and US-style democracy, simply by modifying a few LiquidDemocracyParameters;
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Much, much more... of course
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If you're new to the Wiki, you might want to check out OriginalWiki. In summary, NamesThatLookLikeThis are considered WikiNames, which point to other pages in the Wiki. Also, you can (and are invited to) edit any part of this Wiki, including this page.
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These pages make heavy use of footnotes - I've tried to put everything that disrupts the reader's flow into the footnotes, because before I did that I had tons of lisp-like parenthetical expressions explaining each other, and that just looked messy.
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Any all-capital-and-underscore NUMBERs (like COMMONS_MEMBERSHIP_REVOCATION_VOTING_PERIOD) scattered around are LiquidDemocracyParameters. They can be adjusted to make the system work slightly differently.
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This voting system is designed to be used with the internet, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Please keep in mind that whenever you see something like "Alice asks Bob for a vote recommendation", it might actually imply something like "Alice tells her computer to ask Bob's computer for a vote recommendation".
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So if this voting system is all about the maintence of commons, what exactly characterises a "commons"? Well, in commons, great private gain can be made by exploiting lots of people a little bit - that is, by spreading the costs of exploitation broadly among the public. Examples of LiquidDemocracyCommons might include radio spectra, IP number ranges, atmospheric pollution, oceanic pollution, airspace defense, fire departments, and roads.
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Then, and (I think) more originally: The LiquidDemocracyVotingSystem, or, HowToArriveAtCooperativeDecisionsWithoutCentralizingPower. Of course, voting only, ONLY applies to LiquidDemocracyCommons, and only people affected by a specific LiquidDemocracyCommons should vote on issues involving it.
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I can hear the responses now - "Yea, that's great and all, but what do we do all this with? What's this voting system's interface like? What tools would one use to participate in the LiquidDemocracyVotingSystem?" Well, you would use LiquidDemocracySeeds, if you're living in a MagicalFantasyWorld, or something that does the same thing on current hardware and operating systems (like LiquidDemocracyImplementation), if you live in the world that I currently live in.
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So what spawned this unholy morass? What circumstances would cause someone to want to combine pragmatism and anarchism into a concrete computer program? Well, role-playing, of course. Dig upon my LiquidDemocracyGameScenario.
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Were there not some comments here, a long time ago? Yes, there were - I moved them to LiquidDemocracyEarlyComments because hopefully now there's enough information here for people to reasonably comment on. My old notes sucked. Hopefully these are more clear.
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How about BlogsForLiquidDemocracy ?
LiquidDemocracy now has its own channel on EFNet, (#liquiddemocracy). Drop by to talk about decentralized forms of government, or anything, really. - zoid
