Open tools for transparent participative and democratic decision making

Introduction

There are ample problems in modern society, and I believe the democratic process is an important pillar that needs additional love. The traditional top down decision making process is under pressure since it seems to favour well organized and wealthy groups who do not necessarily have any democratic backing. Some would argue that influential lobby groups in Brussels close to the European Commission are a good example of this. When discussing politics and power in general we should at all times remember that:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. ~ Sir John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Bt (Wikipedia, phrases.org )

From a practical perspective it seems surely more manageable to discuss top level politics with a limited set of partners that represent industries, institutes, unions, people and alike. But then the internet happened which could help scale the problem of democratic participation to a much larger group of people. There are two steps in this process. The first would be to present all working documents, opinions and consultations used in the decision making process to the public (democratic transparency). Second step is to let the public actively engage with this process (in its extreme form this is a direct democracy or e-democracy).

This post will briefly cover some projects that are working on building open source software tools to increase the number of people involved in the democratic decision making process.

On-line collaborative decision making

People unwilling to govern themselves will be ruled by those deemed unfit to govern. ~ Plato, The Republic

With world politics, David Jarvis outlines with a simple example how such a collaborative decision making tool could look like. This open source concept is hosted on Bitbucket and a worth while list of references of similar systems is maintained as well.

Some of the existing platforms in production use today present a very simple interface for facilitating an on-line discussion around a proposal. For example, with Your Priorities (developed on Github), you can cast votes in favour and against, list pro's and con's, and engage in further discussion via a simple linear commenting thread. This approach seems suitable for simple discussions and proposals involving a limited number of people, but I would argue it will not scale properly to larger and more complex discussions.

Another example is Loomio. Although it is relatively similar to Your Priorities, the interface, using nice looking graphs among others, is more polished and thought through in my opinion. You can see the tool in action on some live open projects here. An interesting feature that clearly distinguishes Loomio from others is that you can cast 4 different kind of votes: either in favour, abstain, against or veto.

What I also find interesting about Loomio is how they are organized: (and I quote from their web page):

Loomio is built by a worker-owned cooperative. We’re a social enterprise working to maximise positive social impact, not profit

After raising close to US$125,000 in a crowd-funding campaign, the open source development (taking place on Github) is assured to continue for some time to come.

As a final example I would like to mention Adhocracy, yet another tool for democratic participation, developed by the German non-profit LiquidDemocracy (code is on Github). Although it doesn't look as slick as Loomio in my opinion, this framework has been under continuous development over the last years and there is no sign of reduced activity either. Feature wise, the adhocracy platform is ahead of others by offering nested discussion threads, more complex proposal description page including milestone time line, map and member pages.

Challenges

This post very briefly looked at some open source tools that can be used for on-line collaborative decision making. The reason why no propriety packages are discussed here is because I think they are irrelevant in the context of transparency in governance: you can not trust a black box system with the powers of crucial political decision making. However, developing and maintaining such a system reliably exceeds the capabilities of a group of loosely connected volunteers. Some sort of framework and funding has to be present. In Does an opensource approach help e-democracy? this topic is explored in more detail.

It is clear that a direct democracy with e-participation is not ready for today. However, people are thinking about the problem and are making small steps towards streamlined on-line decision making processes. Since there is a lot to learn before getting there, every step counts!

When looking at projects such as Loomio and adhocracy, I believe that people are moving towards more inclusive and participatory decision making processes. Whether that is in small community teams, traditional companies or within large national groups, it is a matter of time before they will become the norm.