Tools for occupy-style online practices

Digital Direct Democracy

https://twitter.com/willowbl00/status/534483338019364864

Some Tools

Loomio — Agora — M15

Discussion

Met with people who built tools for Podemos, Net Party in Argentina through these meetings he had discussions with their tech teams to learn about these platforms

Lots of people have the idea of using the internet for collaboration and advocacy tools - in some parts of the world it is easier/harder to get politicians elected

The parties that have an ideology tend to do better than those those who do not (Podemos vs. Net Party)

5 Star Movement

Podemos is easy to love if you come from a left Occupy ideology because they do things like unevict people from houses, and have build coalitions with solid leftist groups. The installed all type of software and use Twitter voting, N2 (social software for tools that they rewrote). After the election, the media was asking about their political platform (what are you going to do), they had seats but what were they going to do. They created online forums, used mobile phone as unique identifier and sent a letter to everyone - to verify that they are actual people with verifiable addresses. They used Agroa voting for lists to be voted on - they had created a system to allow them to know who is a member of the party and who is eligible to vote.

Democracy OS is useful for 50K people need to vote (do I vote for this proposal or not), push out we all need to vote, what is the result.

Loomio how do we create a proposal with a small group of people.

Agora voting, how do you get hundreds of thousands of people to vote.

Spain 60 million, Podemos 5-10% participation, getting 250K people voting. Podemos had to pull from the other minority voter bases and disenfranchised people.

Different use cases for different tools.

Democracy OS - ideal use case: single politician or city council and you want to figure out what percentage of your constituents would vote for it. Online part for voting and a part that is for verification. 5 Star Movement - person comes in and they take a picture of their ID and store it. Podemos used the mobile phone number with the physical mailing to verify.

Agora deliberating of ideas to collaborative decision-making, not about voting. Nation Builder does something similar; and an open source version - both clunky

None of these softwares are about the US techniques of getting out the vote - calling, etc.

What is the binding standard for holding these representatives to using these tools once they have been elected? In Iceland, open process constitution that would implement a much more direct democracy, but the politicians wanted to make their own decisions. Iceland is not a list voting system. A list voting system, if the politician doesn’t vote the way the party says, they are out and the party can kick them out of their seat. The party has the power. In countries with a list systems. The lists are for areas.

The reason you can do the Podemos type of things is that if you get 5% of the vote and if you switch all your votes behind another party, you can have some influence.

Sweden has 5 people who have representative looking out for feminist interests.

Problems: if you are a powerful influence you can rig any platform to use it for your interest. These are all open source platforms, where you can see the code. If I’m opening up to allow my constituents more direct democracy - this hijacking happen to the Pirate Party because they did not verify their party members exists. Better responses and circumvention - the moment we start using these tactics others will start using it as well. Israeli peace organization against the wall, two state solution, etc. and they were a legal association that allowed anyone to register and vote; and right wingers came in and subverted it.

The attempt to open represent what people want without ideology consistently didn’t win. The ones that won were the ones with an ideology and a platform of this is what we are going to do.

In Spain, the Pyscho Drum (random guy who lives outside of Barcelona), every day he makes an ether pad of what the Spanish activists are going to talk about (decides the hash tag of the day). In some ways that is building for the network, informal power structure. No one told Podemos or other that they have to use these but every day they pick one and go after it - millions of people. The Pycho Drum man has no formal power.

50M1 it is youth because they are the ones being screwed the most.

5 Star Movement was very concerned about not leaving communities out and gave tablets to each member. Took Liquid Democracy and rewrote it - all in Italian - available on GitHub.

People will report all types of issues with their community but if there is no feedback, why would I do that. The people who are voting are not just your censors, they are your constituents. The Pirate Party gave up on the binding. Podemos binds themselves to direct voting.

Do any of these leverage SMS - Agora, PAH (the organization of people being unevicted) has an SMS they built in Delphi mobile application - chat room for each local organization, geolocates activists in your location;