[Vorcin84]

It sounds vaguely interesting what existing knowledge there is on people working for free for a common cause out of their own volition, and where democracy comes into play.

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch"

[js8]

> Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch

No, it isn't. You cannot put democracy itself to a "democratic" vote, that's a version of Russell's paradox.

In particular, deciding who gets to vote, even by voting, isn't democratic. The democratic decision must be potentially reversible.

[nairboon]

Of course you can. Democracy is just the ruling of a majority of a specific group. It doesn't have any inherent "higher ideals", human rights, or whatever.

[js8]

I disagree. The above condition is unorthodox, I admit, but is needed to make the definition logically consistent.

The idea of democracy is to give everybody the same voice in decision making. There are different mechanisms to achieve that, direct voting is only one of them. Other mechanisms are consensus, random selection and representation. Each of the mechanisms has different strengths and weaknesses and should be used to decide different things. You can also combine them to an extent, for instance you can randomly select members of a jury who then decide by consensus.

[nairboon]

I do like your idealism. But what means "to give everybody the same voice"? Is this about having your voice heard? Or about actually participating in a decision? Either way, only the pure direct democracy guarantees both. In the end you still have the rule of the majority. What you might be looking for is some sort of equal representation of "minority groups"? We're somewhat doing this in Switzerland on the executive level and this only partially works because the executive is explicitly chosen to be very "consensus friendly" in other words no extreme (left/right) positions.

But this won't really work with the legislature, because there we have all kind of incompatible ideologies. There is simply no consensus possible with the contemporary ideologies (socialism, liberalism, conservatism, etc.) by their very definition. If you insist on consensus, your decision making process will simply deadlock forever. How can you ever unlock it? By shifting to a almost-consensus aka direct democracy.

[js8]

It is about actually equally participating in the decision. I agree with you on direct democracy, I am big fan of it (since about 2000).

Consensus can work but only in a very small groups. That's why I explained that there are different methods to achieve democratic participation and have different trade-offs.

I don't think ideologies are big a problem for direct democracy. I think they are artifacts of representative system, where you have to choose a package of things, rather than when you can decide each issue in isolation. From what I heard, that actually happens in Switzerland - since everybody is sometimes in a minority in referendum, people don't take losing as a big deal.

[Vorcin84]

What I meant is, who do you give a vote, and what do they get to vote on?

If I were a developer, I wouldn't want to work on things that the vocal/voting people want to use. I want to work on the topics that I like. Even if the participants voted on something, it is not binding to anybody.

[thomasahle]

> The democratic decision must be potentially reversible.

So how should we make non-reversible decisions?

[js8]

Reversible here has meaning that the same group of people can come to a different conclusion later. If you exclude (or include) someone as a result of voting, then it's not reversible.

You can make them however you want, for instance by voting, they just won't be democratic.