[seykron]

> although DemocracyOS.org seems to have married the idea with political consultation software

Agree, as long as the legislatives have not a legal commitment with a system, it is just a very sophisticated poll.

> 2. If there is a need/desire for direct democracy to be more widespread, why not just bring about true direct democracy? It might take years or decades for the approach of The Net Party to spread to a wider number of jurisdictions. Why not put the same efforts into the wider adoption of true direct democracy, which will probably take the same amount of time.

I'm a member of the Pirate Party of Argentina, and we're trying to do just what you're saying. We've got a direct democracy platform[1] and we use our processes to collaborate with different social movements and government institutions.

For instance, the previous year we participated in several actions and discussions about national bills using our transparent and open process[2]. In our experience, direct democracy works very well as a bridge between real people problems and the representative system. It encourage people participation and it provides real engagement within the organization.

Thanks for pointing out these points!

[1] https://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Carta_Orgánica/en [2] Here is an article about what we done the last year: https://piratetimes.net/a-report-from-the-argentinian-pirate...

[thomasfoster96]

I'd you don't mind me asking, how is your direct democracy platform any different to how most political parties work internally anyway? What that charter describes is how a lot of political parties reach policy decisions, and it doesn't really describe anything that resembles direct democracy that the whole electorate takes part in.

[seykron]

The platform is not for the whole electorate because we are no longer trying to participate in elections (it is explained in the journal article), we are now a non-electoral political organization. There is a lot of literature[1][2][3] and a bunch of experiences[4] related to the implementation of high-scale direct democracy, but looking at the argentinian politics it is a very far horizon at the moment.

Despite of that, we're not that special. There are a lot of organizations (social movements, collectives, local assemblies) all around the world that do organize by using some kind of direct democracy strategy. But we want to bring direct democracy to institutional areas at some level[5]. In order to reach that purpose we've got three main values: direct democracy to take decisions, transparency as the social contract, and free culture as the foundation of our values and principles. Based on these values, we're focused in organizing actions related to the political space.

Regarding direct democracy, we take decisions based on a consensus process rather than voting. This changes the people's mindset and promotes participation instead of competition, it breaks hierarchies and distributes the power among all members. We have not a "board", we have a process to take decisions that we call "dissensus-based process". We consider that consensus is a permanent status, and dissensus is the lack of consensus. So in order to take a decision there's a very simple constraint: the three pirates rule. If three persons want to organize an action, they just do it unless someone says "I DO NOT AGREE", so it must be discussed until there is consensus again.

Regarding transparency, we have our own infrastructure and we adopt tools that helps with transparency: mailing lists, wikis, git, loomio, etc. There're are not "private activities", everything we do is public or "semi-public" (post-facto) when it is quite critical.

Of course, it has several issues. It is a challenge to make the organization grow because it depends on people that think based on quite similar values. We've got a set of principles[6] and political guidelines[7] to appeal when there is dissensus.

I hope you now could figure out yourself how different we are from other political parties.

[1] Aaron Swarz - Parpolity or the power of exponents: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity [2] A classic: The Principle of Federation - Proudhon: http://www.ditext.com/proudhon/federation/federation.html [3] The new anarchists - David Graeber: http://newleftreview.org/II/13/david-graeber-the-new-anarchi... [4] http://www.david-kilgour.com/mp/democracy.htm [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_insertion [6] http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Declaraci%C3%B3n_de_Princip... [7] http://wiki.partidopirata.com.ar/Bases_de_Acci%C3%B3n_Pol%C3...