
DemocracyOS: An online space for deliberation and voting on political proposals - elkingtowa
https://github.com/DemocracyOS/app
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joeyspn
How does this compares to Agora Voting[0], already used by 2 of the top 5
spanish political parties? I'm specially concerned about the
security/encryption of the system... Agora is a very powerful tool in this
regard.

[0] [https://github.com/agoravoting/agora-
ciudadana](https://github.com/agoravoting/agora-ciudadana)

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patcon
Agreed. It might need some UX love, but there are hundreds of person-hours
from intelligent folks that have gone into the technical underpinnings.

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ddoolin
The name was confusing, expected to see something about an Operating System?
Does OS stand for Online Space?

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SeoxyS
I agree. I was very confused at first, and almost did not click on the link
because I don't see the need for whatever a democracy "OS" could be.

However, this seems like a really neat organization management solution.
Voting and discussing formal proposals has never been a sexy proposition; and
this is the first tool that I've seen that attempts to improve that.

Now, it's going to require some much more serious security guarantee to be
used to govern any important organizations (governments, public corporations,
etc.). But as a way to manage smaller communities (e.g. online communities,
clubs, anything with smaller-scale voting, even potentially smaller
municipalities), I see great potential.

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saraid216
> Now, it's going to require some much more serious security guarantee to be
> used to govern any important organizations (governments, public
> corporations, etc.).

I don't think that's the real hurdle for scaling up. The issue for large-scale
democracy has always been that, because an individual's time is limited, it's
very hard for them to make a reasonable appraisal of everyone else's opinion.
If these comment threads were merely thousands of posts long, could you read
through more than one of them and still have a life? And that's only
thousands; the voting population of the US is a bit over 200 million.

I'm really, really looking for the tool that lets you successfully absorb
thousands of opinions around an issue within a reasonable time frame, without
intermediaries. That's the killer app for democracy.

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anonymousDan
One first step might be to filter out all opinions that are contrary to a set
of known facts.

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ende
Who controls the facts?

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chill1
From the Contributing doc:

> "Do not make a pull request withouth having run the app on your own. This
> means, you have to manually test (at least) that everything works."

Lack of automated testing for large projects makes it difficult for others to
contribute and it slows the development process down if manual testing is
required. I don't even see a document that outlines specifically what
"everything" is. How would you know what to test?

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jonalmeida
I think that may have been referring to formatting that is correctly formatted
to be visually appealing. I may be wrong though..

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jhrobert
There is some "delegation" implementation inside, ala "liquid democracy". This
is a nice mix of "direct" & "representative" democracy, a mix that I believe
is very promising to avoid corruption with representatives and lack of
participation with direct voting. See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy)

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piamancini
Yes, that is the key in many ways. It allows for a dynamic configuration of
preferences that the current system doesn't. It is on the roadmap but we
haven't developed it yet. Suggestions are naturally more than welcome.

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jhrobert
If an "example" is a "suggestion", you may want to have look at my Kudocracy
attempt:
[https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy](https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy)

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motters
This sounds ok, but the lack of a secret ballot could be a problem. Having
your name associated with a particular vote for a particular decision or party
can have repercussions if you do not belong to a privileged group.

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jhrobert
OTOH corruption & fraud is much easier with anonymity.

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robinhoodexe
>Browser support

>We support real browsers and IE10+

Had to laugh at this

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astrocat
Ironically, for all their efforts to make government decisions inclusive,
they're choosing to marginalize those who don't meet their tech standards -
and being kind of dickish about it. "Sorry Grandma, but you don't use a 'real'
browser or a smartypants-phone so bye." "Oh hey José, they only have IE8 at
the public library? Tough."

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ende
If you'd let your grandma use IE then you're a terrible grandchild.

