
DemocracyOS - sinak
http://democracyos.org
======
broodbucket
As with others, I am really struggling to see why this has "OS" in the name.
It's not an operating system. I'm guessing it stands for "open source", which
isn't really an acronym people use in favour of OSS/FOSS (probably because OS
already has a very well established meaning).

Can someone share some insight on the naming decision?

~~~
jlgosse
Agreed, why not just choose "Democracy"?

~~~
santisiri
I actually know who owns democracy.com but still, democracy reminisces a 2000
year old system.. we need to update that.

~~~
codyh1
In the spirit of the US Military. "Improved Democracy" Or "Updated Democracy".
If you're not familiar with this...search US Army IOTV to get an idea.

~~~
jeff_marshall
How about "Future Democracy System" or "Joint Democracy Platform" ;)

------
yourad_io
This is amazing. I have dreamt of a system like this and armchair-proposed it
to friends countless times. I am always faced with derision in such
conversations[1] - but I believe that a secure implementation of such an idea
could be the future of democracy.

Or rather, its past. Ancient Greek democracy wasn't perfect (slavery; not
everyone was citizen) but it was much better than our current system of
professional politicians and uber-powerful political parties and lobbies.

The small, first struggle will be to implement it as securely as possible -
for this you'll likely need to distribute specific hardware[2]. The second and
largest struggle would be to actually change constitutions and take power away
from the organizations that have hoarded it for decades[3].

There is a lot of scepticism in these comments. My infosec and analytical side
is obviously going to go into full-attack mode when there is something solid
to take apart - BUT for the time being I'd like to say a huge "bravo" to both
this team and YC for backing them.

I hope you change the world.

[1] how would it work; why would people care to get involved;
execution/implementation issues; fraud; ...

[2] something between RSA tokens and dedicated mobile voting machines

[3] probably centuries

~~~
gvilarino
Thanks for your insights!

Totally agree; finding out what democratic interaction should look like and
how it should work for societies in the current hyper-connected paradigm is
-at best- something that will take a lot of time.

There is, undoubtedly, a technological challenge to address, but moreover I
think the greatest challenge is the cultural one. We're risen to think
communites (countries, towns, organisations, etc.) should be managed in one of
so many fashions, but we're willing to ask ourselves time and again what other
possible ways there are for doing this, and implement on that.

We may not nail it soon, but we'll definitely try as long as we can.

------
jtmurphy
Political systems should protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
I worry that Democracy OS's idea fails to address this issue. If the
politicians always vote with the majority, what if the majority wants to
violate the rights of the minority?

~~~
frozenport
The remedy is to require more than a majority threshold for decisions to be
made. For example, a decision could require 80% agreement before it becomes
law.

In the USA we handle these issues with a representation by region (states)
rather than by population. Solutions feel more like post-processing, then data
gathering.

~~~
wyager
That doesn't defend against tyranny of the majority; it just requires a larger
majority.

In the USA we defend against tyranny of the majority with the constitution.
The constitution places strict limits on what the majority can do to the
minority through governmental force.

~~~
jtmurphy
I agree with wyager.

A political system should be a strong constitution that defines the rights of
individuals. Something like DemocracyOS should be used to engage the
population into ensuring that political actions are in fact constitutional and
just.

~~~
rbf_
I think what we really need is ConstitutionalRepublicOS which would be a bit
more complicated. But by defining strong constitutional invariants with regard
to individual rights perhaps we could pre-strikedown unconstitutional laws
before they are enacted. That would require a more precise legal language that
let's you run some kind of static analysis against against the laws however.

~~~
piamancini
maybe we could think about a two-tier system were we delegate only decisions
that should be taken our of the hands of majority and to the citizens the huge
number of decisions that we can make that affect our every-day lives. I think
the only way for citizens to be responsible for the decisions we make is by
start making them. We've outsourced decision-making for a far too long time.

~~~
rbf_
I do think some of the divisive issues that are taken up often end up cloaking
other matters that should be focused upon. Perhaps with strong enough
invariants and a pre enactment filter it would much harder to use divisive
social issues politically. Maybe we could replace polls with votes on some
things and have better recall mechanics too. I think a lot of the dysfunction
is due to the fact we can and have passed radically unconstitutional laws in
the past to great detriment to the entire population.

------
jonnybgood
So, this platform allows policy to be decided by a "technorati"[1] class?

Are there individuals with low-income, little to no internet access, don't
know what a blockchain or open source is, have hectic work schedules with the
addition of raising a family participating on your platform?

From what I can tell this platform is giving more power to those who already
have some sense of power. This platform does not alleviate the problem of
those in society who do not have any power or say in political processes. It
may even be argued this platform may contribute to the problem.

[1] Those who have the privilege, time, and monetary means of internet access,
acquiring/have knowledge of internet technologies, and being a participant.

~~~
santisiri
The only people that believe that internet access is only for the rich, is
rich people.

We come from Argentina, a latinamerican country and we are very aware of the
social challenges we face.

But it's not just a technological solution, we ALSO created a Political party
that does a lot of offline activism helping society understand the power they
have using digital technology.

The Net Party ran for elections in 2013 and got 1.2% of the votes in Buenos
Aires, it was an incredible first election for a small party and that led to
DemocracyOS being implemented officially by the Congress.

Thanks to that, a lot of bills got attention. For example: Nureses now have
better working conditions thanks to the action taken on DemocracyOS for the
Congress of Buenos Aires.

Read more about it here: [http://democracyos.org/about-
us](http://democracyos.org/about-us)

~~~
jonnybgood
"Its candidates are committed to always vote in Congress according to what
citizens vote online."

You've built a system that requires privilege. And you're giving power only to
those who have that privilege.

You didn't address the fact there are those who do not have that privilege.
Helping people understand the power of digital technology is meaningless if
there are those who do not even have the digital technology.

Are you going to buy them the digital technology? Are you going to pay for
their internet access? How are you going to provide equal privilege?

EDIT: Who is your demographic?

~~~
moe
_Are you going to buy them the digital technology? Are you going to pay for
their internet access? How are you going to provide equal privilege?_

It may come as a shock to you, but poor people have cellphones and internet,
too.

~~~
jonnybgood
And the ones who don't?

~~~
moe
The current world population is 7 billion people.

Approximately 1 billion smartphones are sold every year.

Do the math.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)

[2]
[http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2665715](http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2665715)

~~~
falcolas
Because nobody buys more than one phone ever. Those two numbers have no impact
on each other.

~~~
moe
What do you think happens to all the old phones of the people who buy new
phones?

------
striking
What about the monitoring and modification of online communities by the GCHQ?
This doesn't even look resistant to that.

Also, what about traditional ballot stuffing?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_100#Hacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_100#Hacking)
anyone?

I could only trust this if there were attached a mathematical proof of its
usability. Otherwise, I kind of doubt it's worth anyone's time.

~~~
piamancini
We are working to validate democracyOS votes with the blockchain. Happy to
listen to any other suggestions

~~~
tebou
Please check out: [https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/2014/08/30/every-vote-
count...](https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/2014/08/30/every-vote-counts-
ensuring-integrity-in-large-scale-electronic-voting/)

This is a paper describing an end-to-end verifiable self-enforcing electronic
voting system called DRE-i (Direct Recording Electronic with Integrity).

In my opinion this is a superior solution to any other electronic voting
system developed to date.

~~~
piamancini
Thank you!

------
joneil
I think this is great - it's an attempted solution to an important, difficult
problem, and they've got a number of interesting angles. In particular I think
the branching of proposals, and hopefully being able to diff / blame, could be
as important, or more important, than trusted voting.

I look forward to seeing more of the implementation. Congrats on the launch,
and thanks for working on a difficult problem that we all need to see solved.

~~~
piamancini
Thank you! Totally agree with the branching aspect and yesterday we were
playing with some ideas to order debate in pros&cons. Also, we are looking for
funding to form a blockchain team, to validate democracyos votes in bc. All
ideas are super welcome! pia@democracyos.org

------
dataker
As a Brazilian, I find this initiative to be extremely important.

However, I've recently seen 'democratic' videos urging for a military
dictatorship. Millions of Facebook users shared the message and ~1M people
protested last sunday, while trying to kick out our president.

So I wonder if, contradictorily, some might exploit DemocracyOS to install
anti-democratic regimes.

Is there a way to ensure such thing won't happen?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HR9vqx9oTQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HR9vqx9oTQ)

~~~
piamancini
It's crazy what's happening in Brazil these days, as a close
neighbour(Argentinean) it pains me to see such upheaval. To your point, we
could set up a protocol that the SaaS version of DemocracyOS can only be used
inside the limits of a constitution, but we have no control over the Open
Source version. It's like twitter it's a platform for expressing oneself and
it's content moderation is v. limited. It's all our responsibility to make the
best possible use of the tools we create.

~~~
dataker
Spot on. I still believe the beauty of the project is that it's open-sourced,
so our community of developers would be able to make wiser choices for the
country.

Infinitely better than corrupted politicians.

~~~
piamancini
For sure! Being Open Source it's fundamental to the spirit and vision of
DemocracyOS.

------
gus_massa
When this is successful, I don't understand how you will combat the capture of
the platform form the traditional parties.

A traditional party can ask their supporters to vote for them in the
elections, and then ask them to vote for the same laws in this platform. They
don't ever need to discuss, or they can discuss and discuss and vote for the
official party decision nevertheless. So the party gets double votes, unless
the other parties also try to abuse the system. (If everybody abuse the
system, the biggest party get double votes.)

In the comments sections of the newspapers is very usual to see very politized
users and real or alleged accusations of astroturfing, shills, suckpupets,
meatpupets, 50-cents-army, choriplaneros, ...

~~~
gvilarino
Super-valid concern. The truth is that very-politically-involved people aren't
that big a percentage of the overall population (at least from the numbers
I've seen - usually around 10%). So we're trying to find ways of making it
easy for that other 90% to engage in civic participation. If we get to nail
that, then even any 'arranged' participation would not account for a
significant part of the votes for a given issue.

Also, from our experience with DemocracyOS, users actually participate in
stuff they actually care about, and not equally on _every_ sort of issue. So
it's interesting to see how larger userbases would unfold with apps like
DemocracyOS or similar.

------
alecco
Very questionable people behind it (close second hand). All hype and self
promotion. Zero experience. Shunned often in most online forums in Argentina,
save TedX. I really don't get how YC decided to back this project.

------
santisiri
Hi guys, I'm one of the founders. Glad to answer all your questions.

~~~
na85
Why did you choose to implement Yet Another Blockchain Solution?

Assuming 3-letter agencies haven't already broken it, they will sooner or
later, and now all your users will be susceptible to having their votes
manipulated at the whim of US intelligence.

~~~
santisiri
Im still waiting for proof on this claims. Regardless, the blockchain is still
a protocol lacking good applications and products. But its fundamentals
described in Satoshis papers + the traction it got, speak for themselves. It's
a technology with growth. Show me another one like it, and I'll be glad to
study it.

------
jpetersonmn
Maybe I'm slow, but I've seen this a couple times now and went to the website,
read the "about" section and I still don't understand what this is or what
problem it's solving. I think OS in the name lead me to immediately assume it
was another operating system. So considering I thought it was a new operating
system, the more I read the more underwhelmed I am. Good luck on the project,
but IMO you've not named it appropriately nor described how it uniquely solves
any problem. Sorry if that sounds harsh, just giving honest feedback.

------
santisiri
Guys, if you want to play with a secret version of DemocracyOS (the SaaS
implementation), help us here:
[http://hub.democracyos.com](http://hub.democracyos.com)

------
sharp11
This is very inspiring stuff and very exciting that YC is backing it! A key
thing that Pia said in her TED talk: technology is only a tool here, cultural
change and reinvention is necessary. I haven't had a chance to play with
DemocracyOS yet, but the focus does somewhat seem to be on "direct democracy"
(as opposed to "representative"), and as others have pointed out, that's
fraught with problems.

But I hope and believe this is just a first, experimental step. And I hope
that next steps will be informed by the rich tradition of experimentation in
"participatory, deliberative democracy". This includes things like citizen
assemblies, citizen juries, participatory budgeting, wisdom councils, etc.
What these approaches have in common is a blending of citizen participation
with informed deliberation, often including a random sampling (of citizens).

As two superb examples of this, I would point to the Citizen's Assembly on
Electoral Reform (British Columbia, Canada, 2004) and the Dialogue with the
City (Perth, Australia, 2003). Some really useful books: Tao of Democracy (Tom
Atlee), Deliberative Democracy Handbook (Gastil & Levine), Deliberative
Democracy in America (Ethan Leib).

~~~
piamancini
We met Tom Atlee lately, he is fantastic. His insights on how to move forward,
the importance of diversity in the process, where super sharp. I would add to
the list, When People Speak by Fishkin and check Marina Gorbis' book on The
Nature of the Future, specially the chapter on the future of government. Her
proposal of a new large, agora of randomly chosen citizens is super
interesting and challenging.

~~~
sharp11
Glad to hear you met Tom! He's our secret national treasure. It's awesome to
hear that you are already plugged in to this area of thinking. Thanks for the
Gorbis reference, sounds similar to Ethan Leib's proposal for a fourth branch
of federal gov't.

------
jordanpg
I like the sentiment _very much_ and I think the demo platform looks like a
solid foundation. Not crazy, like others, about the "OS".

That said, I think that, as far as revolutionizing elections/politics in any
important sense, something far more drastic than this will be required.
Finding new ways to debate hot political questions of the day, as a function
of what is coming out of the news (any news outlet), is missing the point.

There is a lack of disengagement with politics, and moreover, it is absolutely
justified. The manner in which most of the discussions are conducted are
nonsensical. There is an abject lack of nuance and thoughtfulness. Discussions
are necessarily vague and always conducted with superlative certainty.

Here is a fact: there is not enough information on this page[1] to form a
reasoned opinion about the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act. There probably
isn't enough information on 20 pages. Yet that is the script. Learn about a
complex issue in 60 seconds, and then decide where you come down on it. It's
patent nonsense.

If there is to be a revolution, it will need to deal with the reality that
there is a facade between the machinations of governments and corporations and
the people, and that facade is the news. The news is our window into vast,
vast complexity and the basis for making choices that supposedly affect our
local quality of life all the way up to the direction of history. So long as
the important decisions are organized in this top-down hierarchy of power, a
website isn't going to change much.

No, the most promising ideas about upending hierarchies try to actually
redistribute the power from the top. Imagine a politician running for office
in the context of some website like this, who, through some formal, public
process, granted certain levels of access to online advocates, in the event of
a win. For example, someone able to marshal something in the order of 10 votes
would be promised one lunch in the first 2 years.

The details are less important than the inversion of power hierarchies that
new technologies enable. Until that can be practically harnessed, approaching
electoral matters along conventional axes is unlikely to get much traction.

[1][http://demo.democracyos.org/law/54766690be6cbe0c0023e08f](http://demo.democracyos.org/law/54766690be6cbe0c0023e08f)

~~~
santisiri
Very insightful, there's no doubt we have a lot of work to do.

------
moe
This looks like Liquid Feedback[1] done right.

Liquid Feedback was a "liquid democracy" platform developed by the german
pirate party. Both the software and the party are now largely dissolved;
ironically killed by their over-zealous interpretation of democracy, which
resulted in a lack of direction and rabid dilettantism.

[1] [http://liquidfeedback.org](http://liquidfeedback.org)

~~~
santisiri
Yep, you got it. We actually started contacting them, but they were already
doing private consulting + all the source code of LF is in german, impossible
to understand. And the UX, well, it wasn't very usable.

But it was a great initiative that we researched 3 years ago when we began.

------
vannevar
I've seen a few of these now over the years, and I've come to believe a
successful implementation should combine argument mapping, consensus building,
and a trust network. Just framing an issue and having a comments section isn't
enough; that form is ubiquitous across the Internet yet hasn't proven a viable
way on its own to actually make decisions.

~~~
piamancini
I agree, we have a long roadmap ahead and all your points should be in it. If
you wish to contribute, by all means github.com/democracyos. It's an open
source project.

------
pekk
If people scrape together a few votes and do not get their wishes rammed
through, they will complain exactly like they complained about the White House
petition site - because it was not a direct way of getting in legislation to
(say) legalize marijuana. I don't see how DemocracyOS can solve that problem.

------
vezzy-fnord
The idea of "open source governance" is hardly new. I'd imagine such a system
in the form of a web app would be swamped with irrelevant queries. Assuming an
idealistic direct democracy where citizens draft new laws or modify existing
ones, the feedback loop of constantly changing legal information to its
application would be overwhelming. On the flip side, too much unaddressed
issues and slow or wasteful processes would create apathy.

Personally I always thought the most attractive model for such an endeavor is
to store laws in a markup format, and go through the old school route of
mailing lists and patches. You'd be making use of highly tested infrastructure
and actually require for participants to put a little effort in learning.

~~~
saraid216
Well, this has the fun distinction of actually being functioning code in
active use. I'm pretty happy to see some "open source governance" that isn't
just talk. I'm only aware of one another project that has crossed that line.

~~~
kpatrick
I'm actually pitching a similar idea to a major corporation.

Here is a reading list if you are interested in the subject. There have been
(at least) four conferences on the subject of online deliberation.

[https://www.loomio.org/](https://www.loomio.org/)

[http://wikis.evergreen.edu/civicintelligence/index.php/ELibe...](http://wikis.evergreen.edu/civicintelligence/index.php/ELiberate)

[http://odbook.stanford.edu/static/filedocument/2009/11/15/Ch...](http://odbook.stanford.edu/static/filedocument/2009/11/15/Chapter_26._Schuler.pdf)

[http://www.publicsphereproject.org/ncn/](http://www.publicsphereproject.org/ncn/)

[http://online-deliberation.net/](http://online-deliberation.net/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_deliberation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_deliberation)

[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=134286...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1342861&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D1342861)

[http://www.virtualagora.org/](http://www.virtualagora.org/)

[http://parliament.sourceforge.net/ftf-
paper.pdf](http://parliament.sourceforge.net/ftf-paper.pdf) Parliament: A
Module for Parliamentary Procedure Software

[http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/IS/archive/henry/RobertReport.pdf](http://www.cs.uu.nl/groups/IS/archive/henry/RobertReport.pdf)
Prakken, Henry. 1998. Formalizing robert’s rules of order: An experiment in
automating mediation of group decision making. Tech. Rep. REP-FIT-1998-12,
GMD.

~~~
saraid216
Huh. I was briefly exposed to CSCW in college, but somehow I never made the
leap to its relevance to modern democratic procedure. Very neat. Thank you for
the list.

------
freddier
I love that it's not about goverments but governance. Open Source projects can
use this. Apartment buildings.

Obviously getting modern tools to shitty politicians is always going to be the
focus with things like DemocracyOS, but I'm really excited to see this for
deciding stuff on the small communities I'm a part of.

The one weird thing is that they're non-profit, open source. I hope they
survive on that model. Is it only donations?

~~~
santisiri
We believe that you cannot put a price tag on the right to participate. So the
nonprofit is a fundamental first step in our mission.

We want to figure a self-sustainable model, donations can only get you that
far. The task ahead of us is a big one: we want to build governance for the
internet society.

------
mudil
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the
people. -- Oscar Wilde

------
mmelody
At first glance I find it very similar to the idea of Liquid Democracy of the
Pirate Parties. Is there any significant difference? Days ago at HN, I heard
that such systems failed greatly due to endless quarrels and external
mistrust.

------
codyh1
How will this assist with those not readily capable of engaging with
technology? Or perhaps I'm not fully understanding all of it.

------
lucio
There's some information, you need to know. In Argentina, people has no
representation. You don't vote for a "district representative" as in the USA.
Here people vote on a "party-list" called here "lista sabana"
([http://babeldigital.com.ar/data/img_cont/img_imagenes/img_gr...](http://babeldigital.com.ar/data/img_cont/img_imagenes/img_gr/665_imagen_unica.jpg))

The "lista sabana" is a large list of party-candidates (in 6pt font) headed by
the "leader" or "caudillo" name (in 62pt font).

If the "caudillo" has a 40% approval rate, the first 40% of people on the 6pt-
font list WILL enter the congress, so the firsts spots on the lists are
literally SOLD beforehand, based on the "leader" popularity index. The spots
can also be exchanged for "popular support" with labor union leaders (to herd
people into political rallies).

So, here the "congressman" have no direct relation to the voters, they've only
a direct dependency on the "leader". They do as they're told or else they will
not be included in the list on the next elections.

 _There is no such thing as "constituents" in this system._

That's a reason why DemocracyOS and the "Net Party" are viable here. _When
representation is completely broken, direct-democracy sounds good_.

Here's a quote from a document on Paraguayan system (the same system):

"But what if the elected representatives of the legislature were not voted in
directly by the people? Would that discredit the authority of the legislative
branch? The actual voting method in Paraguayan politics for a legislator to
enter government is to lobby for their name to enter a “lista sabana,” a list
of names on a sheet that represents the party candidates. The people then vote
for that party list, rather than for the individual. Party leaders can then
decide which positions to give to the party faithful. In this way the
political class can make deals, play at back room politics to add their name
to the list, exchange favors with voters and backers, and conduct business
behind closed doors. The Congress can then vote to apportion more funds from
the Treasury to fund their election campaigns, increase their salaries and
benefits, and buy their votes with political largesse. The system reinforces
the worst excesses of political cronyism, including links to crony capitalism.
Ultimately it erodes the social trust between the governed and the governors
and creates inefficiencies in a country’s economics. Attempts have been made
to remove, or “unblock,” the “lista sabana” by allowing voters to choose
individual candidates to the legislature, but so far these attempts have
failed."

------
alizhd
I wish people in Pakistan used this. it would really help that country.

~~~
santisiri
try starting a democracy here:
[http://hub.democracyos.com](http://hub.democracyos.com)

------
gaigepr
"We support real browsers and IE10+" \--
[https://github.com/democracyos/app#browser-
support](https://github.com/democracyos/app#browser-support)

I chuckled.

------
gghootch
Love the direction this is going. Dreamt about such a system in the past as
well. Looking forward to a mobile first experience which enables me to weigh-
in on (local) issues in real-time.

~~~
piamancini
hi! some pilot live implementations with council-members in the US:
marfarrell.democracyos.org (SF) benkallos.democracyos.org (NYC). Would love to
know your thoughts. pia@democracyos.org

~~~
gvilarino
typo :)

it's markfarrell.democracyos.org

------
kang
Bitcoin is the real democracy of the internet era.

------
seppo0010
The technical quality of the project has been so far debatable[1][2].

The Partido de la Red results seem to reveal a problem that is obvious at
first sight: the underrepresentation of those who need representation the
most[3].

I have doubts about whether direct democracy is a good idea, at all[4].
Summarizing, dividing the burden of decision making is inefficient for the
population at large, and it does not guarantee better results.

People behind this project admit that this does not fully solve the problem it
is attempting to solve[5].

Even if I could ignore the previous statement (which of course I can't), I
wonder if the advantages of moving from an indirect democracy to a direct
democracy are enough to even try to solve the problems. I think the cost of
switching is high, and I cannot see any benefit.

In USA the main problem with democracy is the lack of interest of population
in government elections. Does micromanaging decisions make this problem better
or worse? The question is valid. It could be better if the feeling is that no
matter who wins nobody will represent the voter; it could be worse if people
do not care about the decisions that have to be make. There are other possible
options, of course, but I don't really know if this solves problems or makes
it worse.

I wonder how selection bias would affect decision making. People will mostly
vote on subjects they feel passionate about, and ignore the others. Which will
probably lead to what programmers know as bikeshedding[6].

Now I would like to highlight the positive of thinking about this problems and
attempting a solution. Also following up Congress's debates and actions is
something that should happen more often, for example Congressional Dish[7]
attempts to do so.

[1] (Spanish) [https://medium.com/@alejandrocrosa/votarias-a-un-partido-
que...](https://medium.com/@alejandrocrosa/votarias-a-un-partido-que-te-
garantiza-fraude-d412f1a6992c)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/576422593244299264](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/576422593244299264)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9245536)

[4] (Spanish) [https://catdevmind.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/democracia-
direc...](https://catdevmind.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/democracia-directa/)

[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244628)

[6]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Trivialit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality)

[7] [http://www.congressionaldish.com/](http://www.congressionaldish.com/)

~~~
santisiri
It's not "direct democracy". It's just democracy. If you trace back the term
used by the Greeks, they called both the technology and the concept agora.
Etymologically, agora means "speaking in public", "thinking with others" and
in many verses it's used as antonym of war.

Democracy is always a work in progress. Otherwise it would be a totalitarian
concept.

So what we are trying to understand is simply democracy but for the digital
age. Using computers and networks, and the power of software. Open source,
collaborative free software.

~~~
seppo0010
> It's not "direct democracy". It's just democracy.

Uh? I think we are in a Representative Democracy[1] and what DemocracyOS
proposes is a Direct Democracy[2]. It is not "just democracy" since both
Representative and Direct democracies are forms of democracy.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy)

~~~
santisiri
You're to tied to theory, I'm talking from an abstraction: democracy as a
force in society unleashed when no single ideology dominates a culture.

------
fiatjaf
Votes? Really?

~~~
santisiri
More than willing to figure out the ways of doing consensus. Yet any
enforcement on the need to consent some perceive it as a dangerous dictatorial
pattern.

------
stevecode
FYI OS means Operating System not Voting System.

~~~
santisiri
means both things :)

~~~
stevecode
how so? o.O

------
benwilber0
this trend toward naming your pseudo-company "somethingOS" is getting really
annoying.

~~~
mikermcneil
that's true-- for these guys it actually makes sense though based on what
they're doing IMO

~~~
andars
Maybe I'm just missing it, but why? I associate OS only with operating
systems, and these guys don't seem to be making an OS.

~~~
santisiri
Open Source / Open Society / work too.

