Why shall we not all get into the parliament by next elections?

Online democracy is becoming a buzz word without much action. It is time to make it tangible and relevant!

Imagine this: in the next election cycle, one independent candidate makes it to the parliament running a campaign suggesting that, s/he will act upon decisions taken on an online platform where every citizen may create an account.

There are simply two functions the platform will perform for this representative:
1- all proposed legislations will be debated and voted upon by citizens
2- new legislation (and also questions to government) will be proposed by citizens

The process to deliver these two considers the experiences with e-democracy so far, and comes up with an effective solution set.

In order to ensure decision-making is legitimate, the platform uses a proxy-voting tool, which ensures that there is 100% participation at all times, yet everyone is free to vote directly.

In order to deliver strong legislation proposals, the platform incorporates an idea market, where the policy makers are betting to win credits by generating proposals, which would be legislated.

Agenda:
The workshop will deliver an understanding of the proposed system during the first part, followed by a simulation with the (willing and computerized) participants. Workshop aims to create inspiration and potential future engagement opportunities along with areas for improvement for the simulated democracy process.

About:
weDecide is a Danish start-up supporting democratic, efficient and legitimate collaboration and decision‐making process for its client communities

When:
Preferably in the afternoon

For Whom:
Politicians, policy makers, activists, distant e-democracy sympathizers, anyone who cares for better democracy (even skeptics)

Justification:

Representative democracy as we know is utterly outdated. Think about how much we incorporate internet in exercising our presence as a consumer, laborer, and investor. We can pretty much realize all these functions, online.

Yet, our citizenship is lagging behind. We are not engaged in carrying out our preferences to reality as citizens. Those from Switzerland and California perhaps have an upper hand on this with their referenda. Still, citizens do not have a platform where they actively propose and debate, and take final decisions on public manners. We are not utilizing the many to many relationship web 2.0 offers.

The democratic institutions are more than century old, with mild adjustments. The reason societies shied away from direct democracy was that the cost of communication and incorporation of every citizen was unbearable. Thus, we live in societies where a national representative has vote power of anywhere one hundred thousand to one million citizens.

Representative system has many shortcomings, which produced a large group of skeptics, and a sizeable group of rejectionists of politics all together. Firstly, representatives have misaligned interests with their electorate: often, their private interest competes with public interest. Then, there isn’t enough transparency for citizens to react about what is proposed, by whom, with which reasons, and what are the different considerations about the decision. Feedback opportunities are limited: one must sit and wait until the next election is due if not happy with current representatives. Finally, representatives’ physical and mental capacity constitutes bottlenecks in delivering great public initiatives.