This document is part of a proposal to create a digital platform for voting with a so-called 'liquid' representation system. The proposal is divided into three parts. Each part will serve as a platform for facilitating and focusing discussion of the part following it. The decisions and ideas of those discussions will then be incorporated into that part when it's written.
The first describes the scope of the project, which users and organisations might find use for it, and why it's important.
The second part is a specification for the user experience and the basic functionality of the project.
This, the third part is a specification for the implementation details. The back end – the technology stack and the APIs. (TBD)
While researching the best way to do this, it was of course necessary to investigate all other organisations and projects that might have the same or similar goals. It can be counter-productive in open source development to compete with similar projects for users and developer resources, and in programming it is rarely sensible to write code for when the same or adequately similar code already exists.
A number of potential projects were found and investigated. Of the projects which seem match the goals and aspirations of these documents, three stood out: The World Parliament Experiment, which already has a basic liquid representation system implemented, Vocdoni, a cryptographic voting library and API, and The Democracy Earth Foundation, a world democratic organisation with its own set of democratic software tools including a carefully constructed decentralised identity system.
To save the reader time it should be pointed out here that we have decided to focus development efforts on the Vocdoni project at this time. The discussion of the other projects below is to show due diligence and discuss why they were not selected, as well as to spread the word about them as they are very interesting and worthwhile projects in their own right.
The World Parliament Experiment is a very interesting project and worth anyone's time to look into and maybe even participate in. It has the goal of gathering data about what would happen if world governance were structured along direct democratic principles. It automatically scrapes the policy decisions of world governance organisations like the U.N General Assembly and proposes each decision as a vote to all the users. This enables us all to see what decisions average people would have taken in each case. It includes a basic, non-categorised liquid representation system and a suite of basic voting and discussion tools.
Although the scope of WPE is somewhat orthogonal to the goals proposed in these documents, the tools they are developing are quite a good fit. Much of the voting and representation infrastructure could be generalised and expanded to meet the goals of the project proposed here.
Vocdoni is at its core a software library for voting. It also includes a web interface project for the most common use-case, and an SDK for developers who wish to use the library as part of an external project. It uses modern cryptographic methods to decentralise and anonymise voting. It supports alternative voting and tallying methods and the goal of the project appears to be supporting the widest possible variety of different use-cases for all voting situations.
The library has a basic delegation/representation mechanic but no liquid representation. Other than that it pretty much aligns perfectly with both the scope and goals of these documents. Discussion on the developer discord revealed that features like liquid representation and revocable votes would be welcomed. The decentralised and cryptographically verified nature of the project are things that are desirable, and were only left out of these documents because they were considered too difficult and labour intensive for this scale of project.
The Vocdoni project is as close to what these documents are proposing as we are ever likely to find. It appears to be under intensive development by a competent team and is well documented and supported.
Democracy Earth is a project intending to set up an alternative world government from the ground up. It is blockchain based and includes its own digital currency. The main innovation of the foundation is a decentralised, web-of-trust based identity system which relies on human to human verification. It also uses a system of voting which is typical for blockchain based organisations, but can seem somewhat counter-intuitive for outsiders. Each user recieves a certain amount of voting currency, which they can spend voting on issues or give to someone else, thereby effectively delegating their decision making to that other person. A voter can spend as much or as little of their voting power on each issue meaning people will on average vote multiple times on issues that are important to them, and not at all on other issues.
The scope and implementation of the foundation are very different and largely incompatible with the system being proposed in these documents. The form of liquid voting favoured in cryptocurrency circles is problematic. The exact issues with it are not within the scope of this document. We are committed to a more traditional allocation of voting power. In addition the liquid representation of such a system is very weak, and there does not seem to be a clear way to strengthen it. It is difficult for a user to trace where his voting 'currency' was spent if delegated to another, as there can be a network of such transactions which require some analysis to fully map out. There is also no obvious way for a voter to earmark specific delegates to cast those votes in a specific scope, making delegation more of a popularity contest and less a question of expertise. Lastly Democracy Earth is very much an attempt at world governance, and repurposing those specialised tools for online communities, companies etc. while not impossible, would require some modifications.
Given the huge differences in goals and scope between, it does not seem viable to use this codebase for the project we are proposing. It should however be possible to create an interface for using the DEF identity system as an optional input for the identity of voters in any system we end up creating or working on.
Given the significant overlap between the Vocdoni project and this one, it seems logical and sensible to direct development work towards the Vocdoni project at this time, instead of attempting to create a new project from scratch. This decision may change over time and edits will be made to this document if it does. Additionally if new potential projects are found they will be added to the list above.