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"Script: Did you know the word politics comes from ancient Greek "polis" - the city state in which the first kind of democracy was carried out by its citizens? They, like us today, identified problems and discussed them. We do it on the streets and in bars and sometimes begrudgingly at thanksgiving dinners. In Athens the citizens all came together on a designated hill outside of the city to discuss current issues and create policy solutions. Every free man, literally only free men by the way, had a say and a vote to decide on a policy for each issue. Thus word on the street was transformed into politics. This input from citizens into policy making is what we call direct democracy. Modern nation states, like Germany in our example here, do not share one common public space where all citizens could meet. Reaching an understanding about common issues merely by talking them over is unfeasible for the amount of people that would have to be included in our modern societies. The problems of our time are very much different from those of ancient Greece in three ways: Because of the diversity among our citizens mitigating their issues is far more complex. Moreover, to be a citizen today is no longer a vocation. Unlike the men of Athens we usually have to work to earn our living and do not have the time to spend all of our day pondering and discussing political issues. That may be part of the reason why many people today feel they do not have the adequate expert knowledge about those issues to contribute to the political sphere. What most modern democracies do instead, then, is have designated representatives from the populace devote their full time to be professional politicians. They carry out the public discussion of issues in our place. Mass media channels their discussions back to our societies. But only the politicians get to decide on those issues in the designated political arena. We, the public, do get the chance to vote for a representative of one world view or po

"Liquid Democracy is a fast, decentralized, collaborative question-answering system, which works by enabling chained answer recommendation. It occupies the middle ground somewhere between direct and representative democracy, and is designed to ensure that the things we all hold in common stay properly maintained (by small, stealthy, distributed teams of anarchist kung-fu badasses, if need be), even in the face of radical technological change."

"The Liquid Democracy Association is a non-profit and non-partisan organisation that works on innovative ideas and projects for democratic participation. Our goal is to establish a transparent democratic principle in both the political and social domain based on strengthening the citizens' participation. We are working on ideas and projects that will make our modern democracy more transparent and flexible. The work of the Liquid Democracy Association encompasses both the theoretical conception and the practical implementation of software projects."

"Liquid Democracy is one of the boldest contemporary innovations in democratic decision-making. The idea uses web technology that allows users to interact in new ways. Its primary innovators are located in Berlin, and Germany has been the first to adopt and apply Liquid Democracy systems in the context of political parties, parliamentary processes, and some organizations."

"Online platforms for participatory democracy are flourishing in Italy and they are being initiated by civil society and local governments alike. Some of these tools are limited to 'social reporting,' where citizens are asked to recount problems and disruptions; others strive for empowering people with some sort of liquid democracy that allows people to debate and even propose legislation. But all of these platforms grew out of a deep dissatisfaction toward Italian politics and politicians, as shown by the high level of abstention in the 2013 national elections as well as the contemporary success of the Five Star Movement, an anti-establishment party that suddenly became the second most popular in the parliament's lower house. In the last few years, the economic crisis, the corruption scandals and the governments' inability to make structural reforms - such as changing the current electoral law, which establishes a proportional voting system that does not allow citizens to vote directly for individual candidates - fueled anger as well as political will among the public to demand that government give them a say on all levels of decision-making. "

The information revolution is disrupting every aspect of society. Newspaper sales plummet. Television watching declines. Book publishing is being transformed. Networks expand and proliferate throughout our workplaces and our everyday lives. Politics is also in line for a major disruption. The new norms of participation, inclusiveness and open communication are infiltrating democracy and the era of politicians is coming to an end. The time is ripe to remake democracy for the twenty-first century.

"The Commons Connection Around early 2000, when the name "liquid democracy" was first coined, questions about the maintenance of civil infrastructure swirled with especially fearsome intensity. I found myself thinking about commons (please ignore the stuff near the bottom of that page - it's quite obsolete) as a wider conceptual framework in which to include civil infrastructure. I started wondering if all tasks traditionally relegated to government could be thought of in terms of commons maintenance. So, I wondered... Could we not think of this fast, decentralized, collaborative decision making system as a means to ensure that the things we all hold in common - like civil infrastructure - stay properly maintained... By small, stealthy, distributed teams of anarchist kung-fu badasses, if need be... Even in the face of radical technological change...? For that too-grandiose purpose, Liquid Democracy was designed."

"In this post we will show some practical examples of how liquid democracy can be understood in terms of, and make use of results from spectral graph theory. For more background please see [Vigna2009]. Wikipedia says:"

" This week, Beth Noveck kicked off her talk at the Personal Democracy Forum conference by reflecting on the the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S), Italy's 5 Star Movement, and their use of Liquid Feedback (LQFB), a software for policymaking and political discussion. After its initial deployment by the German Pirate Party, the software has gained a lot of popularity over the past few years, and most recently it has been adopted by several M5S groups in regions such as Lombardy, Lazio and Sicily. True to their principles of participatory democracy and free access to the internet and information (and in response to criticism about how they run their business), it is no surprise that these two parties have been searching for a platform to engage their members more directly. But is Liquid Feedback the answer?"

" Democracy is the gold standard for good governance in modernity. Modern democracy is also fantastically expensive. After all, you only have to write a constitution, establish legislative, judicial and executive branches in permanent opposition to each other, ensure that they have enough assistance to understand the issues they're dealing with, build a civil service so that actual work can get done, regulate that civil service so it can't take over, establish a market sector to deal with everything the government shouldn't do, regulate the market sector so it can't take over, build a media infrastructure to ensure the people in whose stead you govern understand what you're doing, hire more government aides to talk to the media, regulate the lobbyists who talk to the media, hire more aides to talk to the lobbyists… "

reinventing democracy

With an election around the corner, a brand new political party has been born The Flux Party has no policies, no platform. Instead, members of the public would vote 'yes' or 'no' on each bill before parliament via the Flux app, which would instruct the party's senator how to vote.  The party was founded by tech-savvy Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro, who have experience working in the Bitcoin industry. The 500 members required for AEC registration were recruited, largely through social media, in a matter of weeks

Thomas Fazi's critique of the "Democracy in Europe Movement 2025" satellites around the one big challenge that has been envisioned by political innovators, coming from grassroot, anarchic, socialist or just persistently democratic thinking ever since at least 1968, that only now is becoming realistic to address, the idea of a continental or even global assembly of humanity to work out policy together.