Media

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CNN: Fed up with politics?… – The “Liquid Feedback” generation

The Economist: The ayes have it

The New York Times: Direct Democracy, 2.0

The New York Times: New Politics, Ahoy!

This is a collection of questions we were asked by journalists and our respective answers. The quotes can be used in full or part as long as they remain in the intended context and the source is provided. If in doubt please contact us by email.

Could you tell me a little about how the software was launched? For example, was there one person who first had the idea — how did it progress?

In 2009 we (Jan Behrens, Axel Kistner, Andreas Nitsche and Björn Swierczek) started to develop ideas of what a plattform for inner party democracy has to provide and what can be left to the natural development. There is no single “inventor”as we closely discussed everything from the first day.
Axel Kistner

What were the main assumptions and construction elements when you started the development of LiquidFeedback?

There will always be visonaries (individuals or small groups) to start spreading an idea. During a structured discussion period everybody in the organization should be able to learn about their ideas, to suggest changes, to suggest alternatives. And of course everybody should be able to vote about the issue in the end.

Our solution should provide the rules for big groups with real conflicts to organize without any interaction from a moderator hence this would be too much power. This predefined process with quantification of feedback (support, potential support, suggestions) in combination with Liquid Democracy (transitive proxy voting) and a final voting allowing to express preferences (Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping) is what LiquidFeedback is all about.
Andreas Nitsche

What were the main design criteria and decisions?

These were some of our assumptions: It is impossible to create a universal discussion plattform because everybody will chose his own places to discuss (personal emails, twitter messages, mailing lists, forum discussions, real life one on one or group discussions – even in a pub) but it’s not only impossible but also not necessary to force discussions into a single place.

There is no problem if discussions are going on in different places but the voting must be in one place and before the voting it must be possible to get an idea of what others are discussing. But this has to be in a single place: There has to be a process, the discourse must be organized, support for ideas and change requests should be measured to allow the development of ideas based on support (which reflects the chances for approval in the later voting process) and the voting itself needs to be in one place.

Another design decision was transparency. Computers don’t allow trustworthy and secret decisions. So you either have trustworthy or secret decisions. We went for trustworthy decisions (i.e. no secret voting). We also saw a political reason for this: LiquidFeedback gives a lot of power to all party members rather than the boards. In return there is a responsibility to openly tell the voters who decided what (every party member “represents” many citizens who vote for a party in an election).
NB: LiquidFeedback is not intended for electing people but for creating, developing and deciding on propositions.
Björn Swierczek

How different has the reality of the software been than what you expected it to be? Have you found there to be unexpected consequences with the software?

Our approach is quite deterministic. There had been some factors we were not sure about, but finally our concept turned out to work in practice as expected. We only identified two needless features, which we decided to remove.
Jan Behrens

As far as I am aware only the German Pirate Party is using the software at present. Is this correct? Have you spoken to other groups about the software?

There is Slow Food Germany, an association with more than 11,000 members, some pirate parties outside Germany, the youth organization of the F.D.P. (liberals) in the state of Baden-Württemberg (for the latter we don’t know exactly what they are doing because their system is in private mode), there are some test instances in NGOs and there are enterprises using it for allowing employees to create, discuss and vote on ideas for the board to finally decide. We gave presentations for the SPD (social democrats), Grüne (green party) and a commission of the German parliament.
Axel Kistner

Did the software have to be Open Source?

Democracy needs trust. In order to earn this trust, democratic decision making using the internet needs to be transparent. By making our project Open Source, we allow anyone to inspect our code and we allow anyone to make necessary changes for a particular use case. The MIT-License furtherly allows merging our software with other software projects while avoiding license incompatibilities, and it encourages people to use and to contribute to our project.
Jan Behrens

What are your hopes for the software? Could you see it being used by mainstream parties in the USA, for example?

We hope it will be used by as many parties and organizations as possible. This could strengthen inner party democracy and make parties more attractive to citizens. I gave a presentation for members of the Democratic Party in California in 2010. Apparently they liked the idea but had doubts about how many members would actually want to participate in detail. On the other hand: where if not in parties will you find people interested in political affairs and with liquid democracy you can participate in what you are interested in and (using a delegation) still make sure your vote counts for your wing in all other fields. But I don’t know enough about the internal structures of either mainstream American party to talk intelligently about this.
Andreas Nitsche

Do you think that the Liquid Democracy framework could be used by social movements / grass-roots movements in their group decision-making?

To meet the requirements outlined in the “Prospects and what it takes to be successful” section of our mission statement (http://liquidfeedback.org/mission/#3) you need an organizational structure (i.e. membership or a voter registration process). Also keep in mind there is no such thing as trustworthy secret voting on the internet. For this reason LiquidFeedback is not for elections but for openly voting on issues.

The participants must be able to identify other participants which can be solved localy, e.g. if you live in LA you will most likely not know “John Doe, Washington D.C. 20032″ but he will be widely known by members of the “D.C. chapter” or maybe the “ZIP 20032 chapter”.

Truth be told, this may be an insurmountable obstacle for a grass-roots movement but the assessment should be made by the movement itself.

Liquid Democracy is meant as a bridge between direct and representative democracy (http://liquidfeedback.org/mission/#1) and LiquidFeedback is meant to be embedded into existing respresentative structures in organizations (http://liquidfeedback.org/mission/#2).

LiquidFeedback is used by several associations and political parties or branches thereof.  It has the potential to empower the ordinary members of main stream political parties making these parties more attractive to citizens and democracy stronger.
Andreas Nitsche

Your mission statement outlines some conditions for liquid feedback to be successful, including the requirement that “every member of this group (and only they) must have access to this system with exactly one account.”  How is this achieved in current instances of LiquidFeedback?

Currently we have two basic scenarios:

1. member data base of party/NGO/association
The member data base receives invite codes for LiquidFeedback and assigns one invite code to every member record. The members receive their invite code by email and can register. If somebody leaves the organization the member data base sends a request to deactivate the corresponding account. In most cases there is additional ident information transferred to LiquidFeedback e.g. “Tom Bradley, Los Angeles, CA”. The latter depends on organizational needs/wishes.

2. civic registration
Citizens can sign up on a registration website. The passport/voter registration/SSN authority (or the like) confirms the status of the participant. A letter with an invite code is generated and mailed to the residential address. If a participant is no longer entiteled to take part the acount can be deactivated by the authority using the original invite code.

Andreas Nitsche