[pp.int.general] Liquid democracy information?

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 1:12 PM, carlo von lynX
<lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org> wrote:
> It's not just about Liquid Democracy.. proxy voting is in practice
> a rather secondary feature. It is more important to have a good
> workflow. LQFB was designed specifically for good legislative action
> and mostly everyone in Berlin agrees it was essential for our success.
> So if you need an application to seriously get moving, I'd recommend to
> take what is known to work. I wrote up a page about it on
>
>        http://int.piratenpartei.de/Liquid_Feedback

Actually, Agora is specifically designed for the legislative power. As
explained in the cited article, it's a tool to form a virtual
parliament.

> I know the complexity isn't fun getting into, but it is necessary.
>
> I also looked into Agora.. I find the mathematics behind it quite amazing
> and I love its approach to delegate voting.. I had thought about it in
> similar ways - it's great to see these ideas are actually viable.

Modern cryptography can be amazing =)

> One detail I didn't understand.. what if the receiving server of voter's
> signed votes simply drops some votes because they are coming from a
> communist IP range (some part of town where the ruling government expects
> unwelcome votes from for example). I understand voting is safe and anonymous
> once it is published properly, but what if the publishing process is disturbed?

Votes will be signed by the receiver server, so you will be able to
demonstrate that you actually voted and if your vote is not published
properly, then the receiving server will be demonstrably altering the
voting.

> Since Agora is aimed at secret YES/NO/MAYBE;) votes it clearly has a different
> purpose than LQFB which is suited for open collaborative consensus finding.
> I wonder if the brilliant logic of liquid feedback could be applied to
> Agora in order to open up Agora to authoring and other purposes...
> That would be awesome.

As you say, the idea for Ágora is to be a virtual parliament, and in
parliament you can only vote yes/no/maybe and there what is going to
be voted has already been agreed. We follow the philosophy of UNIX
i.e. do one thing and do it right. For authoring proposals we don't
have anything in development just yet, but the idea is that anyone can
develop a legislative initiative, get a lot of electronically valid
DNI-e signatures, and in the following plenary in i.e. congress,
Partido de Internet will propose the N legislative initiatives with
the highest number of signatures, N being the number of proposals we
are allowed to do.

I don't know the internal details of liquid feedback. Is there any
technical article you can refer me to?

> Having many liquid platforms in parallel leads us to a similar problem
> we already experience with social networks: On each platform users need to
> reconnect to the people they like to delegate to over and over.  :-D
> Maybe we can alleviate this by making multi-voting clients or have platforms
> extract delegational graphs using the LQFB API.

It also depends on what are you going to vote. Different platforms
might not be compatible (different votings, different way of
answering..). If multiple parties are going to implement a vote
delegation scheme in the same representative chamber (congress for
example), I think they should just agree to use the same voting
platform.

Regards,
     Eduardo.