[pp.int.general] Liquid democracy information?

[Boris Turovskiy]

Well carlo, you just demonstrated wonderfully the typical response of a 
Liquid Feedback adept to even the slightest criticism... Thanks for that;)

But to answer the factual points (and I have a nagging suspicion that 
our positions are not that far from each other, despite the overt 
animosity):

> It empowered Berlin to collectively create a huge manifesto without
> meeting in general assembly each week-end.
I do not deny that LQFB can be an extremely useful tool to develop a 
party program. The point is that to write a party manifesto which is 
ready to be voted upon at a general assembly, you don't really need the 
Liquid part, you don't need the entire voting module, you don't need 
mandatory real name registration, you don't need to store the entire 
voting history for ages, but you do need a discussion platform (as LQFB 
doesn't provide one it was established to provide links to a discussion 
pad for each initiative). Some features of LQFB, like the 
amendments/opinions system, do indeed help to work out a proposal of 
acceptable quality, but they are not the features which are most often 
cited as the great strengths of Liquid Feedback (Liquid Democracy, 
transparency, etc.) I also don't have the impression that LQFB would 
have produced such a torrent of criticism if its area of application had 
been defined as "collaborative development of proposals" from the 
beginning instead of "the democratic mega-weapon", "a new age in party 
democracy" or "a tool to make final decisions on political topics".

> As far as I can tell, if you don't have "delegation kings" your liquid
> democracy is broken. It is human nature to have some popular people that
> get some 30.. 50.. delegations. It's still ridiculous numbers compared
> to the voting power of a delegate in traditional parties.
Well, if that's your opinion on "human nature" then why not just scrap 
the whole liquid democracy idea and revert to a classical party 
structure where the top brass make the decisions? Besides, by 
introducing chain delegations you create delegation kings who may well 
have 100 votes while receiving only a handful of delegations, as each of 
those delegations brings with it a rat's tail of lower-level delegated 
votes...
By the way, the voting power of the delegation kings is in fact 
ridiculously high compared to a delegate in a classical party, as the 
point is not how many people a single delegate represents but how much 
influence a single person achieves. A classical delegate my stand for 
1000 regular party members but in an assembly of 500 delegates he won't 
be able to push through any decisions by himself. A delegation king in 
Liquid Feedback may very well be able to sway any voting result with his 
decision alone.

Best regards,
Boris