[pp.int.general] 'Liquid Democrazy': Pirate Party Sinks amid Chaos and Bickering

[carlo von lynX]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 04:54:00PM -0300, Nicol?s Reynolds wrote:
> > no, you have to figure out regulations that make people, in particular
> > the ones with high number of delegations, responsible of their actions.
> 
> i meant it as "ok, so who does X now this task is approved"?

we introduced the requirement to announce who has to implement the task
within the proposal, but since discipline isn't a traditional strength
in italian culture i presume we will have to introduce additional levels
of responsibility: the person who wrote the proposal staying after the
one who has to implement it (when it is about technical stuff) and maybe
an elected area officer whose job it is to look after things getting done
and putting jobs not being done back to election/discussion. right now
we only have an area officer in technology. so the officers do not get
to decide much, but they need to get things working if they want to be
candidates on the electoral list.

> > this problem arises when you practice too superficial direct democracy.
> > in the case of lqfb this can happen when people are too lazy to fully
> > work on the proposals but too proud or too emotionalized to not vote.
> 
> this looks like the real problem, how do we address it?

i liked the tunisian approach.. vote less. but it's hard to put into
practice. another approach is to make people co-responsible as they
vote, so they have an incentive to skip the vote if they aren't sure
of what they are doing. how to implement responsibility in a concrete
way without going down the disciplinary path... still thinking about it.

> > yes we must absolutely document our work better. we really have long
> > tales to tell. but each day i feel like i'm understanding more of what
> > we are doing...  ;)
> 
> please do :D

:)

today is election day in italy. i am saddened that we are barely
participating. we are constructing a virtual directorate and we
failed to assign virtual responsability. a traditional board maybe
could have made some things work out better, but we were scared of
becoming yet another political party... and the negotiations with
established politicians that we had in the last months were scary
enough. they were so convincing, had we had an elected board they
might have been able to lure us into misusing the pirate brand.
imagine the scandal. the permanent assembly has kept us from putting
power into too few hands. the permanent assembly has impeded the
traditional approach that italian politics uses for infiltrating
upcoming new hopeful projects. we'll take longer to stand on our
feet, but i believe we'll figure out how to get it right. if we
succeed, we'll be the first honest, functional and persistent grass-
roots project this country has ever seen... because of a tool like
LF. and i hope there will be more and better.

> > oh, that's how PP-IT worked until last year...  :)
> 
> does that mean it didn't work out? why?

if you manage to handle all the behavioural problems related to
mailing lists and people imposing themselves on others by posting
more and insisting on always the same points of view, then you
still have the problem that +1 voting schemes only take into
account who's there, so you suffer from domination by the active
party members over the passive ones. see http://my.pages.de/activerts

> > how do you enforce that?
> 
> we don't, it's magic democracy!

hey.. i laughed as a friend of mine from buenos told me they have
the world's best pizza but now you're telling me that you have
zero problems of discipline in argentina while we have tons?
amazing.

> how do we enforce good behaviour?  you can proppose a sanction
> afterwards through the same procedure (never happened, we're good
> fellows so far, but i can foresee some exploits on this last comment).

what kind of sanction do you have for someone who promises to
fulfill a job and then doesn't do it? i had the impression that
is how the majority of political projects in italy get to a
still-stand: people take on important roles, then go on taking
care of their own business and only come back to defend their
positions in fights, making sure they don't get demoted from the
job they don't intend to fulfil. or maybe that's the infiltration
method which is still working....

> we should translate it, having input would be really interesting.

we have some dominating flower power personalities who effectively
kept us from introducing any sanctions, even on paper. we are voting
about that just now. hopefully once there is a sanction, some will
try to avoid being sanctioned. still, the new regulations only deal
with basic human rights stuff, like insults. we're not anywhere near
sanctioning people who don't do their job, so there is still plenty
of ways for a political attacker to stop us in our tracks. just come
in and take on some crucial role.

> > they are fundamentally anti-democratic, but they are also
> > impractical to anyone who doesn't know how to handle them.
> > if facebook groups are much easier to use, you should be worried.
> 
> that's true.  interfaces should reflect our organization.  i also like
> receiving the info instead of going to look for it :P

yes, but you need to have a brilliant way of choosing the amount of
information to bombard people with. LF's notification stuff is a
start, but it is way too rudimentary currently.

> we have been trying a chiliproject.org instance at
> adhoc.partidopirata.com.ar but it requires going there.  i've seen this

sounds neat.. and it says you can get notified by e-mail...

> dotmocracy.org thingies that sound cool...

hehe.. LF proposals on written paper.. and every time you update the
proposal to take suggestions into consideration you need a new
piece of paper.. and of course it's only direct democracy..
it looks neat  :))  but i presume that having the same group
sit in front of LF terminals makes them more efficient.

> mmm yeah... we just replied to a note on a right wing paper saying the
> new "net party" is the argentinian spin-off of the original net party:
> the german pirate party.

did the "net party" beat the 4000 member limit?

we are fighting against people abusing the "pirate" name
constantly. would be ok if they were running for the same
ideals but they are just squatting the brand italian stylee
while actually having quite different intentions. after all
the political programme is just for the idiots who still
believe parties do what they said before the elections.

we usually spot them not being actual pirates by looking
at their statutes, if they even have some. if the statutes
have a four level delegational structure with built-in
privileges for the founding members (there's a fake pirate
party in northern italy that has that kind of statutes)
you KNOW you're not dealing with pirates. you are dealing
with brand squatters.