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

[Nicolás Reynolds]

carlo von lynX <lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org> writes:

> 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, i feel many discussions about participation are stuck on just
(constant) voting, while many many things we have to do just require the
infamous rough consensus and direct action.  that's why we emphasized
lack of dissent, so you don't have to wait for everyone to agree if you
want to do something for the party.

>> > 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

i thought you meant the autonomous groups approach.  

>> > 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.

maybe i forgot the irony mark. we have some good pizzerias, though i
never been in italy to compare.

>> 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....

i wouldn't consider lack of time/willingness as bad behaviour, but it
helps you grasp whom you can count on even if it's not coded anywhere,
statuses or participatory platforms (they should be the same...)

and i know i can't talk much for myself, i still have stuff to do i
agree on taking over :P

>> 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.

it's better if it's not on paper.  i participated on several groups that
agreed to have anything on paper just because it'd help them get to
business right away and then the right people would just know when to
have them count and it wasn't good.

sanctions are just there in case of blatant infiltrators, trolls and
really bad behaviour.  we're kind of flower power too.

>> > 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...

it does but it's even more confusing than receiving a broken thread
email from a webmail client that doesn't handle threads :P

>> 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.

ha! 

>> 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?

no idea, i only know "they" are composed by a guy that has contacts on
radio and right wing papers so he can make media noise.

> 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.

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