[pp.int.general] Liquid Democracy - a summary attempt

[seykron]

Nice summary!

Some comments on that:

> 1. The Liquid Democracy concept
> In democracy everyone should have equal power - but when the limiting
> factor is time - then those who have more time to play the political
> games have more power - and you get the 'vocal minority' problem. But
> I am not sure if LD really fixes it or maybe it just replaces it with
> another problem (a patronage system?).

I think it is more than "distributed power with the option of
delegation", and "same power" doesn't necessary means "at the same
time". I cannot speak about all topics, maybe I can tell my opinion, but
there're topics I just don't care. So I trust others party members to
work on that. The key point is: I choose to delegate, no one is telling
me I need to delegate. And as I delegate decisions because I don't
care, I can get involved if whenever I want. And technology help us to
address the problem of "time" and "vocal minority". There're several
system like loomio to let people participate when they have time.

Regarding LD, I think it address some problems like "lack of time", but
it still has the same issues of regular representative delegation.

> 2. The Liquid Feedback software implementation
> The LF dev team is completely incompetent in leading a Free or Open
> Source Software project.

I never made a concrete critic about this kind of software on this
list. I am a software developer as well, and I slightly understand
technical implications about these epic implementations. Some questions
I have in mind (without looking at the code of any product):

1. Is it a centralized database?, despite whether votes are encripted
or not, how do you avoid hacking (and I mean adding more votes, for
instance) from someone with physical access to the database?

2. How do you avoid MITM attacks? (ok, maybe SSL is good enough, but it
is still an issue)

3. How do you avoid XSS attacks? If someone stole my login cookie, how
do I get to know he or she is voting on my behalf (or removing my
votes)?

4. *Who* defined the calculation algorithm? Is it just a simple
majority or is there any other mechanism created ad-hoc? If it is
simple majority, how do I know that the system is not just adding +1 to
choose a specific decision?

5. Who leads the development team? who manages the infrastructure?, who
have write permissions on the main repository? how do I submit bug
fixes and how many time I have to wait to have my patch applied?

6. Who provides the money (and it is very important) to support this
development? Why investors are putting money on that?

Maybe it is quite enough for the moment, and probably much of these
questions have a "rational answer", but it is hard to me get convinced
of the safety of these systems.


> 3. The social practices around usage of Liquid Feedback
> I am sure that even once we have a good LF software - it will take
> long time to work out the right social practice around it. Voting in
> general is a very confrontational way of making decisions, but it is
> the only one that scales.

I agree with Cal. on this. It is true that direct democracy practices
did not work on the past (or it did work in small groups), but here I'm
not thinking on a consensus at society level. We are immersed in a
representative system, so we have to deal with it. But we have the
ability to build a progressive bottom-up power as well, and technology
also helps (as LF) to address problems from the past. It is not
"better" than representative democracy, it is another choice, with
another problems.

And regarding problems, as software developer I did learn that it is
impossible to solve a problem you still do not have. It leads to a
complex and over-architectured system which finally do not scale.
Abstract thinking is useless if it is not directed to a specific issue,
and it is a big trick for software engineers: abstract thinking "seems
to be real" because it is a logic structure, but usually it is very far
from the real problem and tends to fulfill programmers egos instead of
solving use cases. Sometimes we fall in the same trap thinking about
society and organization strategies.

Regards,

Matías


On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 11:35:38 +0200
Zbigniew Łukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are three areas:
> 
> 1. The Liquid Democracy concept
> 2. The Liquid Feedback software implementation
> 3. The social practices around usage of Liquid Feedback
> 
> It is all interrelated. It is possible that the Liquid Democracy
> concept is missing some important parts and only a real implementation
> with the software and social practices can validate it. But for the
> start let's at least try to analyze them separately.
> 
> 
> Ad. 1.
> 
> LD tries to be a kind of compromise between direct democracy and
> representative democracy trying to fix some problems with both.
> 
> The main argument against it that I've seen here (and at other
> discussions) is that there soon appear people with huge amounts of
> votes delegated to them - the 'superdelegates'. This is discouraging
> people from voting - because they feel powerless. But this cannot be
> worse than in representative democracy - where the representatives are
> also kind of 'superdelegates' with aggregated votes and the 'oridinary
> citizen' cannot compete with them. The situation is actually a bit
> improved - because here the delegation can be removed and the
> 'superdelegates' can lose their power quickly. Maybe the problem here
> is mostly just perception? Too big expectations?
> 
> LD also does try to fix the problem with direct democracy - where
> people just don't have time to deliberate on every decision of the
> community.
> 
> In democracy everyone should have equal power - but when the limiting
> factor is time - then those who have more time to play the political
> games have more power - and you get the 'vocal minority' problem. But
> I am not sure if LD really fixes it or maybe it just replaces it with
> another problem (a patronage system?).
> 
> Then the problem with buying votes - is it worse in LD than in
> representative democracy? How about direct democracy? This is an open
> question for me - I guess it will all depend on the details of how LD
> is implemented - on the software and on the social practices.
> 
> And the problem with providing the right information for the
> participants. Also an open question. With direct democracy the needed
> information is the facts, with representative democracy the
> information needed is who can you trust - with LD it is kind of
> in-between, maybe both.
> 
> 
> Ad. 2.
> 
> Two years ago a friend of mine made a Polish localization of LF. We
> found out that to have it included into the main LF tree we need to
> print some agreement with the LF team sign it and send by traditional
> mail. OK - maybe in this kind of sensitive development area it is
> better to have all formalities cleared. So we printed the agreements
> and sent them. We also emailed the LF team. We waited. We emailed the
> dev contats again. Nothing happened. After a few months I complained
> on a mailing list - maybe even here I don't remember - everyone was
> surprised that something like that can happen - I was advised to pass
> the info to some other mailing list and I did that. There were
> confirmations and stuff - but the code is still not included in the LF
> main tree.
> 
> The LF dev team is completely incompetent in leading a Free or Open
> Source Software project.
> 
> And the LF user interface is ugly - then I read here that there were
> some attempts to improve it etc - but of course they are not in the
> main tree. Yeah!
> 
> Beside that - the choice of Lua as the main programming language. Not
> a very popular language. Limits the community. This would mean nothing
> if it was a good project - but here it only adds to the impression
> that "we don't give a shit about the community".
> 
> Until there is competent team taking over the leadership in this
> project I don't think there will be anything valuable out of LF.
> 
> 
> Ad 3.
> 
> I am sure that even once we have a good LF software - it will take
> long time to work out the right social practice around it. Voting in
> general is a very confrontational way of making decisions, but it is
> the only one that scales. Maybe there are ways of using LF software
> together with some consensus techniques?
> 
> I worry that LD is too liquid - that it encourages sweeping changes
> that destabilize the system.
> 

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