Liquid Democracy XP/Background
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- This is a sub-page of Liquid_Democracy_XP -
[edit] Background
The idea for more direct participation of the citizen in the administration of the state has been followed by a number of projects in the recent years. Examples:
- Russian activists have founded the "control commission" in the mid-90ies and organized a number of public actions in Moscow. The basic concept: Let the citizens control the authorities, not vice versa.
- The early 2000 years saw the evolvement of a number of flexible voting concepts, often referred to as Liquid democracy (LD).
- In 2006 the foundation of the swedish Pirate Party inspired followers in several other european countries. The german Pirate Party has since then held various internal and public gatherings on the issue.
One segment of these activities see LD as a new way to vote and to broaden the election and discussion process in the democratic political systems. A public software implementation then has the problem that it starts speculative, because there are (yet) no real political mandates to deliver in this process. The challenge is then how to proove the improvements and functioning of this procedure and how to motivate the community.
CitizenControl takes a different approach - it focuses on the executive segment, in public administration and in private or semi-privates fields. Here many citizens have individual cases that concern them directly - so the project starts with a huge number of cases that are directly relevant.
With more processes added to the tool time after time, it might be applied for more political oriented processes, like "petition", "public appeal" or "protest organisation".
