A model of digital democracy

[Lata Gouveia <latalondon(at)yahoo.co.uk>]

Hi there,
I wanted to thank a few members of WDDM giving me the motivation and helping me get Citizen Mundi off the ground. In particular David, Fred and Bill.

The first few weeks have been difficult from the technical point of view and, in particular, from an explanatory point of view. I finally wrote an "About us" page that I feel can go someway toward explaining this model of digital democracy in a consice way.

I shall nor bother WDDM members with this again. I hope you don't see this as Spam.
I just wanted to leave you with the explanation of what Citizen Mundi is and tell you all once again that you are welcome to join us.

Thank you
Lata
http://citizenmundi.wordpress.com/

ABOUT CITIZEN MUNDI

(PARTICIPATION ONLY REQUIRES ABOUT 15 MINUTES PER WEEK.)

Citizen Mundi means “Citizen of the World”.
You should pause and take a deep breath before reading on.

How does a group of people make fair, sensible decisions?

One of the ideas that is commonly accepted is the idea that if everyone was actually equal, making decisions would become a nightmare.

Another accepted idea is that, even if we had the technology for equality (which we do), we would still require a system of Guardianship, where extremely talented people who are good at making decisions make them, on behalf of us all. As the global situation deteriorates on all fronts, we tend to put the emphasis on leadership, finding that super-human who is better than us and can guide us to a better future.

Many would say this is not democracy. It absolves us from all responsibility as citizens: “It wasn’t my fault… I didn’t know he was going to turn out like that”.

In a real democracy, we the people are involved in policy making. The ideas come from us, we debate them, we elect policy rather than people and we find ways to make sure our ignorance does not lead to the worst decisions.

How?

Welcome to Citizen Mundi.

When we begin to think about how to make decisions among equals who don’t necessarily agree or like each other, one of the first options that springs to mind is to throw all the opinions into a hat and pick one.

Many people think of this option almost immediately, when confronted with the question. Why? Instinctively they know that a game of luck evens things out, it makes everyone equal. So we have an instinctive sense of what fairness is, we don’t need a PhD for that.

The problem is that if you pick a random opinion you are not being rational and you might pick the worst option. So we need to be able to judge our options on their own merits, rather than judge them on WHO came up with them. In making sensible decisions, it should not matter if the person who came up with the idea is black or white, male or female, gay or straight, Christian, Muslim or atheist. We use anonymity as one of our basic principles of initiative, discussion and voting.

So this creates equality and it forces people to make up their own minds about how they will vote, rather than following a party or a leader like sheep. However, there is another huge problem. People who are in politics might not admit to this in public but privately they would (almost without exception) tell you that equality would never work because the vast majority of people are too dumb to make sensible decisions and if we left it up to them they would “run the country into the ground”. Well, is this opinion wrong? We don’t think so, we actually agree with this opinion. But lets look at the structural causes of this first..

We believe that the masses have been dumbed-down through a combination of mass media, or low cultural entertainment and an education system based on indoctrination rather than empowerment. We don’t think our schools teach children to think for themselves, they teach them how to stay ahead of the game and stay out of trouble through compliance. It works. Society as we know it is very stable.

We at Citizen Mundi protect the community from ignorance by simply using a weighted vote system. In a democracy you have to take responsibility for your own individual political power, no matter how limited. You cannot expect to vote on something you know nothing about and for your vote to be worth as much as the vote of someone who has dedicated their life to understanding the subject matter. However, we believe you should be given the opportunity to score as highly as them, not on a “lifetime” basis but on a weekly basis. In Citizen Mundi, the weight of your vote depends on your participation ratio (your commitment to the community) and on your diligence (having looked through the basic information on the topic you’re about to vote on).

So, to put it simply the point of CITIZEN MUNDI is to create a community of equals in the true sense of the word,  equals whose goal is to make sensible and informed decisions without alienating the less informed.

Participating in a community decision-making process, believe it or not, is an alien process to most of us. Even those amongst us who are business leaders or teachers don’t tend to have the opportunity to participate in COMMUNITY decisions.

In Citizen Mundi we use initiative. Every member gets to make a suggestion for the community every week (round). We call this a Raw Initiative proposal. Every week, every member gets to vote on the previous week’s suggestions.

Like in a poll, we use a grading mechanism to vote. Do you like, dislike, like a lot or dislike a lot. A grading system ranging from -2 to +3. The grading is also designed to prevent you from “sitting on the fence” because it does not allow you to grade more than one option with the same grade. You absolutely have to discriminate between options on your ballot and the positive pole is bigger as an incentive to making positive proposals and insure something will definitely get chosen. The negative (I dislike) options are there as a safeguard to minority rights. If 10 people take a racist stand, the remaining 4 have an opportunity to reduce the landslide and perhaps deflect the outcome toward a more consensual option.

The winning suggestions go to a Chamber of Apprentices, where they are discussed in more detail. These details become the content of specific suggestions, Specific Initiative Proposals (SIP) that you can submit and they get voted on like before, using the grading mechanism. The big difference is that in a final vote, you take a multiple choice test about the topic and we measure your participation rate. Your vote is weighted accordingly, so that if you chose ignorance, the power of your final vote diminishes, if you chose not to participate, the power of your final vote diminishes too.

We have a research page with all the answers to the test, so it really does become a case of choosing ignorance or knowledge. You can help put this research together every week, if you like. So, technically speaking, a dumb person has just as much opportunity to impact the political outcome as an expert, if they are committed.

In the end (it takes about 6 weeks for each decision cycle) a new decision is adopted by the whole of the Citizen Mundi community. A decision made by everyone in the Chamber but made to reward the aggregate knowledge and the commitment of the community as a whole.

If you get 30,000 points we will give you a Citizen Mundi (citizen of the world) passport on behalf of the entire community. This equates to about 5 years of perfect scoring.

IT ONLY REQUIRES ABOUT 15 MINUTES PER WEEK.

http://citizenmundi.wordpress.com/