Hello Andrzej,
Very interesting.
It's nice to know that someone on WDDM has a similar view of the practical aspects of DD.
With regards to HOW to attain DD I stand somewhere in between your notion of a spontaneous, natural technological outcome and the rather prescriptive methodologies that our colleagues here in WDDM tend to favor.
I agree almost entirely with everything you said, except that it leaves me with a feeling that we can just sit back and relax because DD will happen of its own accord. This might well happen, don't get me wrong... but I think some intention might also be required.
Also, there is the danger that Direct Democracy might not be a flawless concept, there are some major potential pitfalls that would almost certainly force people to abandon the experiment before it had a chance to reach maturity. I am talking here about public miss-information, the public's tendency for knee-jerk reactions and the public's tendency to shirk responsibility for their own actions. If politicians are convenient escape goats, there is a high probability that "the majority" would become the escape goat, unless the system reflected back to the user on an individual level a direct relationship between one's participation level and one's weight in decision making, just like the economic arena does.
I came to believe that a weighted vote solution might be of huge motivational value, where certain boundaries would have to be set up, like for instance a maximum inequality of 2 to 1... or even 10 to 1 (remember that in the current economy we have common inequalities of millions to 1 which in turn corrupt the representative system). Is there any mention of the possibility of weighted voting in the book you have mentioned?
At present I am in Luxembourg and I have finally found some programming Academics who are willing to help me put some platform ideas into practice. If you know of people who are working towards the creation of cyber DD platforms, please let me know because there might be some interesting potential for cross-polination of ideas with regards to a number of database functions and application variables.
Thanks again for your message.
Ted, please do me a favor and don't respond to this.
You don't own WDDM, Ahahaha!!!
Lata
Very interesting.
It's nice to know that someone on WDDM has a similar view of the practical aspects of DD.
With regards to HOW to attain DD I stand somewhere in between your notion of a spontaneous, natural technological outcome and the rather prescriptive methodologies that our colleagues here in WDDM tend to favor.
I agree almost entirely with everything you said, except that it leaves me with a feeling that we can just sit back and relax because DD will happen of its own accord. This might well happen, don't get me wrong... but I think some intention might also be required.
Also, there is the danger that Direct Democracy might not be a flawless concept, there are some major potential pitfalls that would almost certainly force people to abandon the experiment before it had a chance to reach maturity. I am talking here about public miss-information, the public's tendency for knee-jerk reactions and the public's tendency to shirk responsibility for their own actions. If politicians are convenient escape goats, there is a high probability that "the majority" would become the escape goat, unless the system reflected back to the user on an individual level a direct relationship between one's participation level and one's weight in decision making, just like the economic arena does.
I came to believe that a weighted vote solution might be of huge motivational value, where certain boundaries would have to be set up, like for instance a maximum inequality of 2 to 1... or even 10 to 1 (remember that in the current economy we have common inequalities of millions to 1 which in turn corrupt the representative system). Is there any mention of the possibility of weighted voting in the book you have mentioned?
At present I am in Luxembourg and I have finally found some programming Academics who are willing to help me put some platform ideas into practice. If you know of people who are working towards the creation of cyber DD platforms, please let me know because there might be some interesting potential for cross-polination of ideas with regards to a number of database functions and application variables.
Thanks again for your message.
Ted, please do me a favor and don't respond to this.
You don't own WDDM, Ahahaha!!!
Lata
From: <WDDM webmaster>
To: wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Sent: Tue, 23 November, 2010 2:21:39
Subject: [WDDM] cyberdemocracy
*Date:* Sat, 6 Nov 2010 10:07:30 -0700 (PDT)
*Subject:* cyberdemocracy
*From:* Kaczmarczyk Andrzej
*To:* wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Dear DD-ists,
I’m avid follower of DD. With some completion: I don’t perceive DD as a
pure political phenomenon, but as a technology driven occurrence that
can come about through civilization changes; I do perceive it as a
specific EDD, being associated with e-civilization and Information Society
development. Present parliamentary democracy is more than two centuries old,
has been tailored for territorially-oriented nation-states, has arisen when
democratic rulers exercised power only over muskets and sabers, not over
nuclear weapons’ push-buttons (soon about forty of them!). Neither there
were ubiquitous global socio-economic phenomena, nor global threats related
to biosphere, climate, energy resources. This all appears in full scale right
now, together with knowledge and technology unimaginable in times of
parliamentary democracy’s founding fathers. A course of transformation can be
deduced from observable trends of change in many areas of human activity,
and of use of artifacts of e-civilization in it. On the threshold of
postmodernity, characterized by social life regulation from its interior,
exercised by “flexible and fluctuating” networks rather than by structured
institutions, the old democratic paradigm loses its utility. Traditional
organizational structures are substituted be new ones, more flexible, more
participatory and more decentralized — taking advantage of self-organization
and “the wisdom of crowds”, so naturally affined to DD. Information and
knowledge become instantaneously accessible, transportable and can be
simultaneously distributed to an unlimited number of users. A new democratic
paradigm — which I call “cyberdemocracy” — should be compatible with this
altering world, so must be a participatory, flexible, and networked one.
And this is why cyberdemocracy won’t be an elegantly designed, simple entity
with its schema easy to absorb even for a child. It will arise in a
natural, evolutionary way, by the efforts of its distributed architects.
However it can be, and ought to be, a “user friendly” system, meaning it is
easy to use, not necessarily easy to understand; we are daily users of a
multitude of such systems. I’ve written a book about the phenomenon, titled
“Cyberdemocracy. Change of democratic paradigm in the 21st century”
(accessible in Amazon). The book includes seven chapters. The first six of
them present “as are” issues essential for the future cyberdemocracy,
i.e. current state and development trends of the Information Society,
the cyberspace, electronic democracy with its key tool in the form of
electronic voting, DD as cyberdemocracy’s key component, and additional
factors which can help the cyberdemocracy to cross the gate of history.
The final chapter presents a vision of the “would be” cyberdemocracy,
derived from those previous considerations. Each chapter includes its
ummary and conclusion, and all these summaries together form a digest
of the book.
Greetings
Andrzej Kaczmarczyk