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What are the Proposals for Reform? (Wednesday, January 25 2017)

This is a historical post from meetup.com, first meeting: https://www.meetup.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/events/236606653/ , second meeting: https://www.meetup.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/events/237420885/

Meeting Notes

  • First Meeting https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wWn0GLrhoHocJgKWwoM8w4csAAI9cmrDEf376ZuoU84/edit

  • Second Meeting https://docs.google.com/document/d/18adzCQwlS08v9AYkeOL6m0JxDWTjzsemI8UEfCuq9x4/edit

Mailout

Hi Everyone!

Thanks to all who were able to attend the Second Designing Open Democracy Meetup! Great to hear from organisations reforming democracy, including Mivote, Pirate Party and Online Direct Democracy representatives.

In the meeting, we investigated some of the platforms and approaches to reforming democracy:

  • Online Direct Democracy Party's approach, using information on policies and online voting
  • Pirate Party,in particular Andrew Downing’s thoughts on democracy and some of the proposals to reform it (an extended version of which can be found at: https://discuss.pirateparty.org.au/t/designing-online-democracy-some-thoughts/943?u=mofosyne&source_topic_id=999 )
  • Robert Crouch, who argued that the current vote counting system does not reflect the preferences of all voters, and proposed an alternative. People can view his Paper here https://docs.google.c...­ )
  • Mivote Australia outlined the features of their reform proposal, presenting research on an issue, the person chooses what policy approach they would like to follow

We realise not everyone wants to know all the details, so for those who are interested, please click the following link to an online document that describes it all: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15OnbtCNixWGMXxiblYBbKhuz5L-8yKRwRwyuwmTjUY0/edit?usp=sharing

Topic for next meetup is still to be decided, but one option is to discuss "Considerations for Open Democracy Designers" or to hear the reform ideas of Flux Party and perhaps other groups who are looking to reform democracy. The meeting is going to be in mid-february, please put your availabilities via this link: http://www.when2meet....­ and we'll base our meeting time off the days that most are available.

We'll send you an email with the details when we create the next meetup.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Cheers, Nick Merange Designing Open Democracy Co-founder

Additional questions by Christian Tan. (About DODTDG in general):

Suggestions for future discussions:

What is the purpose or what are the intended outcomes of this group?

The scientific method has been brought up as a potential solution - what would such a democracy, built upon the scientific method, look like?

Regarding ‘finding solutions’ (i.e. discussing what an ‘ideal system’ would look like), three potential things to consider are:

the problem (what is it that ‘the solution’ aims to address), the context (i.e. social and cultural context, which may differ in terms of having specifics relating to particular societies, such as Australia) and the existing (what solutions are already out there i.e. certain forms of democracy - and their pros and cons) The role that people (i.e. in the sense of human nature / the human condition) play in shaping a democracy (or any other system)

Source: https://www.meetup.com/Designing-Open-Democracy-Technical-Discussion-Group/events/236155311/