e-democracy

We created Rule2Gether to demonstrate a simple, immediate and practical use of a Free Software platform (Drupal) in the hard task of collecting and organizing feedback from a group of citizens on matters that may directly affect all others. In our specific case, commenting and rating on Italian Chamber of Deputies Agenda Items and collecting proposals for new items that are taken into consideration for the next meeting only if the majority of the users support them directly through a vote, or indirectly through rating and comments.

But consensus-building, in any group, goes far beyond this simple feedback process. There are countless situations where decision-making by a group or by its representatives may go through endless types of stages (ie: anyone can propose topics, users x, y, z can sort the proposals, only users j, f, k can comment on the proposals, the committee of experts A must assess the feasibility of each proposal, voting: the "n" best proposals are elected and the selected proposals can be rated and commented by all users; all actions are suspended for "x" days; users a, b, c need to attend a video-conference... etc ...). That is, it is virtually impossible to think that one can list all the possible steps and then offer a one-size-fits-all solution.

We know this and that's why we designed Rule2Gether's future ready for flexible configuration of decision-making and consensus building stages, which is particularly interesting to political organizations or any organization willing to use a self-management system in a democratic manner. We will slowly publish more about it and carefully listen and discuss your comments through this blog.

In the last days I have contacted some groups (because of our intention to present Rule2Gether as a bid candidate to funds available in the European Union) and analyzed their general goal. I saw that each group has a different approach to solve a more or less the same problem. Many times using the same open source software as common ground (such as a content management system - CMS), but duplicating efforts when it comes to the implementation of features specific to the decision-making and consensus building processes.

• The World Parliament Experiment: the site provides a discussion forum and specific functionality for political debate, with the aim of creating a world parliament, where people can propose, vote directly or delegate their vote on any issue under discussion;
• Senator On-Line: an Internet political party which will allow everyone on the Australian Electoral roll who has access to the internet to vote on every bill put to Parliament and have its Senators to vote in accordance with a clear majority view;
• Efficasync: a theoretical concept for self-management through processes of direct democracy. Users, as in a game, may choose to use their turn to change a "rule" already established, or accumulate "points" to gain more decision power in upcoming decisions;
• GlobalDemo.org: a generic groupware for creating discussion spaces with blogs, faq, calendar of events, wall and discussion forum;
• Gov2demOSS Light: a modular groupware for the creation of collaboration spaces with forums, petitions, calendar of events and knowledge base;
• Global Assembly: uses a numerical evaluation for user's interest in a particular argument and his approval level for the statement, with formula value = interest x approval. The topics are then structured as a regular discussion forum;
• DemocracyLab: calculates the general community view (consensus) on current arguments using a numerical scale evaluation (1 to 7) for agreement and importance to users, classified under 3 categories: values, positions and proposals.

Rule2Gether wants to serve as a common platform for the creation and configuration of the stages necessary for decision-making and consensus-building that is useful for most applications (like the ones listed above) using different workflows to achieve more or less the same goals, where the visual interface can be completely themed, and settings for the amount of stages, permissions and functions enabled for each active phase are constructed in such a way as to allow greater flexibility of use and a huge savings in the implementation of each feature. Besides the fact of establishing an open platform on which anyone can develop additional modules (surveys, voip, mini-apps ...), similarly to a large LEGO model.

The Telematics Freedom Foundation is seeking new partners to kick-off some of its projects in the fields of Innovation Technology, Social Networking, Media and Audiovisual.

Those interested can find the profile of Telematics Freedom on CORDIS platform (the Community Research and Development Information Service for Science, Research and Development on the Seventh Framework Programme).

In particular, the projects for which we seek funds and partnerships are:

• Freedom Box: Aims to promote wide dissemination and standardization of TV Media Centers connected to the web that are easy to use and economic for anyone; and by anyone verifiable and customizable. The ultimate goal is to bring to market easy-to-use and economically affordable devices that promote long-term maximization of important constitutional liberties in 2 stages: (1) Freedom of choice of audiovisual content on TV at home; (2) Freedom to communicate via Internet with levels of authentication, privacy and security that are adequate to constitutional rights. The operating system and any programs installed on the box will be distributed using free/open source licenses, preferably GNU Affero GPLv3 or GPL v3.
• Universal Audiovisual Library: A Digital Library Database that collects hundreds of thousands of GB of audio and video content in its original language, released under open and public licenses. Created and managed by Telematics Freedom Foundation and several free-content partners.
• Rule2Gether: Software for consensus-building, debate and preference expression following the Direct Democracy approach and methodologies. Particularly useful for Electoral Lists and/or Political Parties. Rule2Gether is software developed specifically to allow simple democratic discussions and easy decision-making procedures in any kind of organization.
• User-Verifiable Telematics: A research project for the realization of software, hardware and processes that enable ordinary non-technical citizens to affordable access any internet-based telematic communication with pretty high levels of privacy and security that are fully user-verifiable. A model for the democratic control of services and practical means to verify software and hardware for all servers that run these services.
• Draft2Gether: A new model for creating documents, annotating and proposing amendments in a democratic and cooperative way. Draft2Gether puts any group of people (10's to 100's) in a position to discuss and approve changes in documents democratically, through e-voting and annotation mechanisms. Draft2Gether is perfect for writing documents within standardization commitees, petitions, legal documents or any other type of document that needs to be approved by a large group of people through a careful discussion and a democratic voting of each change.
• Do2Gether: Do2Gether is a Political Social Networking and Groups Management tool. The ultimate goal is to be a Free Alternative to YahooGroups/GoogleGroups™ (or a mix of GoogleGroups™+Facebook™). Do2Gether is a project to create a basic software platform for political networking. A web application focused on the needs of political or democratically-run organizations, which cannot (and must not) use a big player's web services such as YahooGroups or Google Groups for groups management or Facebook, Orkut and MySpace for social interaction and professional networking for obvious privacy issues or because of statutory rules.

Today at the Rome Center of University of Washington, the premiere state university of the state of Washington, located in Seattle, USA, the Founder of Telematics Freedom Foundation - Rufo Guerreschi - gave a talk about the User-Verifiable Telematics project.

The event took place at UW's Rome Center at 95 Piazza del Biscione, 3rd floor with post-graduate students.

You can:

• Download the Presentation file
• Download a 2-page introduction to User-Verifiable Telematics

 

If such “end servers” interact with other external network services, he will know - by having access to the code of the “end servers” - which services, and all the details and conditions of such interactions.

It is not at all feasible, nor necessary for most user scenarios, to control servers and networks in between the client device and the “end servers”, as we can extensively rely on decades-old tested encryption protocols and FLOSS software to secure from third-party interference through software, hardware and cables in between. True, there is a possibility that even those protocols may have been broken by some powerful third party through undisclosed computers and alghorythms, but it is a "very" remote possibility for a host of reason. We therefore advise it's use, even in the political arena, except for governmental elections and primaries.

In fact, the communication could be intercepted in between, but the content could not be read. It could be stopped or deviated in between, but there is free software that, installed on both client and server can certainly verify that it did happen.

This is not new. Democracies, for centuries now, have always provided citizens with reasonable means to verify that key constitutional rights were not widely abused. When I go to vote, I do not simply have the right that my vote be secret and fairly counted, but I rely on a good number of other citizens, randomly selected or with conflicting interests, which prevent the bad guys to put in place large scale abuses of such rights. There are also a number of process regulations, such as recounts, that further prevent such frauds.

In fact, in order to provide such concrete control over telematics, server rooms (or “cages”) hosting a such “free” telematic service could be physically managed applying those same (or enhanced) physical security provisions that are currently applied to ballot boxes during an election. In practice, physical access to such server room would be enabled only while 4 or more randomly selected or elected users (or citizens) are physically present.

According to this model of telematic service provisioning, anyone could deploy a “free” telematic services, by developing new software or freely installing or extending any publicly available FLOSS software, and running those according to such hosting requirements.

Anyone can do this, without breaching any FLOSS license, by requiring the signing of a copyright assignment, or similar statement, whenever users, or anyone, wants to access the software source code.

Here is a practical example of how a foundation or government can do that. We have in fact deployed such Code Access Policies for our telematics service for democratic organizing at do2gether.org.