This was written several years ago and it has been on my website. I’m not the only one who thought of this (although I may have been one of the first). Some people have started implementing these ideas. One of the main groups is Metagovernment.

DDD – Digital Discussion and Decisions

Philosophy

In 1450 Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press, and without it, and the communication technology that followed, the democracy we have today would not be possible. It allows everyone to get enough information to make an informed decision during elections.

While they where big advances, the printing press, movies and television still only allowed relatively few to present their ideas to a wide audience. Most people’s ability to influence government is limited to one ballot every few years to select among representatives which prepackaged sets of ideas.

The Internet is a fundamentally different communications technology. It gives everyone an equal chance to present their ideas. My website is just as accessible as the world largest company’s website. I believe this makes the invention of the Internet more important then the printing press. Just as the printing press made representative democracy possible, the Internet makes direct democracy possible.

Most direct democracy proposals until now have involved complex systems of meetings and delegates bringing the ideas from local groups to national organizations. Internet technology allows everyone to contribute and allows those contributions to be organized and presented in an understandable and configurable way.

There have been many implementations of Internet based discussion, from Usenet to blogs, but they haven’t included feature to allow decisions to be made.

Specification

DDD is a system for Internet based direct democracy. Users create proposals to modify or add to a “master document” and voted on them. The master document is updated dynamically based on the current vote results.

The voting on proposals would never end. If a proposal gets voted into a master document and is popular it could remain unchanged for years or a new, better, proposal could replace it or it may not work out as hoped, lose popularity and be removed. Certain things, such as budgeted money that has been spent cannot be taken back.

A delay could be including so that the a change doesn’t take effect immediately so that the master document doesn’t change frequently when votes are close.

This system will need to scale from governing an organization or political party with thousands of members, to a country with millions of citizens and one day, perhaps, make decisions involving the whole planet with billions participating. I expect it will take decades, during which this system will evolve and be improved.

Document Structure

The document would normally be a set of policies or bi-laws for an organization or laws for a government.

The document would be a hierarchical structure of paragraphs. The paragraphs are not numbered, as paragraphs can be inserted and removed by proposals.

Proposal Structure

Some proposals would add to the document, but most will amend existing proposals. Proposals would add, remove or replace paragraphs.

A proposal should address any contradictions that it may create with other existing popular proposals, even if to clarify why it is not really a contradiction. Only popular proposals that existed when the proposal was created need to be clarified. Unpopular proposal also don’t need to be considered.

Voting Structure

Users can vote for or against proposals. They also have to option to make their vote subject to approval or rejection of other proposals.

As there could be may proposals to consider, the system would automatically suggest votes to users by finding voters who have voted in the same way as the user in the past and calculate how the majority of them voted and recommend that vote to the user. This is similar to how amazon.com website suggests books.

Discussion structure

Each proposal would have an attached discussion. The discussion would be hierarchical and support Slashdot like comment rating.

Discussion need not be limited to within DDD, but could occur elsewhere, with urls pointing back to the proposals being discussed.

Protocol structure

DDD uses a client-server stature, much like the World Wide Web.

There would be multiple implementations of both the DDD server and client, all supporting a common protocol. Having different clients allows users to choose the interface they prefer. Clients would include both stand alone applications and web or email based interfaces.

The Toronto Star recently had an editorial which suggested if the NDP and Liberals didn’t compete against each other in individual ridings it would allow an Liberal-NDP coalition to form the government. This is similar to my recent suggestion. However I was wrong. Doing this would not result in enough gains to justify it.

People tend to assume that Liberal supports will vote NDP and NDP supports will vote Liberal. However, if you look at polling numbers for voter’s second choices, for a great many of them the Conservatives are their second choice.

If you run the numbers using vote’s second choices (and assume people without a second choice won’t vote) the results are very disappointing. There would be only five addition seats for the Liberals if the NDP dropped out. That doesn’t take into account seats lost due to a likely backlash against this.

People from Alberta having been complaining they will be unfairly burdened by reducing our use of fossil fuels to help stop climate change.

They should stop complaining and get on with reducing their carbon emissions. The sooner they get started, the easier it will be on them.

I have two reasons for this.

First, life is not fair. It’s not fair that Alberta has greatly benefited from its the oil resources it happens to have while the rest of Canada has to pay the world price for oil just like everyone else. It’s not fair that, most likely, millions of people will die in undeveloped countries because of the greenhouse gas emissions from developed countries.

Control over natural resources should have been given to the federal government rather then the provinces. This would have allowed the federal government to collect the royalties, while the provinces with the resources would still get the substantial benefit from the economic development extracting the resource provides. Our current system concentrates both the royalties and the economic benefits in one area.

Secondly, they where warned. Concern about global warming has been ongoing for twenty to thirty years. They should have known that basing their development on fossil fuels had a significant risk.

The BC government is asking the BC Supreme Court to rule if it is unconstitutional to ban polygamy, after two out of three special prosecutors surveyed seem to think it is.

It is hypocritical to support gay marriage and not polygamy. Who are we to say that love is only possible in certain combinations. It is up to those involved follow their heart.

People opposed to polygamy point to how many of the women involved in these relationships are oppressed. There used to be an institution like that. It’s call heterosexual marriage. We’ve come a long way since the time women where considered property and beating them too much was frowned upon. The legal structure of marriage has been one of the factors that facilitated that improvement.

Legalizing polygamy will allow those relationships to come out of the shadows and that can only help the women involved. They will be more free to talk about the relationship with friends and authorities. They will have the right to divorce and be able to receive a proportionate settlement. To add someone to a polygamous marriage will require consent of all already involved.

Legalizing polygamy will not instantly solve all the problems of exploitation in these relationships, but it will be an important first step. If we don’t they will continue to exist underground and little progress will likely be made, besides breaking a few of them up from time to time.

I’m bitter that the Governor General allowed the Prime Minister to prorogue parliament. How bitter? Bitter enough to propose a constitutional amendment.

These constitutional changes address the series of near constitutional crisis over the past several years. They increase the power of Parliament and decrease the power of the Executive. In Canada the Executive is the Governor General acting on the advice of the Prime Minister.

1. The Prime Minister of Canada must maintain the confidence of the House of Commons and first ministers must maintain the confidence of their respective legislative assemblies. If the Governor General or a Lieutenant Governor receive communication expressing a loss of confidence from a majority of members of the respective bodies, Governor General or a Lieutenant Governor shall require the Prime Minister or first minister to reestablish confidence within 7 days.
2. The duration of the House of Commons or legislative assembly may be set by Act of the Parliament of Canada or the legislative assembly, as the case may be, proved the Act does not have Force until two years after royal assent and complies with Part I, section 4 of the Constatution Act, 1982. The Governor General or Lieutenant Governors may not dissolved earlier then the duration specified in law, unless there is no one in which confidence can be established.

Basically, this moves to power to call elections from the Prime Minister to Parliament whether the election is triggered by an fixed election date law or a loss of confidence. If there is a loss of confidence the opposition leaders have to option to form the government or allow an election to be called. They could do this right until any election date prescribed by law. Changes to election date laws must be made at least 2 years in advance so the government can’t just change the law to a time that is convenient to them.

It also says that in a minority government the opposition can force a confidence vote at any time, even if Parliament is not in session. Failure to have a vote would mean an automatic loss of confidence, so tricks like prorogue or delaying opposition days would not work.

Giving Parliament these powers makes Canada more democratic because the House of Commons more directly reflects the will of the Canadian people and it is supposed to be the body the Prime Minister is responsible to. The Prime Minister should not be deciding when the House of Commons is dissolved or when it votes on confidence.

Many of the rules that our government operates on are unwritten convention. This includes the idea that the Prime Minister must have the confidence of the House. To amend these conventions, as any county with self-determination should be able to, the only choice is to add the convention to the constitution.

To have it apply to both the provinces and the federal government, they must be mentions separately. If you look at the constitution you’ll see that there are several clauses that are repeated, once for the Federal government, once for the provinces.

You might be able to get away with applying these changes only to the federal government so you only need the federal parliament to pass it, but the problems I’m trying to solve applies equally to the provinces, even though the situations seems to arise more frequently in the federal government.

These changes would have effected several recent events.

Most recently and more prominently was the coalition crisis, where the Governor General allowed Parliament to be prorogued so the Prime Minister could avoid a confidence vote. These changes would have forced the Prime Minister to show he had confidence once the MPs had contacted the Governor General expressing their lack of confidence, even if it meant recalling Parliament.

A couple months before, the Governor General allowed the Prime Minister call an election even though Parliament had passed an fixed election date law. By allowing this, the Governor General rendered all election laws ineffective.

In 2005 the Paul Martin government, when threatened with losing a confidence vote, used it’s power to change the House of Commons agenda to avoid a confidence vote for several weeks. Eventually he agreed to a vote. The changes I propose would have allowed MPs to force a vote, even if Parliament is in recesses. This means that the House of Commons can hold the government to account 365 days a year.

Most people within the NDP find this idea of cooperating with the Liberals to avoid splitting the vote abhorrent.

However, our flawed first-past-the-post electoral system gives tremendous advantages to groups who can unite their votes. We don’t like the system, but we only have two choices, to boycott elections until it is changed, or worked within it. To work within it means we have to adopt a strategy that bring success and working with the Liberals to not split the vote will bring that success. It will bring both more NDP MPs and more MPs who are willing to work with the NDP.

Despite much animosity between the Reform party and the Progressive Conservatives and a leader elected under the condition that the two parties did not merge, they have reaped the rewards of coming together.

People say the Liberals are really a right-wing party and they have certainly governed that way when in a majority. However, unlike the Conservatives, they are malleable. They are willing to bend any which way to gain power. We can use that to our advantage, to bend them our way. Also, most of the people who actually vote for them would consider themselves left leaning and would probably welcome working the NDP.

Any agreement with Liberals would have to be under certain conditions, some of which they many not be willing to agree to.

First would be that they support a referendum on a Proportional Representation electoral system that would not occur at the same time as an election, have an effective education campaign about the system and televised debates.

Second, the number of ridings that each party would not compete in would be the same and that they all be ridings where the combined vote would defeat the Conservatives by a generous margin. As well, the number of ridings would be well short of the number needed to give the Liberals a majority.

While not competing in certain ridings would hurt our changes of getting a majority or minority NDP government, frankly the odds of that happening any time soon are slim. To allow climate change and addressing poverty be delayed by more years of Conservative rule would be unethical.

Remember, this is not about bringing back the Chrétien years of Liberal majorities and right-wing policies, but creating the conditions the brought in the NDP budget and the billions for important projects.

Individually the events described by Dana Larson could be explained as mistakes or misunderstandings, but taken together they strongly suggests there was an organized effort to prevent him from expressing his views and to block the resolution from making it to the floor of the convention.

Even if you don’t agree with the resolution, I think everyone would agree the democratic process should be followed. Even if you think the banning Dana from the convention was appropriate punishment for trying to help pay for delegate’s travel, I think everyone would agree that the decision to remove democratic rights shouldn’t be made by an unelected staff member, but by an appropriate elected body of the party with an appeal process similar to the process for removing a candidate (Dana wasn’t removed as a candidate in the last election, he voluntarily resigned).

The most serious accusation is that the chair of the panel flagrantly violated the constitution and Robert’s Rules of Order with the purpose of prevent the marijuana resolution from reaching the floor. She allowed the motion to raise the priority to pass, then waited for the room to fill with opponents and reopened the debate without any justification at all. The story is consistent with rumors from the previous convention that where an organized group of people moving from panel to panel to manipulate the results.

The idea that someone in a position of authority in the NDP would try to undermine a party member’s ability to present their views or interfere with the democratic process because they disagreed with an idea or was afraid it would interfere with some grand electoral strategy is totally unacceptable and that anyone doing that should be removed from their position.

The next step would probably be for the federal council to pass a resolution directing the party to lunch an independent investigation to answer these questions:

1. What where the reason Dana Larson’s ad was rejected from the convention guide and what supporting documentation do they have? Why did it take so long for a reason to be given?
2. Why where Dana messages removed from the convention Facebook page?
3. Why did it take so long to inform him his group had a table at the convention? How many others where delayed?
4. Who decided to revoke Dana Larson’s delegate credentials? By what authority did they do that? Why didn’t they do so earlier? Why did they prevent him from being an observer? Why did they offer to refund the money for his flight?
5. Who disabled the public wall on the convention Facebook page and for what reason?
6. Why did the chair reopen the debate on the resolution? Where they given an instruction on how to treat the resolution?
7. Was there a group of people moving from panel to panel with a specific agenda? Who organized them?

There are additional questions the NDP should ask itself:

1. What procedure should be put in place to revoke someone’s delegate credentials?
2. Should people who chair convention resolution panels, plenary sessions and other large meetings be required to have training and be familiar with the constitution?

This has been crossposted to rabble.

In response to Toronto Star Business Columnist David Olive’s blog posting about how some professional bloggers have started working with the Mainstream Media. Several other blogs talk about how there is no conflict between them. I disagree.

I believe that bloggers and other Internet based amateurs will replace the Mainstream Media news in the coming decades.

It’s too early to say exactly how they will organize themselves, but taken together bloggers have knowledge of every detail of every event in the world from every point of view. As MSM reports putter along trying to understand things (and if you read about something you already know about, they usually fail), while bloggers have multiple experts on every subject. When something happens they don’t have to find witnesses, they are the witnesses. They are the people who initiated it, and the people who tried to stop it. They don’t need investigative reporters to find out. They already know, because they lived it.

While this is a bit of exaggeration, as the number of bloggers grows it will become more and more true.

Not all will be amateurs. Corporations and professional and semi-professional bloggers will be adding to the mix.

Because blogs often link to other blogs, if someone writes something important, even in an obscure blog, a few other blogs will link to it, and then more bloggers will find it and link to it and on and on. Through blog aggregators and blogs linking to blogs a comprehensive system of news gathering can develop.

The Mainstream Media isn’t the first industry that will be threatened by the power of individuals working together on the Internet. The software industry has been loosing ground to open source software for years. While the software industry hasn’t disappeared yet there are many categories where open source software is the second most popular product and a few where it dominates, like security scanning. Just like the coming Blogs wars, most of the open source software writers claim they aren’t fighting a war.

It won’t be the last industry to be threatened. Next will be entertainment. Then, once nanotechnology and computer-aided manufacturing is advanced enough, even manufacturing may fall. By then it will be clear that the capitalism can no longer function under those conditions.

Parts of this article are based on a comment I made in David Olive’s blog

Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy was written in 1887 and describes a socialist utopia. Its plot is simple: Julian West, due to a freak hypnotism accident, falls asleep for 113 years. When he wakes up he is taken in by the Leete family that lives where his house used to stand. They explain to him the changes that society has made. Bellamy uses the plot to present his vision of an alternative society without resorting to a dry academic text.

On being published it quickly became one the top selling books of the day, behind only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, and sparked the formation of organizations to promote and try to implement its ideas. It also prompted the publication of many other books either expanding on its ideas or countering them.

The alternative world of 2000 that Bellamy describes is one with far greater social progress, and far less technological progress, than we have today. All business is socially-owned, as is all real estate. People rent their homes, but buy their other personal possessions. Everyone receives the exact same wage throughout his or her life, no matter what job they do. People are attracted to jobs most consider less enjoyable by lower work hours. Money cannot be transferred from person to person, only used to buy things from the socially-owned stores.

Work is mandatory until retirement age (45). To justify this, it is compared to military conscription, but for an infinitely better cause and much better conditions than war. While conscription occurred in almost every generation up until the end of World War II, it’s been more then 50 years since there has been conscription in Canada, so such a comparison may not be as persuasive today!

Bellamy anticipated very little technological progress in the passage of time between 1887 and 2000. Everyone has electricity and a telephone, but there is no wireless communication, nor computers, let alone rocket ships to the moon. It’s still a world of pneumatic tubes and hand-written bills of sale.

Bellamy’s description of society in 1887 is remarkable inasmuch the basic social relations described have persisted in many ways into 2009:

By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

While the coach has now had tires installed and the road has been paved, we still pull the rich along.

On the role of women, while not quite up to today’s standard of equality, Bellamy’s views would probably been considered radical in the nineteenth century. Rather then being expected to stop working after marriage, they were required to work just as men were, only taking time off to raise children. Some jobs were only open to men and others only open to women. Woman’s jobs where less arduous and had shorter hours. Women had their own separate elected hierarchy. One infers that a woman could not be President, as the post of President is at the top of the men’s hierarchy.

It’s almost disheartening to read the how easily the society solved problems of the 19th century while we struggle with the same problems. Today most people can’t even imagine how society might be organized differently. This book allows us to envision alternatives and remember that all that it takes to implement them is public determination.

The copyright has long since expired and the book is freely available on the Internet. Copies are available at: Wikisource and Project Gutenberg.

This review was also posted in Hearts & Minds.

I didn’t attend this year’s convention in Halifax, but I did attend the last two federal conventions and I watched most of this one. Watching it on a PVR is great. I can just fast forward over the speeches for motherhood resolutions.

The policy debate is process has so many limitations and restriction it is virtually impossible to have a serious debate about anything. The vast majority of policies presented are very popular and are generally already being implemented by the caucus. It seems like only one resolution per convention gets serious debate. This time it was the energy policy and last time it was Afghanistan. It hardly seems worth it for hundreds of people to fly from across Canada at great expense, just for that. Of course, there is all the socializing, which I can’t deny is important.

Here are some resolutions that could improve the process. There are limits to how much can be done to improve the policy convention structure. Ultimately, online voting among all members will have to be implemented to solve the democratic problems.
Continue Reading »