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InstaGov is a set of tools for instant self-governance via computer network. It is currently under development. It will be open-source and distributed/federated.

A Narrative What if a bunch of people: agreed to contribute, say, 1% of their disposable income every month towards a common pot voted (via self-hosted software) for how the money should be used e.g. they could use it to hire one or more people to work on particular things they all agree would be a good use of that money if particular problems required a lot of study and decisionmaking, they could delegate individuals to make those decisions ...with the caveat that if the group decided they didn't like the decisions that were being made, or the level of transparency into the process, they could replace that person at any time (subject, perhaps, to reasonable guarantees of adequate warning and income stability) And then: what if there were a lot of groups like this, selectively working together the same way that fedi instances do, and they hired people to work out collaborative deals across multiple groups where they would each share a portion of their resources in order to produce something that wouldn't really have been affordable for any individual group? And then... (should I spin this out further?) Feel free to comment on this post.

Goals to invent functional and productive techniques of stateless (non-hierarchical) democratic self-governance to test and demonstrate these techniques starting on a small scale and working progressively upward to watch for exploit holes and "gaming" of these implementations, and work out ways to defeat these while they are still small to eventually make traditional government both unnecessary and irrelevant In order to work towards these goals, it is necessary to better understand the mechanics of power. Restrictions on the sampling of public opinion, and its conversion into binding decisions, are a thing which may once have been necessary but which is now basically preventing democracy from taking place. "restrictions on the sampling of public opinion" means: Elections only happen at set times, with long intervals in between What or who people can vote for is determined by those already in power The means of expression on votable issues is limited to favoring a single one, rather than expressing the degree to which one approves or disapproves of each Proposed changes (there are some details to work out in each of these, but this is the basic idea): A. Any voter should be able to propose agenda items at any time B. Any voter should be able to proxy their decisions in any given subject area to another voter of their choosing (subject-specific liquid democracy) C. (this part is not logically required, but I think it will be important) There should be a system of rational debate available, to which issues of sufficient importance should be subjected before they can be enacted.

External Pages Design documents Philosophy Project manager / bug tracker Google+: page and community

Modules liquid agenda debate mapper P2P Accountability Enforcement categorization proxy voting weighted

Methodology cooperatives governance methods: alternatives inquest liquid democracy liquid representation rational debate stages of change voter enclaves

Applications democratic militia federated retail structured debate: a set of rules for rational debate solutions to the taxation problem: co-operatization of large companies opt-in market socialism socialized land ownership

Presentation Collaborative network Circling the wagons International Citizens' Union Premises Structural overview Social business coalition Solutions US House of Commons

Related Projects

• CitizenOS: proprietary decisionmaking platform
• DemocracyOS: liquid democracy implementation (via via author on Mastodon): code is on GitHub
• Liquid Agenda and the Debate Mapper could probably benefit from having a UI like this, at least as an option. (author on Mastodon)
• The Humanity Online Project
• Loomio
  • software co-op
• Liquid Feedback (a project of the Pirate Party)
• Make Your Laws: main site .. wiki .. Google+

proprietary / centralized

• Deliberator: very similar to Liquid Agenda, but more heavily moderated and produced
• Kialo: similar to debate mapper
• Loomio: "a user-friendly tool for group decision-making. Creating a world where it’s easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them." Subscription is pay-what-you-like; looks like interaction may be limited to "groups".
• Participedia "open global knowledge community for researchers and practitioners in the field of democratic innovation and public engagement."
• PopVox (Google+): tell US Congress your opinion of bills
• WikiVote "Russian non-governmental organization which goal is to develop effective means of citizens’ participation in lawmaking and strategic planning"
• The Spark "Users post and vote on PROBLEMS that we face as a global community. The most popular problems are voted to the top. Users then post and vote on SOLUTIONS so that the community can take ACTION." - sounds similar to liquid agenda

techniques

• wikipedia:Participatory politics: hierarchical representation carried out more thoroughly
  • Professional Politicians Beware! by Aaron Swartz (via)
• wikipedia:Rational consensus: the method is not currently described in the article, but perhaps the article will be expanded soon. A user has described this system thusly: "ideas are based on known facts and good practices."

discussion

• Quora

plans

• Equality Incorporated (discussion)
• Wolf PAC
• 2013-07-31 How Democrats can reclaim North Carolina government