Adhocracy FAQ/en
From LiquidDemocracy
[edit] What is Adhocracy?
A weird piece of code that does a half-baked version of Liquid Democracy
[edit] What is Liquid Democracy?
A buzzword created in 2003. While many use the term Liquid Democracy to describe internet-based Delegated Voting (a voting mechanism), Adhocracy goes beyond that. The essence of Liquid Democracy is the tight coupling of a networked voting system to an open system for the discussion and development of policy alternatives.
While traditional online discussion systems are a great way to generate new ideas, they frequently fail to prioritize and filter them. This leads to situations in which the most outrageous and absurd proposals receive the most detailed discussion, while more realistic options are drowned in the noise. A convenient method to filter such proposals is to allow users to vote on them. This way, the community can learn whether a proposal lacks essential support among its members, whether the proposal needs some more work or whether it is generally accepted and can become part of the group's policies or even of the political agenda of that organization.
Involving many users in an online poll can be hard, since the degree to which individual users engage in an online discussion is highly varied. Yet any meaningful poll must reflect not only the loud and ever-present voices, but also those who cannot and do not want to spare as much time on a specific debate as others. Liquid Democracy allows these users to make a simpler choice instead: they can name an agent whose position in one or many debates they want to support. This agent will be given the right to vote on their principal's behalf. Yet this delegation, unlike a proper voting proxy, is a soft connection which can be reviewed, overridden or entirely cancelled at any moment. In a way, delegated voting is a recommendation mechanism that works like the song recommendations a service like last.fm produces.
In Liquid Democracy, opinions are no longer just a private matter but instead become the subject of a dynamic network based around both topics and opinion leaders. This reflects the structure of a networked public implied in tools such as Facebook and Twitter.
[edit] How does voting work?
Adhocracy allows users to vote on proposals - so-called motions - to determine the degree of support they have within the community. In order to bring an idea to be voted upon, the following steps are needed:
- A motion is created within an appropriate issue. It will have both a formal and an informal description.
- The formal descriptions, so-called provisions, are modular. While a motion needs only a single provision to be voted upon, it can have an arbitrary number of them.
- A poll need to be called for a motion to be voted upon.
- The vote can be called by the motion's creator, an administrator or any user who has met the "call for a vote" karma threshold. Future versions of Adhocracy might require multiple users to agree for a vote begin.
- A vote can be called at any time. There is no pre-defined schedule that mandates voting in specific intervals or at defined dates.
- Polls can last for any number of days or weeks and need not be stopped at any time. A successful vote (ending in an adopted motion) will last for as long as the motion is in effect. This principle could be called Continuous Legitimization.
- While voting, the provisions that have been included in the poll cannot be modified. This is required to allow decisions to be made on a fixed proposal.
- A vote can be cancelled at any time unless it has acquired the required majority. When that happens, a motion becomes entirely immutable and cannot be modified without first losing its support among the voters.
[edit] What are motion states?
This portion of the FAQ is outdated and has been replaced by an easier concept. It will have to be re-written-
Motions have a life cycle that leads them from being drafts to community-approved documents. Which state a motion is in depends on whether it has been released and on the number of votes it has for/against it.
- draft: A draft motion is not yet finished and can still be edited by any member of the Adhocracy.
- voting: After a vote was called, a motion is "voting"; any user can cast a vote on the motion.
- activating: After gathering approval by the required majority of the participants (usually two thirds of the voters), a motion is activating and must maintain that majority for a certain delay (usually 7 days) in order to become active.
- active: The motion is approved by the community and can be seen as part of their established codex.
- deactivating: When a motion loses the required majority, it is re-transferred to the voting state. Similar to the activating state this transition is delayed. Deactivating motions are, therefore, still an active part of an accepted consensus.
[edit] What is delegated voting?
Delegation helps voters to make their voice heard in a decision even if they cannot or do not want to explicitly vote on certain proposals. A delegation is an authorization of one user (the principal) to allow another user (the agent) to vote on his or her behalf. Each delegation is valid within a certain scope, e.g. with regards to a political area like climate policy. This means that the agent can vote on the principal's behalf in all decisions that are marked to be inside the given scope. The delegations of a voter can thus be seen as his or her personal cabinet. In this cabinet, one agent is responsible for making decisions regarding the subject area A, while another agent is responsible for making decisions in a second subject area, B.
The special properties of Adhocracy's delegation system include:
- Unanimity: When a voter has delegated voting on a certain proposal to two or more agents, his or her vote will only be counted if both agents make the same decision. If the agents disagree, no vote will be cast by their principal unless he or she does so manually. This can be used to intentionally limit the power of an agent in a specific domain by requiring a second delegate to concur.
- Transitivity: If a delegation is created in which the agent has delegated their voting powers themselves, the principals vote will be available to the agents agent. In other words: If A delegates to B and B delegates to C, then C can vote on A's behalf. This can be used to quickly reproduce the delegation decisions another voter has made: A voter can just delegate to the other voter, instead of reproducing all individual delegations.
[edit] Who should one delegate voting to?
The Adhocracy platform provides a lot of information that can be used to make delegation decisions:
- Voting records are the most objective source of documented prior behavior and can help to identify a users' positions.
- Comments within a discussion can give more specific insight on a user's approach and position regarding a specific topic.
- Aggregate Karma scores with regards to an issue or category can help to identify regular contributors.
- Off-channel communication, such as blogs and Twitter can also be a valuable source for identifying the opinion leaders which most closely represent one's opinions.
- One of the major goals of the next version of Adhocracy will be to introduce more intelligent automated comparisons among the users to generate reliable recommendations.
[edit] Are there secret votes in Adhocracy?
No. A full public voting record is available for all users, at any time. There are three reasons to do this:
At its core, Adhocracy is a discussion tool. Having the participants state their opinions on an issue is a part of this discussion and should thus happen in public. Without voting records, delegation becomes useless. If the voting record of delegation agents wasn't published, one would have to trust the agents to honestly identify their intentions regarding each vote. This would create a critical trust limitation against delegation. While one could imagine a system in which only those who wish to receive delegations would publish their voting records, such a system would create unequal conditions for voting between public and private voters, thus violating another important principle of any democratic voting system.
Keeping voting records a secret is hard. Trust in the system would be predicated on the assumption that no leaks - including those resulting from indirect attacks - occurred. This assumption is bound to be compromised at some stage, creating a system with dubious security and privacy. Publishing all voting records is thus a step avoid creating misconceptions among users regarding privacy. The voters themselves can then decide whether a particular topic is fit for public voting and otherwise go off-channel, using paper ballots.
[edit] Which voting system does Adhocracy use?
Adhocracy currently only supports voting on individual motions, not the comparative polling on different alternatives regarding an issue. Starting with the next version of Adhocracy, the software will use a fairly complex variant of approval voting. In this process, users will be able to specify which motions depend upon each other and which motions contradict each other. Motions will then become active only if they meet all their dependencies and have the highest level of approvement among their respective cluster of contradicting motions.
While this process is somewhat complicated internally, the voter will only have to make a binary decision on whether he thinks a motion is acceptable or not. Tactical voting is not needed in most approval voting systems.
Unlike instant runoff systems, approval voting also doesn't require users to priorize their choices, a process that generates more information than strictly necessary and that leads to various inconsistencies such as Arrow's paradox.
[edit] Can Adhocracy be used to make laws?
While the concept of delegated voting can (and probably will at some point) be applied to the creation and decision on state laws, Adhocracy is not intended for this purpose. Many aspects of the idea of Liquid Democracy are still very new and will have to proove themselves in practical use before we should consider running our states based on this idea. In the mean time, there is a lot of value to the democratic systems that are currently in use: while they may be imperfect, we have come to know their weaknesses and can use that knowledge to run democratic and stable governments.
[edit] Can Adhocracy be used to hold elections?
While it is technically possible to elect members of the community into an office using Adhocracy, this is highly discouraged. Arguing for or against the capabilities and personality of a candidate is a process that is fundamentally different from arguing a position on an issue. A secret vote is, therefore, an essential element of any election. Adhocracy cannot offer any degree of secrecy. Additionally, the delegation system will produce odd incentives when used in an election setting.
[edit] Is Adhocracy secure?
For a long time, smart people have tried to build voting machines that no attacker can tamper with. Concepts for this usually integrate strong cryptographic mechanisms that allow the voting authority to verify the identity of the voter. Unfortunately, most of these proposals are extremely complicated and require the user to install special software on their PC, follow non-trivial processes and to manage cryptographic keys. Yet, even these tools do not guarantee perfect security: shit just happens.
Adhocracy values access and usability over ultimate security. Since the goal is to structure a debate and not to command an army, the focus, instead, is on creating tools that will make it more obvious when shit starts happening. The core principle of this, an idea called Soft Security, demands that Adhocracy should keep you informed about your past actions and the way in which polling results come about.
[edit] Why can others edit my comments?
To avoid redundancy. In most internet forums, when a good argument has been made, there is usually a stream of additions and examples provided by other users that end up spamming the thread. Having the ability to edit the original argument allows you to decide whether to add your extension to the original comment or to create a new one.
This way, the new comment is no longer a static step of the conversation but can become a living and growing argument that is supported by its own community of editors.
[edit] You stole ideas from StackOverflow/Reddit/Digg/HN!
True. These tools, I think, are the pinnacle of what online debate can look like at the moment. StackOverflow, unfortunately, is based on the assumption that there is a right answer to any question. This, of course, is not true in a political setting. So I used some SO ideas (including the graduate membership thing and, I'll admit, the layout) and repackaged them.