Designing an Operating System for Democracy

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/designing-an-operating-system-for-democracy/374526/

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BUENOS AIRES—Pia Mancini is the photogenic leader of Argentina’s Net Party, which she co-founded in May 2012 and runs on her MacBook Air—from airplane lounges, conferences in Europe, government ministries, and sometimes an office that her group shares in a Buenos Aires district known for its television studios.

As telenovela stars arrive in jeeps and crews unload props from double-parked trucks nearby, Mancini and her colleagues type away next to their officemates, a group of young architects. From this office, which could easily be in Berlin or Berkeley or Beijing, Mancini and co. have created DemocracyOS, an open-source platform for voting and political debate that political parties and governments can download, install, and repurpose much like WordPress blogging software. The platform, which is web-based but also works on smartphone browsers, was conceived as a tool to get young Argentines involved in city governance. But it has since spread as far as Tunisia, where activists turned to the software earlier this year after their own efforts to develop an online forum for debating a draft constitution had failed. “People in Tunisia just found DemocracyOS online,” Mancini explained. “We learned that they were using it through a Transparency International news article.”

Her team’s vision is to make DemocracyOS the “operating system of a more open and participatory government.” The party, which has drawn inspiration from Pirate Parties in Germany and Sweden, fell short of gaining a seat in the city legislature after standing for election last year, winning only 1 percent of the vote. But it still made headlines for its ambitious charter. Net Party candidates promised to cast their votes according to the will of DemocracyOS users, and introduce legislation based on user suggestions rather than those of industry lobbyists. They’ve proposed crowdsourcing the reading of bills to combat corruption and instituting proxy voting, where people who do not feel informed about a given topic can delegate their vote to experts in the system.

This past spring, city legislators agreed to take part in a five-month test of the platform starting in August. Residents of Buenos Aires will have the opportunity to discuss and vote on three upcoming bills, while lawmakers will report on the results during their sessions. “The members of parliament aren’t saying they will vote according to what the citizens tell them,” Mancini noted. “What they are saying is they want to see what this is all about.” In this way, the party has managed to gain a measure of influence in the council without getting a member elected to the body. Its technology, in effect, has been elected. As Mancini’s co-founder and boyfriend Santiago Siri observed last year, “The political party is the way that we have to inject this Trojan virus into the congress. We are making the political system believe that we are playing by the rules but actually we are inserting an entirely new logic into their system.”

[CJCRANE]

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