Liquid Democracy
2012-08-01
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“Code is Law” is the catch phrase of Lawrence Lessig famous bestseller[9] on the future of democracy. From the beginning of the Internet revolution, there has been the discussion, whether our new forms of media and communication would lead to another revolution as well: a political one[11]. Many of the media and platforms that rose over last decade show aspects of communal or even social systems – and hence might be called Social Media with good cause. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that we start to see the development of the communication platforms that are genuinely meant to support and at the same time to experiment with new forms of political participation, like Proxy-Voting or Liquid Democracy, which had been hardly conceivable without the infrastructure of the Web1. Since these new forms of presenting, debating, and voting for policies have been occurring just recently, we can expect that many other varieties will appear, new concepts to translate the internet paradigm into social decision making. Nevertheless, how do these new forms of voting work? Are they really mapping the volonté générale into decisions? If so, will it work in a sustainable, stable, continuous way? And how to evaluate the systems, one compared to another?2