Represent.me

Blah - wikipedia

Here is a review from Carlos:

Structurally it has some very interesting features like demographic analysis, which probably only work on *their* cloud servers, even if we had the source code of it. Conceptually, liquid democracy yields good results in compensating for the absent ones in a certain group - but it doesn't deal with a general bias the entire group may have - in the case of DiEM that would be the way we generally agree with Yanis' views on economics. A demographic analysis would illustrate how close or far we are from the average people on the street and might in that aspect be superior to liquid democracy (science papers needed!). Still, it is itself a political choice whether a movement should reflect the average minds of the population or rather *has* to have a bias aka a political mission. So, for the purposes of DiEM I presume that liquid democracy yields better results than demo- graphic analysis would. I noticed some anti-features about Represent.me which go against our knowledge of fair democracy. The "anonymised results" make me particulary suspicious as they give the server owners a strategic advantage over the participants, and an opportunity to manipulate them with false data. "Social voting" is indeed an implementation of transitive liquid democracy, as Wessel suspected, which is exciting - I, however, have the impression that the delegation tree may not be in use for ongoing consensus measurement - and that is an important aspect! Voting alone comes too late. We need ongoing consensus evaluation to be as close as possible to what a final vote would yield, or we are working towards a "fake" consensus. Whenever the final vote produces opposing results compared to what the previous debate seemed to be heading to, you know that something is wrong with your consensus modelling. It's not okay to deal with it as if democracy were a theatre play. That's what traditional political parties deal with at each general assembly, but we don't want to replicate that. Real democracy is an ongoing transparent and mostly predictable process. Marketingwise I love how "represent.me" implies that representative democracy isn't actually representative, but I don't appreciate how they sell liquid democracy as if it were their own invention. Some credit is due.

The top-level organizational structure in Loomio is the ''group''. A group is made up of members, who are granted permission to that group. Groups can be both public and private, permitting for both privacy and transparency.

Proposals solicit feedback from members on a specific proposition. Members can either agree, disagree, abstain, or block. Blocking is essentially a strong form of disagreement.

In 2014, Loomio raised over $100,000 via a Crowdfunding effort to develop Loomio 1.0. The Loomio 1.0 software supports mobile phone usage and other enhancements.

Loomio was built by a core group of developers, based out of Wellington, New Zealand. However, many contributors from all over the world have donated money and time, in an effort to fund the new platform.