Resources

Here are a few resources that come to mind immediately:

The Meta-government wiki has a pretty comprehensive list of software projects working on the problem of online decision-making.

The Facebook group Upgrade Democracy has a really interesting membership with a a slow turnover of interesting content and discussions on this topic.

Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge's manual on how to organise 'swarmwise' is interesting reading.

Heather Marsh's series on mass collaboration is some of the best thinking I've read on this topic.

Clay Shirky's TED talk on what github has to teach us about governance.

A conversation with Stephen Johnson, Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford and Lawrence Lessig - Has Politics Gone Peer 2 Peer?

I thought we could also list some related online tools here.

Two that come to my mind:

• Incoma is a tool for network-mapping complex discussions. It was released 2 weeks ago, built by a team in Spain, involving a really nice guy called Miguel Catania who organised a conference on collective intelligence a few months ago.

• Intertwinkles which is a suite of awesome tools for small democratically organised groups to shift good decision-making process online. It's been built by Charlie DeTar supported by MIT Center for Civic Media.

I'd love to invite both Miguel and Charlie into this conversation too!

We should probably add the API's for Google Moderator. I think there are quite a few deliberation and decision online services ... but it's been a few years since I've investigated (many have probably expired, evolved and emerged in the meantime). I'll take a fresh look and add more. Also, it might be worth looking backwards to high merit earlier works to see if there are any good ideas to revive and carry forward somehow...

Hey, I compiled a large list of resources in some of the prep for my dissertation here: http://project.intertwinkles.org/projects/consensus/wiki/Related_work (though many of those are now defunct).

Also just to note: there's a tremendous diversity in this space, everything from tools to support 5 people scheduling a meeting together, to voting systems intended for 100's of thousands. The framing as "e-democracy" makes me think folks are looking at the larger end of the scale -- worth keeping in mind some of the limitations in applicability of different types of tools.

Thanks for the nice words Ben! We are working to add new features in Incoma so it will be improved a lot in the following weeks.