Liquid Democracy in Loomio

@hubatmcjuhes it wasn't me but @christaklis that has expressed the frustration about chain delegation.
I have only proposed a solution that could help to reduce this risk by using "distributed delegation" instead of "mono delegation".
But your solution seems also very good since it give an incentive to the user to participate.
Both solution are complementary.
And

I was thinking that you could actually combine chain delegation and preference delegation, deciding one by one if you want to let a person do delegation on to others, or if you want to go to the next one on the list instead. Maybe even decide a number of levels to permit chain delegation. For example one chain can be okay, two chains goes so distant that it can be hardly seen as a meaningful choise. This way everybody can decide a level of trust. But probably this would be too complex?

Chain delegation seems a bit unstable. The chains can break multiple times, which adds a lot of practical and conceptual complexity. In general, people have a very hard time understanding concepts beyond the vanilla democracy they were raised with, and so it is a hard sell. Additionally, the sftesre behind it becomes complex. That's my opinion, anyway. I started a company called VoteIt.com so I've been fighting this out for a while.

My sense is that getting an elegant version of of a single level of delegation to work well is more important -- how decisions are made, how votes are delegated by topic area, the period that a person can have a last chance to see if they want to change their vote to disagree with the proxy, and generally the notification system to bug the voter just enough so they get the right level of engagement, even if they have delegated their vote.

Those areas all seem like they will require finesse, experimentation, and great design to make them generally accessible. Chain delegation, which I really hope can be made to work, seems like the next step once simple delegation proves effective.

The term, 'Liquid Democracy' seems just another adjective for yet another form of democracy without really adding anything to clarity and if anything, making things murkier by adding to complexity.
I mean, do we all have to get into some kind of body of water before we can vote? Is voting from under a shower good enough?
Nevertheless, as long as Colloid Democracies (in-gelatin voting rights), etc., work for whoever want it and are not coercive to those who don't, then I'm fine with that.
Have it in your ecovillage. In a swale-fed pond.

@caelanmacintyre 'Liquid Democracy' is a concept that tries to give a positive answer to what is seen as a major problem of democracies-as-we-know-them.

The usual democracy will be based on a delegation system where the people vote their representatives (or a pre-configured list of representatives) and for a given period of time these representatives will make all sorts of decisions in the name of the voting people. this model is beautifully expressed by the term 'seine Stimme abgeben', which means 'to vote' but literally says: 'to hand over ones voice' - making it very clear that, once you voted, you have no saying any more at all (until the next voting day in three, four or five years time, when you will be hero just for one day again).

The concept of Liquid Democracy wants to overcome this tragedy by introducing a way of real-time delegation, where you can define fine-grained delegations, so that you can define your representative(s), not a list, but the exact person; either for all things politics or only for particular political fields or a single issue. But in any case you always can exercise your voting right yourself on each and every issue, if you like. You delegate just as much as you feel appropriate. And you can change your delegation scheme at any point in time. No election day needed.

I think, this is more than...

just another adjective for yet another form of democracy without really adding anything

...this is a change of paradigm.

@Hubat McJuhes
Fair enough, Hubat, I guess… There are, of course, ‘pure democracy’ and ‘direct democracy’, but if they don’t already suggest a similar approach or framework to Liquid D (clothes come out softer in Liquid D), then perhaps it is not reinventing the wheel.
In any case, and again, much of this seems of the ‘Ya, no kidding’ category, but somehow never makes the light of day. Instead we get so-called ‘representative democracy’ at the business end of an embedded gun to varying degrees, depending on what kind of prison-ship you live on.
The parable of the violent tribe.
Even the crony-capitalism-state model (call it what you will) is what creates the computer network upon which rides Loomio and, presumably, Liquid D.

Loomio, perhaps in association with, say, Permaculture Global, seems to need to be its own decentralized pure democratic– ok, liquid, if you will– ‘country’ or ‘liquid democratic republic of a million villages' and to use its own model– its own, main point perhaps– to help run it, uncoercively/opt-outable.

If so, then it is a ball that is being dropped, or not exactly picked up and held properly– a lost opportunity– by the folks at Loomio and elsewhere with similar takes that are ‘internally democratic’ or discuss it and have some kind of idea of it, but somehow can’t seem to get around to the other side, outside of Plato’s Cave perhaps, and in part, look back in on itself and note the cave’s limitations, even if the prisoners are unchained.

So Loomio it is suggested is essentially just, say, a quaint house on a street somewhere that is democratic on the inside or has a democratic model to export to other houses, with little apparent ambitions of transcending, or capacities to transcend, its walls.

“Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.”
~ V. S. Naipaul

Every aspect of everything is built upon the established framework of that which existed before it. Followed to its roots, everything is derived from the potentials of existence.

The foundations of society do inhibit the freedom of the potential designs that can be added, and I don't think it is necessary to tear down that which already exist to be able to create systems that could offer better opportunities and potential. We are creating little experiments all over the internet. Testing different ways. Soon some of these different methods will take root.

If it is true that a better paradigm can exist, and they surely can, then change will come.

There's potentially much that can be done on and with, say, a 'sociogeopolitical Titanic' before it sinks, with a caveat that it is important to recognize what we have to work with and its implications for our efforts.

In the manipulation of the social mechanics of society, we have many possible combinations of the methods available to us. Every so often a new invention broadens that potential, and the internet is unquestionably one such invention. There was a chain reaction of events that lead to the invention of the printing press, it was not the results of one man or one technology. Did the participants in the use of this new technology foresee the effects that this new ability would have on society? I guess they would have known that it would be a huge benefit, but could they have imagined how much it would raise the ability of the lowest class? It used to be that the elite possessed easier access to enabling technologies, but now you and I can use the same powerful technology as the rich.

We will not know the eventual effects that the convergence, of the internet into the governance of society, will have until after it has happened. I am of the opinion that giving every person access to the mechanisms of their society, not through the occasional vote for a few people but through the every minute results of an internet poll, will demonstrate the true collective nature of humanity. Therefore I believe that the most important consideration is question of whether the true majority nature of humanity will produce positive results for the success of humanity.

“It’s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980 and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human history. Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end, and the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again… As we move into the penumbra of the deindustrial age, then, it’s crucial to start thinking about the options open to us – individually and collectively – with an eye toward their long-term viability and to the hard reality of a world of ecological limits. When today’s data centers are crumbling ruins long since stripped of valuable salvage, and all the data once stored there has evaporated... the thinking that led politicians to gut viable library systems on the assumption that the internet will take up the slack will look remarkably stupid. Still, the habits of thought instilled by the age of cheap abundant energy are hard to shake off, and from within them, such mistakes are hard to avoid. ” ~ John Michael Greer

Good quote. The content... it is possible and not just slightly, but I don't see that it is likely. Perhaps you do, and that is you. Me - I don't know. As for faith in humanity - I choose to.

Count me in as wanting to use Loomio for an LD governance model. As far as I can tell this is not yet possible. All the LD alternatives I’ve evaluated don’t appear to be actively maintained.

I expect we'll have the ability to delegate your vote in about 6 months time - after Loomio 1.0 is retired there is a small architecture change to happen that will solve a number of things, including specifying exactly who can vote in a proposal and selecting and applying delegated votes.

We're also looking into the process of many groups discussing and participating in their own copy of the same proposal, then showing an overview of these proposals for cross group intelligence.

I just want to issue a strong ‘second’ to @Hubat McJuhes’s suggestion that delegated votes could degrade. The skepticism and criticism for LD in this thread have definitely given me some pause and caused me to rethink my enthusiasm somewhat, but I still think LD/delegate democracy could exhibit some really valuable strengths. Perhaps the vote degradation could be even more dramatic—a delegated vote only counts for 25% or 10% on the first handoff. This would certainly reduce the power of proxies, incentivize participation and deliberation, appropriately penalize indirect and likely under-informed engagement, while still allowing some influence by those who are less-informed or very short on time or temporarily occupied. It also lends greater legitimacy to decisions in which a majority of people did not directly participate, which I personally think is a better outcome than decisions with a minority of any kind of engagement becoming binding, which I think is more likely to generate resentment among people who are simply unable to consistently participate.

I’m also interested in other measures for potentially limiting the power of proxies, such as prohibiting chains, requiring that proxies complete their votes a certain interval before decision deadline (and notifying members of their choices with the chance to change them before the deadline has passed), and, a suggestion I haven’t seen here yet, establishing an upper cap on the number of votes a proxy can carry.

I also think apathy and the decision to delegate are more likely to occur the lower the stakes of the decisions. As some groups become more and more important in their impacts on members’ lives, I strongly believe members will be more motivated to directly participate more often. Participatory democracy is also a habit and a lifestyle that few of us are well-practiced at—I absolutely expect that in early stages we will see the worst levels of engagement in either LD or more purely direct forms. It’s just a period that we have to push through for democracy to become second nature—and as we do, people will make better and more engaged direct decisions and, as the case may be, better delegations.

Final thought, I’m not sure whether the Pirate Parties previously discussed conducted their votes online or in-person, but smooth online voting dramatically lowers the barriers to participation and makes it much easier to pick-and-choose when to delegate and whether to invalidate the decision a delegate made for you, which should dramatically diminish the imbalance of influence compared to in-person decisions that require travel and long meetings.

We've been reworking the architecture of Loomio's voting system over the last couple of months. A basic proxy voting system is planning for some time this year.

First iteration will be a simple "Select your proxy, should you not participate" when joining the group, on closing of proposal all votes that were not cast will be updated according to the proxy rules, and marked as proxy votes.

With export to CSV support, you can apply your own understanding of the weight of proxy votes vs direct votes.