Political use for Loomio

Your perspective is really powerful @roslyn . I doubt we would have time to engage in an extended political theory discussion here, although that is kind of the thread topic!

You seem to be arguing for simple majority rule above because you perceive supermajority to be highly subject to obstructionism. To me, that seems roughly equivalent to saying that consensus process itself is highly subject to obstructionism. My general answer is that yes, both processes are quite vulnerable to obstructionism if they aren't used skillfully, and if they don't have resilient tools and strategies for dealing with dissent.

It might help me if you could explain how you feel about consensus decision-making per se, because that's the general philosophy of Loomio.

@roslyn I think “consultative representation” would work for now, once there are plenty of decisions to be discussed by the law-makers/government that a common person doesn't understand and or doesn't have time to deal with all of them. That's why we still need politicians, people that will dedicate themselves to deal with lesser importance discussions to keep the group (city, state or country) running. BUT these elected must give the option to society to decide about the most important topics. That's where these tools would fit perfectly: to give this access IF the society wants to participate.
As you, I also intend to run for elections in 2016 and using this tools is part of my project.

@alandavison 'Vote na web' brings something good when its brief text "translate" the law being discussed from lawyers language to something ordinary people can understand. This stimulate more people to participate. But it's very important to keep this writing neutral.
I'm talking to the 'Vote na web' team to find ways to explore the tool the way I mentioned above, once they have infrastructure costs that must be considered.

@gregorycassel Yes, well sometimes, due to my background, I do feel like I hail from the Dungeon Dimensions where everything is a bit more rough and ready. I have seen obstructionism skillfully deployed to great effect more than once in my life, so it is certainly something that occurs to me as a potential problem.

I do think that it is good to try to achieve consensus and the deliberation is certainly useful for this. However, I don't think it's a very good idea to hold out on it or on supermajority rule as a requirement for decision-making, because it can be so easily abused (although I would be very interested in hearing any possibilities for effectively dealing with this situation...so please share).
I think someone earlier (maybe it was you) kind of hit on this, when they pointed out that Loomio is obviously completely voluntary. I think therefore, it probably attracts people who are mainly nice people and willing to genuinely engage with others. So as long as that is the case, consensus is probably A-OK. But if you were to roll it out to a wider audience...well...the world is not in the state it is because everyone is a perfectly nice person.

Also, quite apart from that, I would say, in the corner against consensus as a feasible outcome here, that there are often real pros and cons to any issue, therefore - why would everyone agree? There is often no one right answer, if you get my drift. Plus there are just different types of people in the world - maybe A is more important to you, but B is more important to me. Both A and B are reasonable things to want and (for whatever reason) it isn't possible to have both at the same time.
I would think that it would be better for sound decision-making to agree to disagree quite a lot of the time, without, however, hamstringing your ability to take action during that time (since often doing anything at all is preferable do doing nothing).
Personally, I would feel more comfortable being on the losing side of a debate, able to cast my vote in good faith against whatever is being voted on, and knowing that I've been able to have my say without holding everyone else up. If I knew that I was genuinely the only hold-out and everyone else wanted to do something else, I would probably cave in for the sake of keeping the peace. But is that best for long-term decision-making? After all, maybe time will tell that I was right, or maybe the society wasn't ready for my favoured proposal at the time, but will be someday. I think that if consensus is enforced (as opposed to just being a general goal), it actually puts everyone under unnecessary social pressure.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and detailed feedback @roslyn ! I tried to write a reasonably concise reply, but this subject feels complex to me, so I ended up with an essay I was planning to write anyway. (Though it's pretty rough for now.) You can check it out here if you'd like.

The upshot of the essay, basically, is this: I think that both simple majority and supermajority processes provide excellent opportunities for both progress and obstruction. To me, it's mainly a matter of how issues are chosen and framed, and who's doing the choosing.

@roslyn Thanks for the insightful comment ..

Also, quite apart from that, I would say, in the corner against consensus as a feasible outcome here, that there are often real pros and cons to any issue, therefore - why would everyone agree? There is often no one right answer

This is something that not only affects voting for a proposal but also during the discussion phase. I have been discussing this in another post Agree with statements instead of adding New.

Rather than simply a chronological list of comments (posts) we are discussing different views of said posts. Thanks do @dnephin for the following..

My idea for solving this problem (of being able to scale discussion making) was:

• keep the discussion and the “decision” together, not as separate things. Every comment had to have some “position” (support, agree, challenge, disagree, flag), which is very similar to the proposal portion of loomio.

• all posts would be responses to a specific piece of data or sentence in the proposal. Allowing people to disagree with some portion of a proposal and agree with other portions of it.

• handle some of the complexity by exposing all of the posts as more of a graph instead of a linear list of posts. So every post could have comments on it, forming a directred graph.

The idea with the user interface is that instead of seeing a chronological list of posts, or something like reddit where you can see the nesting, you would instead look at posts in the context they belong. So if you clicked on a proposal, you’d start by seeing some posts for each position, and if you click on one of those you’d see the parent context, and all responses to the post, and so on down the graph.

@gregorycassel I followed the link and read your essay. I see from your blog that you dislike "groupthink" and "blocking" which has also been evident in your posts on Loomio.

You raise some interesting points. I am not a student of politics with a small "p" or capital "P" but like you I did spend some time "evaluating myself" reading about philosophy, religion, psychology and cognitive processes to name but a few.

I don't think your objection to a "block" facility should cloud your judgement of Loomio. Right now it is "horses for courses" as they say. You wouldn't have a racehorse pull a plough (unless you had no other option) and Loomio isn't currently designed for "large scale political organisations"

As a group process much of the "Storming" has been done and the "Forming" and "Norming" stages are under way. This is our opportunity to beta test the new 1.0 platform to see how well it performs for us as individuals, members of groups or group coordinators. The testing and feedback we provide will lead to an improved user experience.

I am interested in the points raised in this discussion topic and spend a lot of time following up on posted links, articles, web sites and theories floated in these groups. I try to keep my posts short partly due to time constraints, partly due to my view that short, succinct posts make for a more engaging, easier to follow and less off putting discussion for new members to the group. And, lastly because I am posting in several groups to provide Interface / Useability and Feature Ideas and feedback.

I think it would be useful if the essay prone were to work on a collaborative document discussing the "political implications of online voting systems" or "supermajority - it's minority rule by another name".

The real benefit of Loomio was it's departure from the Forum style commenting with huge swathes of text to read and disseminate. Perhaps use Loomio to discuss a particular issue or component of a problem and test it that way?

@alandavison I'm sorry I don't know where a misunderstanding may have arisen-- I'm quite fond of the fact that Loomio has a block mechanism.

In that essay, I wrote "For that reason, I tend to think that an Agree/Disagree/Abstain system (like Democracy OS) is more suitable than Loomio for large scales of political organization right now." That statement is not meant in any way to criticize Loomio. In fact, I can hardly imagine being more fond of Loomio.

As far as I know, Loomio was developed for decision-making in general, of whatever sort. It has mainly been used by groups of voluntary members. (Political parties, for instance, are voluntary associations.)

I think that the agree/abstain/disagree/block concept is not only appropriate for voluntary associations, but may well prove necessary for our survival in general.

@gregorycassel perhaps I was mistaken, and confused your "block" stance with somebody else. I have been reading and posting a lot. If I did I appologise, and will have to re-read some of the discussions I have been part of.

I also watched that TED talk some time ago, and I agree that some more thought needs to go into balancing direct democracy, consultative processes and representative democracy - the term I have been using for the last 30 years (coming from Germany and grassroots politics there in the 1970s and 80s) is 'basis democracy'. The problem, of course, with internet voting is that it might degenerate into X-factor style mob rule, gravitating to lowest common denominators, if we were to implement it today. So whilst we want to enhance consultative processes, and develop internet-based technological tools that will enhance this, alongside that, it seems to me, we need a consciousness revolution. If we were to scale up Loomio beyond the association of like-minded groups who share a common mission statement and values, and wanted it to become a political tool that encourages engagement, we would have to maximise decision-making stages before it even comes to voting on proposals. People tend to vote in knee jerks, before considering the various lived realities of all the stakeholders, especially emotionally/psychologically. When I was involved in grassroots politics, I reformulated existing steps of consensus decision-making, in order to maximise the phase of mutual understanding, and even more importantly: mutual exploration of inner worlds underpinning any possible decision, before even brainstorming possible solutions. I am wondering what you all think about this kind of exploratory stage, which in larger and diverse communities tend to easily polarise and fragment, which usually leads to quickly entrenched positions?

The question I would ask is - how much difference would there be in the decisions made by a set of people that consists of elected politicians, and a set of people consisting of the eligible voters of a country? I am not convinced that a set of politicians is better than the citizens.

I am a member of an Australian political party intent on creating a hybrid of representative and direct democracy.

Just like the intentions of Pia's - El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of Buenos Aires, we intend to encourage our country's people to elect politicians from our party, who promise to obey the outcomes of internet decisions, and take them as our vote into the representative system of Australia's Parliament.

I would imagine we will not get many people elected so it won't be any more dangerous to our political system then the one or two crazy people we have elected now. But it could possibly give our government the shake up it needs.

Hypothetical - Lets assume we get one politician elected and that after the election Australians realise that they can control this politician, and so we find that a great percentage of the population start to interact and have an input. Would the decisions made by the people be respected by other politicians? Would the other politicians see that Australia is telling them what they really want and listen, or would they try to write it off as a flawed method?

I have heard many arguments about the possible consequences of this idea, but none as well written as the ones you all post here.

I am in favour of the idea, obviously. I don't know if it will benefit or degrade the decisions made in the Australian Parliament. We will only truly know after we have tried the experiment. But remember, this idea will not dramatically change our current system unless it proves popular and people choose to vote in enough e-politicians to hold a relevant balance of power.

Let me leave you with a much deeper philosophical question. Would the decisions made by the total population reflect the nature of humanity and if so... is that nature a good thing? Do you have faith in humanity? I have chosen to trust us, while realising that if I am wrong then there is not much point anyway.