The process.

@pete1
I just had a look at ABC fact check. It's a very interesting concept and I think that investigative journalism has a huge role to play in the checking of facts.
However, ABC is owned by Disney and represents all the old problems associated with a centrally controlled media narrative: spin, bias, propaganda, special interests etc.
I would advocate for a decentralized checking of facts: peer review on a huge scale, where individual biases are somewhat neutralized.

@robhayward

My thought was to leverage the tools Loomio already has. We can make a proposal, discuss it and vote. In the end the votes are tallied.

Instead of just making proposals, Loomio could have a different category than proposal. I'm calling it "agreements". Propose a "fact", discuss it, vote on it and tally the votes. If the community agrees, then the agreement is published in the timeline.

Technically possible. Hopefully not a huge burden to implement.

@BenBurton
Very nice! Could be a great way to do decentralised peer-review.
Are there examples of Loomio already being used to effectiely discuss/evaluate subjects rich in evidence/statistics/complexity?

@robhayward @BenBurton

I agree with Rob on the "agree" button point. Efficiency is really key for a lot of people trying to participate in decision-making on a more regular basis while still coping with all of the other obligations of life. It would be a very easy point for Loomio to integrate and provide a big pay-off in terms of simplifying the process.

@rorytb @dnephin

As far as drafting laws is concerned - this may well be more complicated than you would think. Some legal agreements may be tens of thousands of pages long. All lawyers are now specialists and there are even specialists among the specialists. Also, you won't find most law in laws - it is a lot about interpretation. Thus, understanding law necessitates reading many judgments and commentaries. Probably only 3% of any lawyer's reading is the law itself (maybe not even that).
One prong to this is, of course, simplification and (especially in common law countries) codification. Sometimes law is needlessly complicated.
But some of the time it is just bloody complicated because it has to be, and therefore I would say that instead of trying to write legislation with some combined group knowledge (which only someone with at least 20 years' experience in that field would actually have), it would be far more efficient to simply commandeer the resources of those experts and order them to write laws that achieve the general objective you are aiming at, i.e. make them take care of all of the details of getting there.

@roslyn

One issue I see with Loomio is that in order to help simplify or improve a process the process should be clearly defined. A simple flow-chart of the decision making process would help people use and improve Loomio.

The more I read and research this issue the bigger and more complex a beast it becomes.

For example, this discussion topic is titled "the process" and @lbjoum outlined three main points raised in the original discussion. To summarise

1> Distributed (Internet) Voting Platform
2> Platform presents Parliament's decisions / choices
3> Elected representative votes according to Platform result

@BenBurton I referenced a tool earlier that is currently not open source but is free to use. It is a type of flow chart and is still in early stages of development but I created a topic about Improving Collaborative Discussion and Decision Making Tools.

We can only simplify or improve a process if we fully understand that process as Ben pointed out. Textual technical descriptions, documents and explanations are not only difficult to follow but also difficult to write.

For example :

Is this discussion about Loomio in particular or "the process" of distributed democracy in more general terms?

i for one dont think its easy to do.

i favour the following progression:
1.using internet "SOL" style system to initially have represntatives do as we request.
this is part of rolling out phase 2

1. establishment of in home access to a direct democratic network and removal of politicians .. saying that, i dont trust the infrastructure we have for internet right now, and i think a new open source code should be written to do the actual direct democracy voting and polling, on a new second internet, or even local community network then somehow transported to the overall society/global tallies

i have about 15 years on development of this kind of system, and ideas on how to reduce complexity and ensure that it is difficult to corrupt and usurp.
direct democracy is extremely sensitive to well targeted media campaigns and in this society, time restraints.
changing to any kind of direct democracy requires massive societal changes on almost every level, so its a good opportunity to discuss every aspect of society and ensure it matches what people need..

i would like to invite other people into this discussion if someone could message me and tell me how.

i would also like to bring some of my existing base models in as well, but think they should be individual topics.
is there a preferred method for this or a format we shoudl use?

I'm glad to see joum has come across to seeing this as a global issue (:

@directadmin you wrote ...

changing to any kind of direct democracy requires massive societal changes on almost every level, so its a good opportunity to discuss every aspect of society and ensure it matches what people need..

One of the main problems we have is that only a very small number of people (proportional to population) are actually even considering this - despite millions of people actively participating in phone, text and app voting for "trivial" purposes like x-factor format television shows.

In relation to your first point

Using internet “SOL” style system to initially have representatives do as we request.

I think it would be useful to create a list of current candidates around the world who are working towards or willing to take on this mantle.

So far, here in the UK I have come across James Smith (via the Loomio Introductions) who is standing for election this year (2015) not in my area unfortunately but still interesting reading non the less.

Something Else Policies

Anybody interested in "the process" or thinking about running for election may be interested in taking a look at the above link. Personally I think "policies" should the reason candidates or parties are elected and also to what they should be held accountable to once elected.

I actually think SOL wasn't on too bad of an idea for transitioning, we should all run for a position. every member of the party in every seat of every election in every westminster democracy world wide.

but we need to be clear and have a blueprint we can stand behind.

the same blueprint for all of us. that's the key.