jaenyf

Ha ha, good point! BUT…! Fortunately, the model proposed by Stack Overflow isn’t based on referendums! Fortunately, Stack Overflow users aren’t required to answer every question!

So I think we could set up a system that would distribute laws or legislative amendments both across the entire population (horizontal axis) and according to current trends or severity (vertical axis).

This could lead to situations where certain minor and very localized changes would affect only a very limited number of citizens who have subscribed to them: those directly affected by these changes (for example, a village), even though all citizens of the country could access this information and contribute to it.

On the opposite, a very significant change (such as a revision of the Constitution at the national level) would require broader citizen participation and would likely necessitate a referendum mechanism.

I believe I’ve observed these two mechanisms at work on Stack Overflow:

- Their default system for sorting questions, tags, and categorization could be used to target a specific segment of the user base (while remaining open to all other users).

- They also have a global voting system that sends all users an invitation to vote (for example, to elect a Stack Overflow moderator). This could serve as inspiration for a simple and accessible referendum system.

What’s interesting about the ODD is that if citizens are dissatisfied with a feature (let’s say a poorly designed referendum process has been implemented), they can simply propose redesigning it themselves, and the system would adapt accordingly.

EDIT: That's also why I explicitly made the very 1st element of the very 1st article of the draft constitution as follows: "Because of human nature, ODD will face attempts at sabotage, power grabs, deception, manipulation, and subversion—whether through deception, trickery, or direct attack—and must therefore ensure its own security in order to guarantee the security of all citizens. However, no security mechanism can justify the implementation of opaque processes that escape the scrutiny of even a single citizen, even if they pertain to national security. Fundamentals proposed by ODD’s lie in its openness and are the guarantee of the security, the freedom, and the application of a direct democracy by and for citizens."

The intent is to exclude any "Rimmer-like" individual, whether it be me or any other person, from seizing any kind of power of any sort. As long as power is distributed, the citizens remain in control and, therefore, the democracy remains.

ODD should guarantee this; as a bootstrap process, democratic self-organization on GitHub (or any other Git-related platform, e.g., through its discussion system) should make important initial bootstrap processes emerge until a working ODD system is ready to be used instead.

Thanks, I agree and that's exactly why I mentioned in the draft of the constitution in Article 4.2: "Reputation can influence access to specialist responsibilities, moderation, research and advisory functions, but cannot increase the weight of an individual's fundamental vote. This is to prevents a system in which the most popular or experienced citizens gradually become a new political aristocracy."

Because that's exactly what representation is nowadays in most so-called democratic countries: an expert system auto-spawning representative experts. That's the definition of aristocracy. The only way to stop this is to give equal access and equal rights to every citizen to adapt laws. The model proposed by Stack Overflow is interesting in this sense.

I imagine a server (or better, a decentralized system) hosting the ODD (the open direct democratic system) where each citizen could connect (i.e. with a phone, a tablet) and easily shape their own country's laws. Directly, with no proxies, which is what the representatives are.

But the danger of this could be the imposition of a kind of technological tyranny where a "disconnected" person would no longer have access to the shaping of laws; so it is important that, as soon as the borders of the digital world are transcended, we implement physical offices to serve as an alternative bridge between the citizen and the ODD without any need for computers or digital devices. This is precisely to ensure democratic access to the ODD because a digital-only way to go is a de facto tyranny in disguise.

Not until we clearly identify the deep root from which all of this is conveyed.