Mission
Partido de la Red (Net Party) is an Argentinean political party that proposes a hybrid model of representative and direct democracy online (liquid democracy), with the goal of getting elected a congressman to systematically vote according to what the citizenry decides online.
The proposed method and app
The Net Party uses the DemocracyOS open-source software (see demo), aiming to provide citizens a new instance of democratic participation. The main features for citizens are:
- vote on existing legislative projects being discussed in the local parliament, so as to determine how the party ́s congressman will vote; and
- propose and vote on new law proposals, to be officially presented by the party ́s congressman if they meet a threshold of citizen support.
In the DemocracyOS software each citizen can either cast their vote or can delegate it on a trusted peer (liquid democracy model). Delegation is transitive and can be determined by topic (i.e. a user can delegate economics-related votes on a certain user, environment-related and health-related votes in another user, and keep the remaining topics for himself).
Since this app ́s innovation is that it is linked to the formal political system through a "Trojan legislator", identity validation is a crucial component and is achieved through a separate app called NetIdentity.
History
The party was officialy founded in April 2013, received the required support of 4000 citizens (to exist as a party) in August 2013, and ran for a seat in the local parliament of Buenos Aires during the October 2013 elections achieving 21.000 votes (1% of the votes). Is currently working to improve the DemocracyOS furthermore and to get elected its first congressman in the 2015 elections.
Links
- DemocracyOS live instance
- Net Party presentation v1
- Net Party presentation v2
- Official website (Spanish)
- Official Wiki (Spanish)
- GitHub repository
- Media appearances (mostly Spanish media)
