Global crises, democratic solutions—within days. Using Internet to empower citizens, reach popular consensus, and ensure democratic decision-making [Preprint]

In the last months, governments around the world have adopted public policies to promote large-scale vaccination, and covid certificates. Whether such measures are adequate or not has been largely debated. But why have such debates emerged? To this day, alternatives to centralized decision-making have been limitedly discussed.

Here, I present how an online platform could help thousands of citizens express their needs (plurality), agree on common priorities (popular consensus), and pool resources to become the protagonists of a common project, like body cells coordinate in real time to preserve life.

Building on the commons, on the free/libre and open-source movement (crowdsourcing), on short online events (hackathons), and on a method to coordinate large groups, I sketch how such a platform could help citizens build solidarity-driven solutions during three-day events.