Published September 11, 2021 | Version 1.4
Working paper Open

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

Description

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.

Version en français

Notes

Newsletter: https://www.houseofcommons.ch – Commentable file: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BiNEdJetmszYp4Qj8-05yuVyzLMvwR-0/ – Editable file: https://houseofcommons.ch/pub/balli_brief_en.odt – Editable visuals: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tEWP54qPZrd-dqYGt3PFj_KsfEEebOhXA3fH2CeKAE0/

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