{"id":78,"date":"2013-12-24T16:34:01","date_gmt":"2013-12-24T16:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/?p=78"},"modified":"2014-01-10T10:15:26","modified_gmt":"2014-01-10T10:15:26","slug":"liquid-democracy-and-retroshare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"Liquid Democracy and Retroshare"},"content":{"rendered":"

For several months now, I’ve been working on various parts of RetroShare<\/a>, including building a\u00a0Scripting\/RPC system(along with a selection of scripts)<\/a>, helping out with a Web user interface<\/a>, Starting porting to Android and trialling new features such as parent-topics.<\/p>\n

What really brings me to RetroShare is the desire to build a system of Liquid Democracy on its Friend-to-Friend (F2F) network. The idea of a F2F network is that you only connect *directly to* your contacts, there is no server or central point of failure\/censorship\/corruption.
\nBy passing messages on – within about 7 hops, you could still reach anyone in the world.<\/p>\n

In my view of Liquid Democracy, one of the most important elements is allowing many Representatives for different Topics, as opposed to one representative for everything.
\nAnother is Forming a “Tree” of topics, allowing Votes to be passed up the tree.<\/p>\n

This means that you will be able to be well represented by someone knowledgeable who you trust in each topic, or an even more specialised expert who they trust.<\/p>\n

Below is a simplified diagram of how this would work on a small scale – I hope it still illustrates well how such a system would be able to scale up while providing good representation for all participants in each topic.<\/p>\n

Click To enlarge
\n\"LiquidDemocracy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The system of liquid democracy I aim to build requires the following features to be added to the upcoming “Posted Links” links system in RetroShare:<\/p>\n

-Each of your contacts can be your representative for any given topic (or sub-topic).
\n-Any Topic may be created as a sub-topic to build a hierarchy of topics
\n–Your Representative in a sub-topic Also represents your representees in that topic.<\/p>\n

“Posted Links” is a currently un-finished feature in Retroshare that can be thought of as similar to Reddit – But of course with no central server. Anyone can create a Topic, or join a list of existing Topics. In each topic, a post consists of a link, some text, a vote record, and a tree of voteable comments. It already implements A large portion of the system I wish to build.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest challenges is the scale of “Anonymity vs Accountability”. Amongst other things Anonymous voting makes controlling a voter harder, but also makes falsifying votes easier. One tool I am developing, which could help ensure votes are real, is a “Global Peer Connection map” which could be used to display where votes are coming from, or the “flow of representation” similar to the chart above. I will however attempt to maximise Anonymity without compromising the system.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter Anderson of VocalEyes<\/a> for introducing me to the concept of liquid democracy, and look forward to further future collaboration. I am also working with Change The Future<\/a> to help make democracy a reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For several months now, I’ve been working on various parts of RetroShare, including building a\u00a0Scripting\/RPC system(along with a selection of scripts), helping out with a Web user interface, Starting porting to Android and trialling new features such as parent-topics. What really brings me to RetroShare is the desire to build\u2026<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":82,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/92"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chozabu.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}