Digital Democracies of Future

The information and communication technology is evolving and disrupting different fields and various aspects of our lives. Politics and public administration won’t be an exception. Here we brainstorm on what future digital democracies may look like and what they can bring as disruption to the less efficient and less sophisticated traditional democracies:

1.    Direct Participation of citizens in decision making regarding policies, law, their implementation and monitoring, can be made possible through specialised apps and novel encryption, identity management and participation receipt technologies.

2.    Mass-collaboration Expert Parliaments in which decisions can be channelled to the expert communities and summarised based on participation level and consensus, may substitute a great deal of work done by traditional parliaments (gradually), with much better merit.

3.    Participation Profile (including payment) may be created for masses of interested and participating people, allowing them to participate with their expertise. Experience/expertise weights are counted in different relevant decision makings and participants are get paid for their work. Anonymous participation is also possible and even payments for this can be taken care of by DLTs, encryption and automatic contracts.

4.    Future Politicians who have been elected by people with equal-weight vote (not expertise-weighted vote) set the rules for the participation and do the parts not being already done directly by expert communities, which can include the anti-trust and fairness monitoring (and politicians don’t do the parts already being done well by Artificial Intelligence in a regulated way!).

5.    Real-time Dismissal of Politicians is made possible such that petitions which gain traction can lead to dismissal of politicians who underperform or misbehave, by people (equal weight vote, reasonably high threshold should be met).

6.    Elected Media leaders can be the democratic norm to bring down the democratic deadlocks due to media bias in traditional democracies (traditional democracies are usually hijacked by groups, making existence of a real democracy a project yet to be accomplished, perhaps by using the required digital transformation frameworks leading to a Digital Democracy).

7.    Open Codes for Micromanagement of places, media programmes, decisions, speeches and all aspects of public sphere is made accessible to people such that they control and micro-manage their representatives where they want (reasonable thresholds should exist).

8.    Hijacking Schemes on Public Administration and Policy Making is made quite harder, using ICT, bringing more peace, efficiency and prosperity. Robustness of the mass-collaboration and managing the potential problems and complexities must also be studied.

9.    Automatic Fulfilment of promises and duties is facilitated by AI, simulation and much more use of automatic contracts is made possible through Distributed Ledger Technologies.

10. E-presidents can be an option as the rules of governing the country are defined using next generations of Semantic Web, and executed using novel Artificial Intelligence and Public Administration Management technologies. Who wants corrupt/underperforming presidents? Maybe much of the role can be automated in a regulated way by defining rules using Semantic Web and by deductions using formal methods plus Deep AI?

11. Data and media monopolies can be challenged, and deadlocks decided about directly by people, binding governments and private sector to automatic compensation schemes for liberating people from privacy/monopoly obstacles and paying compensation to the parties affected by the decision.

12. Complex people, process and technological aspects of sophisticated digital democracy platforms and facilities will bring us many challenging problems to solve (and be rewarded by the results when all-round solutions are evolved). With people participating much more directly and much more frequently in broader scope of participation, from the president to the kitchen sink (well, if many choose to participate and hit the thresholds), the money and power will flow in liberation technologies and liberation enterprises, not in monopoly and closed-group deadlocks and lobbying concealed in shallow democracy cosmetics, and tricks which have hijacked the traditional democracies in too many cases and aspects.

Please send your feedback (privately or in the comments part).

You may also join our Digital Democracy group: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/12336638/