Parademo: E-democracy based on a delegated expert selection process in a small-world network

Abstract

Many countries have a representative democracy where their governments consist of a relatively small group of politicians that represent the values and beliefs of the majority of the voters. Unfortunately, many citizens are un-satisfied with their rather limited influence on politics especially regarding governments on national level or even higher like the EU or the UN. On the other side, referenda or direct democracies seem to be a too risky way of letting un-knowledgeable or uninterested individuals decide over complex issues. We mainly have these extreme opposites in our democracies due to the limitations of our manually maintained ballot system. Initiatives like Vivarto propose an alternative, called 'Delegated voting' where parts of a vote can be delegated to people with more knowledge on a certain topic. This leads to a convenient position in the middle between both mentioned extremes. We want to use the vast amount of expertise of many online citizens in our societies in selecting the right politicians and solutions. In this paper we propose the design of system called Parademo, that enables a fine-grained e-democracy. Next to this we briefly describe how we can achieve more transparency and third-party functionality by allowing listeners to subscribe to specific information-streams within communities that are formalized in a Semantic-Web language. © 2010 Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.