[tor-talk] Project Idea: Direct Democracy Network System

[Oliver Koenig]

Hi All,

I'm new to the TOR network, my motivation for joining it is mainly the
following idea that I had (maybe someone else has posted this or a
similar idea before, I don't know, I hope so), it is the idea of
implementing a global direct democracy.
Here the idea:
Politicians are generally too incompetent to make good decisions, it's a
fact, I guess most people agree with this. The results are less than
sub-optimal.
On the other hand there are very many people out there who together
would be much more competent and who could come up with much better and
wiser decisions, and it is only a minor technical issue to get them
together, because the required technology is readily available.
An example:
Many of you may know the stackexchange website, where people can ask
questions, can answer them, comment the questions and answers, and rate
the questions and answers. It is my most used work tool at the moment. I
largely depend on google to find information on the Internet, mostly
about programming, and it happened that ca. 80% or more of the most
useful search results I found were on stackexchange, so maybe you might
get interested and have a quick look at its system.
Another example:
Many widely used news websites have forums linked to their news articles
(e.g. www.spiegel.de), and it most often happens that people who are
interested in specific fields tend to be or become knowledgable in those
fields because they read a lot on what they're interested in, and often
they also have a professional background. In effect you often find
surprisingly competent comments on news articles.
Now the idea:
Imagine to combine this with the stackexchange system, and you get a
system that can generate optimal political decisions.
In addition to the distillation of knowledge then, after discussing a
specific actual matter, there could be then a poll or vote for suggested
solutions which were suggested by and voted upon by the people who took
part in the discussion.
Such a system would be globally open to anyone to contribute and
participate. If this system would become very large, so large that
public media would start to quote information from it, so that public
opinion would start to get influenced by it, then politicians would have
to start paying attention to it, too. Thus can direct democracy be achieved.
BUT it is crucial that the anonymity of all participants is guaranteed,
otherwise there would be the problem with totalitary political systems
who pick on individuals who publicly criticize them, it's already
happening to journalists and scientists in countries like USA, Russia,
China, and probably all over the world.
So the idea would be to implement and distribute this direct democracy
network as a P2P network with very strong encryption.
That's why the TOR project looks like the first and best approach to
start this.
I think this sort of network is the only solution for the global
ecological and economical and political problems, and the only
alternative to a global future in hell that we are heading towards if we
don't do this.
What do you think?

Greetings,
Oliver