The last few months have been busy (hence the break in new stuff at independence4you.org) – we first got (and then lost) the budget for creating a tool for democratic self organization.
Upon analyzing existing tools (e.g. democracyos.org and others), we found that they all had two significant weaknesses, which make them unusable in a real world “democratic self organization” scenario:
- lack of transaction security / accountability
- no connection to real world application of made decisions
So we spent >1 person year of work to create a feature specification for a tool that is ultimately usable for the task to facilitate democratic self organization.
Unfortunately, after we had a signature of a potential benefactor to spend 200k€ on realizing the tool, this benefactor decided, that “too much democracy is not good” – so it goes with those who do have the money to finance something for the public good: they prefer to finance other things instead.
So here we stand:
- we have a complete feature and function specification
- we have conducted a search and evaluation of potential suppliers to do the coding for the tool (open source bases, so it can be released under GPL)
- we are ready to go
- we lack the funding
As the existence of a working tool for democratic self organization would be a major asset for independence4you.org (and creating democratically organized Independencies), we’ll keep trying to fund this tool, so all we do here is not just theory, but can be realized in a real world scenario.