Euroliquid

one mind, one heart, one soul.

There is since 2012 the planning and forming of a European Liquid Feedback instance to develop a best common denominator of Pirate policies rather than the least common denominator which is inherent to the current representative approach.

If you are interested in participating in this working group here are more details:

We have not taken any design decisions as yet (we aren't even entitled to).

The Italian PP has developed a Bootstrap Proposal as provided below which allows to use it to shape its own future configuration from inside. This plan has been approved by the Permanent General Assembly of the PP-IT, which is itself implemented in a Liquid Feedback instance.

Long term set-up principles:

• For transparency, the Euroliquid is publicly viewable including who voted how.
• Participants are politicians thus bound to transparency. Their real names and affiliations are displayed in their public profiles. Further data is optional.
• The database shall be downloadable in its entirety so anyone can set up a mirror of it.
• Should the European Pirates be doubtful of the Italian administration, they can decide to migrate the platform elsewhere without depending on Italian consent.

The Euroliquid bootstrap is a sort of “Constituate Assembly” for the actual Eeuroliquid within a liquid feedback installation itself. It is designed to debate on how it should operate, starting from the current legal status quo. Strategy for bootstrapping Euroliquid:

• We only create one area called “Euroliquid administration.”
• We only admit one delegate per participating EU country to start with, so you have to coordinate among each other what your vote should be. You can use your own liquid feedback to find your party's bootstrap opinions… (hint, hint ;))
• We only create one voting-policy which is 100%-majority also known as consensus.
• To even start the debate, the quorum is at 50/100 - so the majority of participants needs to agree that something needs to be debated.
• For a proposal to pass to the vote, 10/100 support is sufficient, so you can add an extra voting option last-minute in the verification period and have a couple of folks support it.
• For rapid bootstrap it has a one two day new, four day debate, one day verify and three day vote policy. This is just for bootstrap presuming there will always be one delegate per member party that finds the time to participate.
• Whenever consensus isn't reached on time, we can reopen the same debate.

The things we will have to find consensus upon are:

• Potential changes to the bootstrap policies above.
• Weighting maths for future non-consensus voting: by which formula do some countries get more voting power then others? Population size? Success of respective Pirate Party?
• How to handle participation of non-EU members.
• How to handle multi-ethnic/politically split countries.
• Certification and administration procedures for slowly growing the number of participants: What does a Pirate Party have to do to submit people to the Euroliquid?
• Suitable “no protection” declaration of all data being available/public.
• Develop the policies for long-term Euroliquid discussion areas: debate on statute amendments and programmatic themes.
• Consider long haul policies for longer debates and majority vote options.

The Euroliquid bootstrap process may appear a bit strange at first, but the short term goal is to have several delegates per country, the mid term goal is to have hundreds of Pirates (and large-majority-based decision making) and the long term goal is to one day be able to host all Pirates that are willing to take on the responsability of being a European politician.

To achieve that we will have to wait for newer versions of the software that allow for weighted voting of participants. Until then we do the weighting by a counted number of participants. We can slowly grow the system into the hundreds of Pirate participants per country and still be weighted by a fair formula that respects big and small countries - and we can decide together when and how to do this. The speed at which we move there depends on the priority all the parties give to it and provide for accreditations of further participants.

The lynX' vision of things is documented on http://my.pages.de/euroliquid whereas Robotica's approach follows:

This is the summary of many brainstormings held in physical and virtual meetings. This is a “model in progress”. :)

For more details feel free to write me Daniele Monteleone aka Robotica

or just join! :)

Mainly are involved the Pirate Parties of Europe and particularly EU;

the invitation is to all the world wide Pirate Parties because in the Euroliquid platform the non-eu countries have a voice in EU foreign policy.

The partecipation is open, in Euroliquid are welcome all the pirates interested in this project.

The project just began, we must be ready for EU elections of 2014.

The Euroliquid group is open to anyone who is interested in contributing to the foundation of a Pirate Party at european level.

Euroliquid!

A common platform for the Pirate Parties to discuss and decide through direct democracy about the european policy and make a common strategy, for the european union and pan-european countries.

We believe that the key of the success of the Pirate Party is not only the cool word “Pirate”, but the open philosophy and the partecipating decisional process.

Euroliquid guidelines are not necessarily based on LiquidFeedback. LiquidFeedback at the moment is the most complete tool we can dispose and fits our needings. If in the future will arrive a better one we can adopt it.

1. Allow to pirates to interact directly
2. Balance the representative capacity of bigger parties giving voice to the smaller ones.

1. Inclusivity
2. partecipated democracy
3. Transparency
4. Trust and reliability
5. Incorruptible by design

The two chamber model that follows below has been developed to work around the weight assignment to each country /party individuals . We can debate this better in the bootstrap euroliquid, however, as any other issue of this model.

Most important for an healthy structure is the capacity to balance the legitimate representativeness of bigger parties and at the same time to give a voice to the smaller ones.

The solution is to distribute a large number of tokens to the Pirate Parties, members of the PP-EU, based on the weight that each Party/Member will have in the PP-EU council.

Those tokens are given to the representatives of each Pirate Party for accessing to the reserved unit of Euroliquid “chamber of representers”.

They are a sort of “liquidboard” that interact directly with all the pirates.

According to Robotica's model, euroliquid could have two main chambers:

  Chamber of Representers: 
  Based on the distribution of tokens.
  It has functions of organization, direction and executive coordination.
  The units have functional Areas.

  Chamber of Pirates: 
  Any pirate can join.
  It has programmatic and proposal function.
  There are common thematic and funcional Areas 
  There are reserved units for each Party member.
  The pirates will be able to influence the decisions of their representers 
  voting in their own party units. 

In the future LiquidFeedback will be able to manage the weight of each pirate vote (it is going to be implemented this function for company shares), so the tokens of the chamber of representers can be directly shared among the pirates of each Country / Party member.

Member weights is the most delicate argument of PP-EU model. In Euroliquid, member weight is represented by the number of tokens given to each member; therefore, the number of representers (then votes) that each Country / Party member have in the decisional unit depends on how many tokens they have.

the best way to assign weights is according to the Square root of voters.

X is the number of voters of each Country / Party.

• It's easy! Only one parameter.
• No exception, no complicated rules to remember, easy to understand it.
• Reach the goal: balance representativeness of bigger members and give a voice to the smaller ones.
• Alredy used for seats distribution of European Parliament (degressive proportionality)
• Has strong theoretical basis

What happens when 2 or more regional Pirate Parties of the same country confederates and concur toghether to european elections?

Easy, they split the weight of their total voters.

Assuming for example 3 confederated parties: P_A, P_B, P_C

• W_A = SQRT(A+B+C) * A / (A+B+C)
• W_B = SQRT(A+B+C) * B / (A+B+C)
• W_C = SQRT(A+B+C) * C / (A+B+C)

A represents the voters of the party P_A
B represents the voters of the party P_B
C represents the voters of the party P_C

W_A represents the weight of the party P_A
W_B represents the weight of the party P_B
W_C represents the weight of the party P_C

Euroliquid platform has to be as much reliable as possible on representativeness of the Pirates.

To avoid fakes and multiple subscriptions will be taken some precautions, for both chambers, particularly for the chamber of representers that is the decisional unit.

Each party member will receive a number of tokens according to the weight of that Party in Euroliquid (as explained in weight section).

The party member will distribute those tokens to the representers they choose among their pirates.

Representers will use the tokens to enter in Euroliquid with the “representer profile” who will give access to the reserved decisional unit.

Representers are public officials, cannot be anonymous and have to publish their presonal data (Name, Surname, PP-XX, City, E-Mail and photo). Very welcome PGP finger print.

Each Pirate can partecipate in Euroliquid platform. The only requirement is to be associate to a Pirate Party Member.

At the moment of subscription in the platform, the email of the pirate is automatically checked on the list of members of his party.

The list of members can be a php ajax script, a wiki, an encrypted table, a xml file, or just a mailing list. The party member will decide the way to confirm the subscriber's mail address.

The email address and the country / party will be the only obbligatory fields, all the other info are optional and the pirate can choose to remain almost anonymous.

Almost anonymous means that the representers have the autority to ask informations about any pirate to their secretariat to verify if it is real.

LiquidFeedback can be organized in directory tree to allow selective partecipation voting to the core EU members, to European envolved menbers till the observers depending on the scope of the votation.

• Members
  • EU Members
  • EFTA Members
  • Acceding EU Members
• Observers (Europe)
• Observers (non Europe)

The chamber of pirates allows to any individual pirate to propose and debeate inside each country /party unit about any issue regarding PP-EU: the program, the rules and any kind of decision.

The results of those issues must be proposed by their representers to the Chamber of Representers in order to be ratified according to the weights of each party member.

• EU Pirates
  • Germany
  • France
  • United Kingdom
  • Italy
  • Spain
  • Catalunya
  • Poland
  • Romania
  • Netherlands
  • Belgium
  • Czech Republic
  • Greece
  • Hungary
  • Portugal
  • Sweden
  • Austria
  • Bulgaria
  • Finland
  • Denmark
  • Slovakia
  • Ireland
  • Lithuania
  • Latvia
  • Slovenia
  • Cyprus
  • Estonia
  • Luxembourg
  • Malta

• EFTA Pirates
  • Iceland
  • Liechtenstein
  • Norway
  • Switzerland

• Acceding EU Pirates
  • Croatia
  • …

• Candidates for EU Pirates
  • …

• Other European Pirates
  • …

• Worldwide Pirates
  • …

by Nuno Cardoso

Just to make it clearer, there is single spreadsheet with several sheets. Right now there are these sheets:

• Default Policy for Standard Proceeding
• Policy for Fast Proceeding
• Policy for Extensive Proceeding
• Policy for Statute Amendments
• Policy for Member Acceptance
• Policy for Member Expulsion

Here is a template that you can copy to poll for new specific policies that really need their own rules and don't fall under the generic proceedings (Standard, Fast or Extensive), or for even more generic proceedings.

• Template Policy for ...

(to be continued)