The digital democracy of the future is here. Smarter, more efficient and more secure than ever. Using modern decision-making tools based on neural network principles and blockchain technology, you can harness the power of your organisation's collective intelligence in a safe, fair and transparent way.
In Flowback, our open source digital democracy tool, we combine the best of traditional democratic methods with new, innovative concepts like quadratic voting, delegation and prediction markets, which can solve several classic democracy problems.
Our ambition is to make Flowback a complete end-to-end solution that supports organisations and businesses all the way from fact gathering and discussion to good decisions and effective execution of those decisions.
In the decision-making process, it is important that everyone's ideas, arguments and facts are put on the table. Flowback has:
Secure voting methods where the identity of participants can be verified are essential for making decisions. Flowback has:
In order to implement decisions, it is important to have a clear division of labour where decisions can be taken close to those who will implement them. Flowback has:
Manage your organisation effectively by creating different types of votes to make decisions on meeting times, motions, goals, activities, campaigns and budgets.
Avoid Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, which have expensive licensing costs, security issues and can leak sensitive data. In Flowback, we've integrated Jitsi - a leading open source video meeting tool that runs directly in your browser or via a mobile app.
See all the decisions on the table in your personal feed, get a quick overview of which stages the decisions are at: the discussion phase, the decision phase or the implementation phase?
Create tags for different responsibilities and delegate decision-making authority. Delegation means that you automatically copy how the delegate votes as long as you have not voted yourself.
Vote yourself or see how your delegate voted for you.
Change your mind if you think differently from your delegate.
Below is a list of all Flowback's features. The green highlighted boxes are fully developed and available in Flowback 1.0 and the white boxes are features under development that will be released in later versions of Flowback. Some boxes can be clicked to learn more about the features.
At Flowback, we've developed a range of tools to harness your organisation's collective knowledge and intelligence. Involve everyone's brains in formulating and evaluating proposals, sorting, structuring and weighting arguments. Meet in video meetings in different groups and edit common documents. Make predictions about the consequences of different choices to make smarter decisions.
Join groups with different responsibilities.
Give everyone the opportunity to formulate proposals that can be taken up for discussion.
Upload files and manage shared documents
Structure and weight arguments for and against based on participants' assessments
Video meetings in unique meeting rooms for all groups
Inclusive discussion where everyone, regardless of disability or personality, can participate on equal terms.
AI methods to let good proposals cut through the noise and come up for discussion, regardless of who made them.
Making good decisions requires that participants have access to accurate information about the consequences of the options being voted on. One downside of digital development is that more and more people are stuck in their filter bubbles and distrust established media and experts. This can result in people voting for candidates and making decisions that are bad for themselves on the whole. With the right digital technology, however, this trend can be broken. The Association for Digital Democracy is working to research, develop and implement:
In this way, we want to support your organisation to harness the collective knowledge and intelligence of participants and make smarter decisions together. Good democratic decision-making also requires that all participants have the same opportunity to make suggestions and arguments that others read, take note of and discuss. A digital democracy creates several new opportunities to improve and streamline the democratic participation process:
Good democratic decision-making also requires that all participants have the same opportunity to put important issues on the agenda. Otherwise, important proposals that would substantially improve the country/organisation risk never being implemented. Control over the agenda is often exercised by a board or presidium to ensure orderly decision-making. Many major parties do not allow members to submit motions and proposals to the Congress because there is too much to deal with.
Digital democracy makes it possible to combine the free opportunity for all participants to get their issues on the agenda with a structured and limited agenda where all the thousands of small proposals do not have to be taken up for final consideration. We are exploring and developing the following methods for effective and democratic agenda control:
Maximizing the democratic influence of all in a transparent, open and secure decision-making process. Each participant can choose their level of involvement. Make the right decisions for all stakeholders that benefit your organisation in the long term. Use a robust and transparent system that cannot be manipulated. Weight decisions according to the strength of preferences or other criteria so that all participants are maximally satisfied with the outcome over time.
Use your organisation's collective knowledge and intelligence through online deliberation.
Ranking, voting on meeting times, for/against votes.
Full transparency and possibility to verify votes afterwards.
Avoid time-consuming meetings and long agendas, and analogue voting. Make decisions efficiently all year round when needed.
100% secure voting with modern blockchain technology.
With continuous voting, decisions can be changed quickly in response to new information that comes to the table.
Avoid taking a stand on issues that don't engage you by delegating your vote to those with the highest interest and expertise.
Enables 100% anonymous voting by participants with verified identity.
Quadratic voting to allow minorities with strong preferences to express these in a balanced way at the cost of reduced influence on other issues.
Geographical voting and interest-based voting to give more power to those most affected by the decision.
Open source for increased security.
AI to sort out clusters of proposals that are compatible and supported by many streamlines decision-making in large organisations.
Flexible voting list according to willingness to work on the implementation of the decision, contribute with funding or other criteria.
In order to make decisions that benefit an organisation and its employees as a whole in the long term, it is important that the voices of all participants are weighed equally, i.e. in the same way. However, there are different scales on which to weigh votes. For example, a vote can be weighted based on the strength of the participant's preferences, how the participant's interests are affected by the decision, or the participant's geographical proximity to the location affected by the decision. With more ways of weighing votes available, participants can be treated equally politically measured according to more and more relevant scales than today.
The Association for Digital Democracy is working to find, implement and test the scales for weighing votes that will ensure the best possible decisions for the vast majority in the long term. We are also working to find forms of decision-making that maximise respect for the political equality of all. Here are some examples:
Democratic decisions also require that all those affected by the decision are included in the decision-making process. However, not all people are affected by all decisions. As a result, many people are forced to vote unnecessarily on issues they are uninterested in, lack knowledge about, or where they can override a minority for whom the issue is very important. Digital democracy, however, allows the voting list to be set flexibly to include only those who are actually affected by a decision, according to criteria such as:
For different types of decisions in different types of organisations, collaborations between organisations, boards or companies, different ways of determining the voting list may be reasonable. Those who are determined to be above the threshold of voting rights are then allowed to participate in the democratic process and decision-making.
Achieve high efficiency through creative freedom: the right person in the right place decides and executes at the right time. Avoid unnecessary bureaucracy and time wasting through clear division of labour into groups, sub-groups down to the individual level. Use schedules, Kanban boards for the different work groups and keep track of who does what flexibly. Manage emails, members and donations in a unified database.
Focus your time and energy on the areas where you have the skills and motivation to contribute.
Structure the work of the team with a Kanban board.
Time polls for organizing meetings.
Get rid of Mailchimp and other expensive email systems, manage mass emailing to your group and followers through our system.
See what has been decided and the deadline for the decision in your group's schedule
Manage donations, membership fees and payments in a unified system.
Would you like to be involved in suggesting new features and voting on which features we should prioritize for development? Flowback is being built by us together, when Flowback 1.0 is released you will be able to participate in its development by registering an account, making suggestions and voting - we develop Flowback by using Flowback.
ALL CHANGE STARTS WITH YOU!
The Digital Democracy Association is a non-profit association that is religiously and politically independent. It aims to support and promote effective democratic organisation of people at all levels: from small networks and organisations at grassroots level to large companies, political parties and organisations at national and international level.
Its ultimate goal is a world in which everyone's influence and participation is maximised in a way that is compatible with high flexibility, efficiency and power to act in human co-operation and organisations. The Association's sub-goals are to (i) develop innovative open-source tools for digital democratic organisation (ii) disseminate knowledge and stimulate interest in effective democratic decision-making and organisational practices (iii) support organisations and companies to improve their internal democracy.
(C) 2022 THE ASSOCIATION FOR DIGITAL DEMOCRACY 802538-9241
