That would also mean forcing everyone to have and account, to identify itself. I’m not sure this will be appreciated.
That’s important, we are going to discuss governance issue in near future!
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I think we should consider a democracy web app, at least to understand how does it work and if it could really help with our community governace.
Moreover, @lapineige, it could be a good way to be updated with community numbers … in terms of developers, testers, users and enthusiasts.
We now have three weeks to understand if it could be a good solution. @Thatoo, do you have any name to suggest?
Not sure it will be 3 weeks.
Until we reach a point where clear decisions should be taken, with tensions and no common voice emerging - at that point we will need a way to take final decision - the current system is fine.
Well… So we will count the people registering in the app ?
We have already count in the telegram group for instance. More than 100 people.
As we can see here on the forum, it does not mean 100 people are actively participating.
I’m not sure this numbers will be more meaningful.
I agree, reflections are still ongoing here - we almost said during the meeting that it’s too soon to create an “heavy” structure, regarding to the participation number.
Having detailed proposal is great, so exploring this kind of solution is a good idea.
We may have to do that anyway: all current OSs (and browsers) out there rely on some sort of account signing, including FxOS, for a wide number of functionalities. I think we should start thinking if we consider that to be ok and/or unavoidable or if we want to design an “account free” OS, which would be a major design/engineering challenge. I’m not sure whether the benefits would justify the compromises and effort this requests.
You can’t have an anonymous true democracy. To keep anonymity then you have to stick to the old way, the representative democracy but again are anonymous only thoose who don’t have power or a very limited one, voting 
You want power you can’t be anonymous. You want to give power to people, they need to express themselves, they can’t be unidentified.
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I wish I had… Unfortunatly governance question for the era of the net has not been so much questioned as far as I know. Almost everything has been impacted by the Internet even money (bitcoin was just an experimentation from my point of view, the future of our moneys is still ongoing and very exciting) but what about democracy and governance… I know only the exemple I gave earlier.
And in delegative democracy you have more power than voting ? It’s another way to express it, but it’s still voting.
(note that I exclude the part about expressing ideas here, I focus on the decision making process)
There is account and account.
For the systems that need people to sign in (like a “where is my phone” feature), we should give them the possibility to control what’s done with those data (~ self-hosting), we will also have the issue on our side of securing all this stuff.
And there are accounts that are not really linked to the people, made on the fly for 1 time for instance.
But that’s not the point: that would mean that for having a control about what’s next for your system (in some way, having control about how to use it), you need to be registered. That exclude some people, give security/privacy issue.
If I come here, take part of the decisions, just by adding arguments and reactions, it’s a kind of power on the decision took for the OS, right ?
I don’t need to link my phone (for instance) to do it.
What and how are you voting for? these are the question you need to ask yourself? 
Are you unidentified here?
Right. I have a pseudo.
I could create a second account too. Will you know it’s still me ?
(at a community level I mean, let’s exclude external operator watching the network)
One example: We create a poll here, to decide between choice 1 and choice 2.
In both system (delegative/representative democracy), you still click in this button to make your choice.
In some case a “chief” do it for you, with some power (depending of the number of people voting) that you+others gave to it, in the other one, you can vote with the base power (your vote), someone you trust can vote for you, with your power+his power (+ other). You still add the same power, 1 voice.
The difference IMHO is that you choose if you represented or if you express your vote directly. It’s a different way to express it (with some advantages, more control, …), but it still the same power.
This is not that incompatible with anonymity in some way, or at least, not linking your phone to have some power (with the risk/issues related to this).
I just want to precise: I’m not against Delegative Democracy (it’s more the contrary) - but there’s a need of finding a way to adapt it to our project.
Something to bear in mind is that the Mozilla project as a whole is not a democracy, it is a meritocracy.
See Governance.
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Thanks @benfrancis for this reminder.
And in fact that’s my point here: I don’t see any way to integrate a delegative democracy in this system (but if you have some, please share it), where a classic representative system could, as it’s in some way related to meritocracy.
For the code part especially, all the code depending of Mozilla will be regulate as meritocracy.
And even if we vote for our module owners (for the module specific to the phone part), there’s a great chance that we will (at least) partly take choices based on skills/experience/contributions of the volunteers.
And well, current system seems to still be working fine ^^
Is that really the same?
In one case you act, you express yourself publicly, you take part of decision with others publicly (you might delegate your vote to people you trust on some subject), which means that the society needs to be very comprehensive and tolerant over all ideas, which was, might not still be, the case, in other hand, you give all your power to a group (hopefully) or (unfortunately) one man who is supposed to make the wise decisions for the group (not selfish decision). However, from my experience and what I could read in history, wise men don’t access power (mostly because they are wise enough to not want that concentrated power) and only people with some interests and ambitions got it, which lead very quickly to what I would call an oligarchy.
This is just a technical problem. This is an other topic.
I know and debate is always good.
I agree it’s another topic, but it’s not only a technical issue. For instance making sure there is no “cheat” (people voting more than 1 time for instance) is not only related of the technical part, but also related to the system “design”.
No it’s not, I understand what’s the goals, advantages and issues. But it’s not incompatible with not-linking your phone (datas) to an account to be able to take part of the decisions.
Anyway, where’re going a bit off-topic here.
As said in the previous post, the issue with this system is the integration with the Mozilla system (but not only).
Exactly and that might explain why we are hear today to speak about it.
As we save this project, with a light support from Mozilla, my question is do we decide to inherit that or not? or do we want, no offence, to be more open, inclusive than the way Mozilla works?
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There is also an other system.
If we believe in the participants of the system, if we really trust them, we can rule with a random democracy. The same way the jury of our courthouse are selected to judge criminals…
What is more difficult in a human life than deciding about an other human life?
That’s an innovative idea to select a leading board that would obviously need to be renew time to time.
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Totally agree on this: security and anonymity on the web are something not related to community participation. In the latter case you need to be someone recognizable. IMHO, in conclusion, this is a false problem.
Second point: IMHO, we should first make an observation strictly related to our community as it is now. It has more or less no structure, followed by a little group of people who becomes much more restrict when move the focus to issue like the one we are talking of.
Actually, we are now using a not representative democrat system, but a direct one.
So, at least for now it seems to work, isn’t it? Yes, we could make it official, design and structure better mechanisms and so on, but the truth is it worked till now and it probably will with a bigger community.
We have now two possibilities:
- change our structure and make B2G0S project a representative democracy, electing a Council, but always giving the community powers to orientate council’s decisions of key topics.
But, ça va sans dire, we should remember that wouldn’t be a perfect democracy such as Montesquieu designed it. We would always have only two powers: a “Council” (our Govern) and the “Community” (our Parliament). So, it would be more similar to a Company, indeed.
This is why we should anyway elaborate a check and balance system, as I was trying to say in my last post:();
- remain, as we are, a direct democracy, just shaping our system to make it function with a bigger community, as the one I hope we are going to become sooner or later
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To be honest, I don’t believe you can completely equalize a govern system and a popular jury. There are too many differences between them, in terms of functions, electoral mandate and so on!
I think you have here a kind of conclusion: let’s remains as we are for the moment, until it starts to be blocking us.
This topic will come back later, when we will feel that we need more “structure” to take decisions.
(well, that’s almost the conclusion of the meeting)
What do you think about it ?
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