The Net Party (Partido de la Red, in Spanish) is a political party headquartered in Argentina, with a global projection based on the Internet, that proposes an online form of liquid democracy that it calls "net democracy", with the goal electing representatives who will reliably vote according to what the citizenry decide online.
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History
The party was founded by Santiago Siri and Esteban Brenman in April 2012. It received the required support of 4000 citizens (to officially exist as a party) in August 2013, and ran for a seat in the local parliament of Buenos Aires during the October 2013 elections achieving 21.000 votes (1% of the votes). It is currently working to improve the DemocracyOS (a software system, see below) and also to elect its first congressional representative in the 2017 elections.
Net expanding
This Net Party is constantly expanding with independent political parties nodes that shares the same name and purpose.
Proposed method
The Net Party created an open-source software (DemocracyOS) to be used as a new democratic participation instance, for citizens to:
- vote on existing legislative projects being discussed in the local parliament, so as to determine how the party´s congressman will vote; and
- propose and vote on new law proposals, to be officially presented by the party´s congressman if they meet a threshold of citizen support.
DemocracyOS
In the DemocracyOS software each citizen can either cast their vote or can delegate it to a trusted peer. Delegation is transitive and can be determined by topic; i.e. a user can delegate economics-related votes to a certain user, environment-related and health-related votes to another user, and keep the remaining topics for him(her)self.
Since this app's innovation is that it is linked to the formal political system through a "Trojan legislator", identity validation is a crucial component and is achieved through a separate app called NetIdentity.