Cloud democracy: key ideas

We publish a squeeze from the book of Leonid Volkov and Fedor Krasheninnikov “Cloud Democracy”, prepared by the authors themselves. The book is available on the network ( http://cdem.ru ), but we consider it important to introduce the idea of ​​the book of “paper-oriented” readers. To someone expressed ideas may seem fantastic, someone-not applicable to Russian realities (they say that they will still vulgarize, pervert and buy it). But, if we refuse to crawl into the cemetery, covered with a white sheet, we must try other ways! The authors not only wrote a book, but also initiated the embodiment of its principles in the electronic system “Democracy-2” ( http://democratia2.ru ), which is already working in black. Let the “clouds” are still far from building states, information technologies have already shown their strength in the self -organization of citizens. It's time to try! ..

Modern technologies open the way for new opportunities not only in business and in relations between people, but also in the conservative sphere of public administration. Cloud democracy is a concept that answers the question of how important for the democratic structure of the society the tasks of ensuring representation of the interests of a citizen, feedback between power and society and making consensus decisions in large groups of people can be resolved on the platform of new information technologies is more easier and easier than humanity, used to solve them over the past millennium.

It was a common place that the current state of technology allows you to actually return to the direct democracy regime: to provide all citizens with electronic signature (this has already been done in practice, for example in Estonia and Belgium) and conduct direct electronic votes on any issue.

But just a return to direct democracy, to the Athenian Agora and the Novgorod Veche, can hardly be considered as an ideal model of a modern democratic society. Too many achievements of human thought made in the centuries of the formation of institutions and procedures of representative, parliamentary democracy will be irrevocably thrown away! (Yes, most of these institutions and procedures appeared “not from a good life”, but as a result of the need to circumvent restrictions related to the impossibility for a large number of people to gather on the same area of ​​the same city at the same time for voting on all issues, but many of them, nevertheless, have great independent value.)

Direct democracy is not an ideal. Not all people are ready and want to constantly participate in the adoption of politically significant decisions; Conducting thousands of referenda, even in the form of Internet voting, tires anyone. Not all people are quite competent for making decisions on certain issues. Considering the technological potential of Internet communications leads to a very powerful but completely realized concept of “cloud democracy”, which is a hybrid of direct and representative forms of democracy, adopting only the best features for each of them.

Before describing the model of cloud democracy, briefly, but clearly fix the problems that this model must allow us to solve.

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Problem 1. STILL STARTMENT. A stable system is the one that returns to a state of rest after a little indignation. A small ball can rest both on the top of the hill and in a hollow, but only in the second case its position will be stable, because after the deviation from the original state, it will strive to return to it.

Ensuring resistance to small indignations using a system of checks, counterweights and mutual control is the most expensive and infrastructurely complex thing in modern democracy. Nevertheless, over and over again, even with very advanced legislation, one can observe how, on the basis of absolutely democratic constitutions, more and more new authoritarian regimes are successfully growing. The system comes out of balance and is rapidly rolling in inclined.

The problem is 2. The honesty of politicians. The guarantee of honesty occurs only if a system is created, completely open from all sides. It cannot be that somewhere there is some institution that checks everyone, but it cannot be checked. Any official who sits and regulates some processes may and should be withdrawn if his activity causes constant and mass discontent.

In the impossibility of withdrawing a person who is already chosen and endowed with power (or in any significantly influence his decisions) lies the main problem of representative democracy today. That is, in addition to control mechanisms, there should also be a mechanism of inevitable termination of authority in extreme situations.

Problem 3. The complexity of the procedures. Attempts to make democracy more stable and transparent, to supply it with feedback leads to bulky procedures, which is less and less accessible to an ordinary citizen. For example, registration as an election candidate due to a multi-stage mechanism intended for protection from unscrupulous candidates becomes an inaccessible to a simple person who has no lawyers at his disposal (at the same time, scammers are still successfully registered once after at once).

The proposed system of cloud democracy should be very easy to use; it will not have barriers to passive or active participation in political life. And this will not require any unique technological inventions, we are talking only about the systemic integration of already established and widely used technologies.

Currently, on the Internet, all those technological components on which cloud democracy will be built in the future are already used in various applications and social services. However, this does not mean that we urge to take these components and blindly copy them. The use of each of them should be very conscious, the components should be adapted to the needs of electronic democracy and correctly joined with each other.

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So, we described the problems that should disappear with the introduction of cloud democracy, and are ready to move on to a detailed description of key technologies, the application of which will ensure the solution of these problems. It is important to understand that each of these ideas exists and can be effectively used in a wide range of cases quite independently, they are independent of each other. But they are especially strong together. Each of these ideas is a separate pillar at the base of the building of a perfectly functioning cloud democracy. Its potential will be revealed only if on a certain technological platform, in a certain general civilian network of networks, they will all be implemented simultaneously.

The first idea: a living measurement of trust in the representative. This mechanism will overcome the limitation of the time that exists in the current real world, which consists in the fact that voters can choose their representative only after a long period of time. The mechanism of mobile trust allows you to measure the level of support for the representative of the representative constantly. The main consequence of the implementation of such a mechanism is a change in the incentive system and the motivation of a policy; The introduction of voters becomes a deliberately meaningless occupation.

Imagine that we also have regular elections of the head of the city, region, country, the regular elections of the head of the executive branch of the city, the head of the executive branch. Suppose that in these elections a bar of 50% of the votes is also established, which are necessary for the official to receive an appointment. We record those voters who, through our electronic voting system, entrusted him with this position, and then give the same voters the opportunity to change their opinion at any time.

Now imagine that the townspeople elected the mayor, and he (out of habit) began to do something exactly the opposite of what he promised. Since he did the wrong thing, he did the wrong thing ... Patience ends with voters. And after a certain amount of time, the voter enters his “personal account”, to his voting system, since it is always available to him, and recalls his voice. One voter withdrew his voice, then the second, third, and now the mayor’s support is less than 50%. The mayor automatically loses the position, new elections are assigned! We specially note that technologically this is just the “likes” familiar to all of us on social networks. With the only difference being that, in addition to emotional satisfaction from the statement of his displeasure, the voter receives a real effect: the mayor-co-driver lost his position without any additional ceremonies, but simply because people stopped trusting him.

This basic model can and should be clarified. Almost any politician is losing popularity immediately after his election (after all, a competent, victorious political campaign leads a policy to the peak of the rating to the voting day, just as the training plan of a professional athlete should provide him with a form of a responsible match at the peak). Of course, the elected politician must have the right to carry out unpopular measures (especially if he promised them during his election campaign), aimed at solving long -term problems. Therefore, in practice, a certain “threshold of sensitivity” should be installed: say, the mandate will be responded only when the support level falls less than 25%, but these are all technical details that can and should be discussed.

The main thing here is this: the system can and should be expanded in such a way that it stimulates officials to fulfill these promises and satisfy voter expectations. By the way, the opposite situation is not excluded: the official feels changes in society, begins to do what his former voters do not like, but at the same time his actions begin to like other voters. In this case, he has new votes, and he will continue to occupy his position. This situation will also be the result of the proposed system in which the official will be forced to monitor real moods in society and focus on the majority group.

The mechanism of mobile choice is based on the extremely low cost of electronic democracy procedures. It became possible to ensure such low cost only in the very last years, according to the results of the Internet work.

The second idea: matrix delegation of trust. Another imperfection of the real world is that no person can be an expert at once on many issues at the same time, this is a limitation of competence. Nevertheless, in a real, non -electronic world, the voter has to have one representative on all issues. In cloud democracy, we go around this restriction through a matrix delegation mechanism. In this situation, on each issue at each level of power, we can solve the issue either independently or attract other people to be their representative, or delegate our own voices. Cloudy democracy is neither direct nor representative - it takes the best features from both of these models.

Today, in each social network, one user can “follow” by another or “subscribe” to another user-this occurs in cases where one user is in a sense an authority for another, for him the content produced and important for him. The number of subscribers (followers, freeds) becomes in each of the social networks a natural integral rating of authority: practice shows that the most followers are among those people who are leaders of public opinion.

Imagine that a citizen, a participant in the cloud democracy system, does not want to use his right to participate in discussion and voting on each issue of the agenda - all the more so since in our difficult world of such issues there are thousands of such issues and in various fields. Many of these questions are too complicated for him, and there is not enough time for everything. In such a situation, he can “follow” by someone or, in order to use a simpler term, to delegate his voice to someone.

The simplest example: you got acquainted with the political program of a certain Ivanov, you like everything that he does, accordingly you trust him. At the same time, you yourself are not particularly versed in politics, so you delegate your voice to Ivanov and trust him with all the decisions. Now Ivanov disperses two votes. Then - three, then - a thousand, then - ten thousand votes.

In such a system of Internet voting, where we post bills, thousands of decisions appear on our virtual veche per day, and no one is able to read them. However, today the State Duma is supposedly! -somehow solves this problem; It is expected that professional politicians work there, which can understand everything. Now imagine the policy of Ivanov, who says: “On such issues I will vote as follows, you delegate my trust, and your voice passes to me.” Can this be called a representative democracy? Not quite. This is such a wonderful combination of the best aspects of representative and direct democracy. In this situation, the following modifications are possible.

For example, many delegated their voice all the same Ivanov, and now he can vote in thousands of votes. Thanks to this, he began to have a serious impact on the adoption of key decisions. Journalists, politicians, lobbyists run around Ivanov. He takes part in electronic votes, all this is protocol, and you can watch how Ivanov voted (your voice) for each of the questions. Accordingly, after some time, if you do not like Ivanov’s position, you can withdraw your voice from him and choose someone else, and immediately, online. That is, it will not turn out that the deputy is selected once every four years and no one else has the opportunity to control it.

So the idea of ​​delegation works in conjunction with the idea of ​​mobile democracy. But that's not all. The main thing in the idea of ​​delegation is the possibility of breaking delegation on topics of issues, which, being realized, inevitably leads to the emergence of expert decision -making mechanisms.

The obvious, it would seem, thought: it is quite reckless in everything to trust the same person to the solution of all issues only because he is popular in some field. Meanwhile, representative democracy inclines us to this: we are offered to choose by deputies of famous people - athletes, musicians or doctors, and then they are invited to make decisions on economics, agriculture and foreign policy. It is quite logical to entrust the famous athlete to judge sports, he probably understands what needs to be improved in this area. However, it is strange to trust him with the same health care, the space program or the regional budget, since he does not have any specialized education, and it is completely incomprehensible why he can be a good representative of the interests of citizens on these topics. It would be more logical to ask about sports by athletes, about jurisprudence - from lawyers, and about education - among teachers.

But this separation is not in modern representative democracy, from which it suffers very much. In cloud democracy, this is precisely possible. Imagine that the whole circle of questions is divided into 50 topics and a person appears a “delegation matrix”: on these issues I delegate my voice to that, otherwise, for some kind of no delegate to anyone, I want to resolve the question for myself, and for some issues I also want other people to delegate voices!

For example, a citizen is a specialist in information technology and wants his opinion to be taken into account when making decisions in the field of IT. In politics, economics, pension fund, medicine, he is not an expert, respectively, he willingly gives the right to make decisions in these areas to knowledgeable people. But on IT-questions, he actively writes articles and seeks people to trust him to make decisions. His resume, which anyone can get acquainted, indicates competence in this area and enhances trust in the expressed opinions.

There may be such a situation that out of thousands of questions per day, which will be consideration by the electronic veche, 999 questions will not even have to view, because his representatives will vote on his behalf. But on the thousandth issue, he will vote himself: the system notifies when the question falls from the selected subject area. A person votes himself, and, moreover, due to his authority in a particular area, his voice may be decisive.

There may still be a gradation on the importance of the issues discussed. В этом случае определяется список наиважнейших вопросов, например изменения в Конституции. В этом случае у себя в интерфейсе человек ставит галочку, что он доверяет депутату Иванову по всем вопросам, кроме важнейших. Тогда в 99,5% случаев голосует Иванов, но за важнейшие вопросы человек голосует сам. При этом политик может выступать и предлагать свою точку зрения, но в конечном итоге люди решают сами. Это тоже прямая демократия. В этом случае, кстати, воплощается древнегреческий подход к демократии, когда старейшины совещаются о незначительном, а граждане — о наиболее важном. Или гражданин оставляет за собой определенную тему, например вопросы войны и мира. Может получиться, что вопросы спорта решают 10-15 депутатов, известных спортсменов, каждый из которых аккумулировал по несколько миллионов последователей, а вопросы войны и мира автоматически превращаются в общенациональные референдумы, где каждый участвует только со своим единственным голосом. Прямая и представительная демократия — одновременно!

Деление возможно еще и по уровням: государственная власть, региональная власть, местное самоуправление (муниципалитеты), территориальное общественное самоуправление (микрорайоны, кварталы,ТСЖ). Вопросы бывают разных уровней. Скажем, в моем подъезде живет профессор экономики, умнейший человек, и я хочу, чтобы он был моим представителем по экономическим вопросам государственного и регионального уровня. Но, честно говоря, когда заходит речь об уборке мусора во дворах, доверять ему довольно опрометчиво. То есть человек должен понимать, с какого по какой уровень полномочий он кому делегировал.

В системе облачной демократии осознанное голосование по понятным вопросам и делегирование прав голосовать по непонятным вопросам другим людям становятся абсолютно реальными, контролируемыми и прозрачными.

Третья идея: Принудительная честность. Последнее ограничение реального мира, которое придется обойти, — это ограничение достоверности. В реальном мире мы не можем заглянуть и увидеть то, что происходит в головах у других людей, соответственно, обмен идеями не может быть прозрачным. В нашей модели мы обходим этот механизм при помощи принудительной честности, который подразумевает раскрытие информации на каждом следующем уровне политической активности в большей степени, чем на предыдущем.

Даже сейчас и даже в развитых демократиях политик сам определяет степень своей честности и открытости для избирателя. Опять-таки потому, что порядочные люди полагают, что, если человек идет в публичную политику, — значит, ему нечего скрывать. Тем не менее, существует масса лазеек для сокрытия от избирателей информации, которая способна влиять на их мнения.

Между тем, сбор всех данных, относящихся к конкретному гражданину (не говоря уже о публичных фигурах) в наши дни не является технологической новинкой. Уже сейчас все поисковые системы умеют собирать пресс-портреты, обрабатывая и сортируя сообщения в СМИ о той или иной персоне, и эти технологии постоянно совершенствуются. Таким образом, рано или поздно у публичной персоны просто не останется возможностей что-то о себе скрывать. Речь не идет о том, что одни люди будут заставлять других людей быть честными. Более того, мы совершенно не призываем к этому. Мы просто констатируем неизбежность такой ситуации по мере дальнейшего развития современных технологий.

Но «принудительная честность» в том аспекте, о котором мы сейчас говорим, подразумевает не только пассивное приятие того факта, что вся информация о персоне рано или поздно где-то появится, но раскрытие определенной информации о человеке в обязательном порядке — для участия в каких-либо общественных процессах, а также для занятия каких-либо должностей.

Важно также, что строгая аутентификация гражданина в системе облачной демократии является необходимым и достаточным условием, обеспечивающим возможность проведения юридически значимых электронных голосований. Существующие криптографические протоколы позволяют сделать следующее: добиться, чтобы, с одной стороны, нельзя было отследить, кто как голосует, и, с другой стороны, обеспечить возможность для каждого избирателя контролировать судьбу и правильность учета каждого поданного им лично голоса и каждого сделанного им делегирования.

Кроме того, принудительная неанонимность и честность помогут реализовать важный принцип симметрии общественной активности: критикуешь-предлагай, критикуешь — покажи, на что ты способен, выдвини свои предложения. Сейчас распространена следующая ситуация: выступает в Интернете некий общественный деятель, чиновник, а в ответ получает 99% анонимных оскорблен ий на 1% конструктивных предложений. Так происходит потому, что положение несимметрично: тот, кто оскорбляет, знает о своем контрагенте многое, а тот, напротив, не знает ничего. Будет хорошо, если подобных ситуаций удастся избежать в дальнейшем. Хотя, конечно, всеобщая прозрачность должна гарантировать и авторам критических замечаний защиту от возможной мести. Собственно, публичность всех коммуникаций между гражданами должна стать главной защитой от коррупции и произвола.

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Повторимся, что все эти механизмы — самоценны, но лучше всего их комбинировать между собой. В идеальной модели облачной демократии избиратели выбирают себе представителей по каждому из важных для них вопросов, имея возможность также не делегировать свой голос никому. Выбирая представителей, избиратели имеют полную информацию об их компетенциях по соответствующим вопросам и получают полную информацию о том, как представители реализуют их законные интересы. Основываясь на полной, открытой и общедоступной информации, избиратели поддерживают живую обратную связь со своими представителями, что исключает всякий смысл для политика дезинформировать избирателей относительно своих намерений.

Итак, описанная система сочетает в себе лучшие черты прямой и представительной демократии. У человека всегда есть возможность отказаться от любого делегирования и голосовать по всем вопросам самостоятельно, и в этом смысле это — прямая демократия. Кроме того, у избирателя есть возможность по каждому из вопросов выбрать лучшего представителя, которому он доверяет, но при этом будет полностью его контролировать. В этом случае политическая нечестность становится практически бессмысленной. При этом профессиональная политика тоже продолжает существовать и нормально финансироваться. Быть хорошим законодателем, публицистом, идеологом по-прежнему будет почетно, однако необходимо будет, чтобы твои идеи завоевали популярность в обществе и оставались востребованными. Потому что обратная связь, интерактивность — краеугольной камень облачной демократии и ее главное отличие от всех других форм народовластия.