DemocracyOS team at work.The Politics of Code is an interview series curated by Marco Deseriis with software engineers and political activists about a new generation of decision-making software that allow movements, organizations, and parties to make collective decisions online. Rather than reducing technology to the status of a tool, the interviews explore the different conceptions of political participation and democracy embedded in each software, the relationship between online and offline deliberation, as well as questions of authentication, verifiability, ownership, trust, and leadership.
Launched in 2013, DemocracyOS is a decision-making software for political consultation, deliberation, and decision-making developed by a team of Argentinean programmers and activists. The software was originally designed to support the organization and decision-making of the Partido de la Red, a small “Internet party” founded in Buenos Aires in 2012 and inspired by the model of the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. Over the past two years, the software has spread to several Latin American countries, Europe, Africa, and North America. It has been used by the Revolución Democrática party in Chile, Podemos in Spain, the national governments of Mexico and Argentina, the City of Nanterre, the D-Cent program funded by the European Commission, as well as in dozens of other experiments.
At first sight, DemocracyOS is less sophisticated than other decision-making software such as LiquidFeedback and AdHocracy, which allow participants to delegate their vote to other users and rank proposals in order of preference. However, the apparent simplicity of DemocracyOS is deceptive, as the software allows for a high level of customization and adaptability. In this interview, Guido Vilariño, chief technology officer of DemocracyOS and founding member of the Partido de La Red, explains why a usable software interface is inherently democratic, how the community of DemocracyOS users drives the development process, and how online participatory democracy is a learning process for institutions and citizens alike.
