Socracy, the virtual parliament: How it works !

Socracy, the virtual parliament: How it works !

The Web 2.0 paradigm applied to politics… hmmm... not so simple !
Politics can lead to passionate discourse, and can go so far as to divide even the best of friends. Already, it is challenging to reach an agreement on the simple definition of a term on Wikipedia… so imagine the problem when it comes to discussing and reaching agreement on issues like abortion or tax rates!

Socracy has put into place multiple mechanisms to optimize the collaborative creation and management of political proposals.

Maintaining strict neutrality

 In order to attract contributions from all political perspectives, an obvious requirement is to be able to guarantee absolute neutrality regarding contributed content. To meet this requirement, the articles of association of Socracy stipulate that Socracy will only design a technical collaborative platform that, by definition, is entirely neutral. Socracy is not involved in content generation or management, outside of the automated processes. Socracy cannot arbitrarily promote or dismiss any contribution, or even comment on contributions. Only the members, by expressing their views and opinions on the content, provide the objective data the collaborative engine requires in order to sort, classify and present the content.
Socracy is not concerned by what is said, but rather how it is said.

Last but not least, Socracy is a Non-Profit Organization, ensuring some protection against any commercially motivated bias.

Separating facts from opinions

There are facts and then there is their interpretation. It is relatively easy to agree on objective facts (statistics, existing laws, etc.). When they can agree on the facts, it is already much easier for people to dialogue.

It is for this reason Socracy clearly separates out the objective facts that feed reflection from interpretations and potentially partisan proposals that are submitted. For each topic, a single page of "objective facts" (one page per language) is maintained by members, much like a definition on Wikipedia. To the contrary, so that all opinions may be freely expressed, it is possible to create many different proposals.

Socracy does not seek to force an immediate consensus - which would be a utopia in politics- instead the discussions will naturally lead to the creation of various families of thought that can then be materialized by several different proposals that articulate the key principles. However, the collaborative engine encourages and fuels the dialogue between these schools of thought, even across countries.

Encouraging positive behavior

 This is a major concern for Socracy! We have set up the following systems to encourage positive behavior and civility in discourse:

• To avoid spam, members are recruited either by name (Socracy knows and verifies the identity) or upon recommendation of current members.
• To discourage the malicious editing of a proposal by someone holding an opposite view, members are warned that by editing the contents of a proposal, they will be considered by the collaborative engine to be promoters of this proposal, thus boosting its priority in searches and presentations. In addition, version management can quickly eliminate such abusive content changes.
• Members are rated by their peers, both in terms of the quality of their proposals and relevance of their comments: one can be opposed to an aspect of a proposal but remain constructive!

Recognizing the opinions of others

 The content presentation format adopted by Socracy uniquely promotes awareness of the views of others. Thus, on every topic you will find proposals prepared by individual members, political parties or think-tanks of all persuasions, and from various countries. All measures are taken to minimize a risk of creating a misunderstanding and initiating sterile confrontations: for example, before entering a negative comment on a proposal, one is asked to summarize briefly the portion of the proposal being commented in order to ensure that it was read and understood - their summary will then accompany their negative comment, thereby providing a context.

We believe that a central forum for the broad exchange of political ideas can foster a better understanding among opposing views, thereby facilitating the creation of a consensus.