The Debian project is probably the largest and must sucessful online democratic deliberative body. There are about 1,000 members producing a product and governing themselves. (If you disagree with this, please feel free to comment on this post!) Here are the slides for the talk I’ll be giving Sunday at 9am in room 380Y. Time allowing, I’ll be able to go into the details about how the Debian democracy works and a little of its fascinating history.

Online Deliberation

what I mean by “Online Deliberation”

• the process by which a group reaches a verdict
• conducting of business
• not just discussion/reasoning

how to analyze any group

• goals
  • problem solving versus conflict resolution
• members
• political structure
• deliberation
  • asynchronous/synchronous
  • parallel/serial
  • voice/text/face/video

the most common form of online deliberation

• keep existing political structure
• move discussion to mailing lists, chat
• put documents online
• many Board of Trustees are online to varying degrees
• SPI meetings

WikiMedia Foundation Board of Trustees

goals

• develop wiki-based software
• manage online content
• WikiPedia

members

• Membership
• Volunteer Member: actually working on an article
• Contributing Member: paid sixty bucks

political structure

• has Bylaws
• three normal trustees chosen by other trustees
• Volunteer Representative chosen by volunteers and contributors
• Contributing Representative chosen by contributors
• nominations, campaigns 2005
• nominations, campaigns 2004

deliberation

• minutes from an IRC meeting
• IRC meeting transcript
• mailing list info
• mailing list archive
• have tried to use wiki-based polls to get user feedback
  • poll about reimbursing travel expenses
  • also used simple emailing

Debian

goals

• put together a high-quality operating system
• Debian Manifesto

membership

• lengthy, formal process for becoming a member
• about 1,000 members
• application page
• new membership list

political structure

• Debian Constitution
• Developers
  • sweeping powers by way of General Resolution
  • run for and elect Project Leader
  • of course have power over their own work
• Leader
  • figure head
  • responsible for urgent action
  • has one year term
• Technical Committee
  • advise on technical issues
  • appoint new members of Technical Committee (with Leader)
• Secretary
  • runs votes
  • interprets Constitution
  • stands in for Leader (with Technical Committee Chairman)
  • appointed by Leader and previous Secretary

deliberation

• Standard Resolution Procedure: used for all decision, elections
  • proposal
  • discussion
  • amendment
    • if accepted by proposer: effective immediately
    • if rejected: remains as separate option
  • call for vote
    • proposer may call after minimum discussion time has elapsed
    • rejected, remains as separate option
  • Secretary takes votes (highly automated)
    • have specified period which to vote
    • amendments/options are all ranked by voters
    • take Condorcet winner, use Schwartz Sequential Dropping
  • example of use of Standard Resolution Procedure
  • example statistics
  • organization wide votes
• extensive use of mailing lists
  • Debian vote mailing list
  • Debian policy mailing list
• IRC is used for discussion, was rejected as an official means

Lessons Learned

confirmed old lessons from face-to-face deliberation

• 2-8 members is achievable
• must have a protocol, way to declare a decision final
• large groups of people require sub-committees

new lessons

• people will respond to email
• hundreds of people can work together democratically!
  • members must have direct power