Burgess is a very simple piece of software I wrote to allow small groups to deliberate online. I’ll be giving a demo of it in room 380C in the 1:10pm session. After the conference, I’ll update this post to contain a link to a live demo site. Here are the slides from my talk:

Burgess

Allows groups to democratically and deliberatively make decisions online.

• create bills
• discuss bills
• vote on bills

Intended for use by small (3-30) groups. The “backyard” of deliberative democracy.

• frat houses
• church groups
• student clubs

Open source friendly.

• implemented in Python
• can use any SQL database server
• can use any webserver

Keep it simple.

• must get the simple thing working first
• “out of box” for groups
• users must trust it

The Protocol

General Goals

• limited by Arrow’s Theorem
• hard to “game the system”
• robustly handle urgent issues and long-term problems

Ristroph Democratic Deliberative Protocol™

E-Bay style: fixed amount of time to discuss and vote on a bill. Author specifies duration for which a bill will be discussed.

• votes are always private
• may change vote at any time before close of issue

The Amendment Problem

How do we handle asynchronous, parallel consideration of alternatives?
My solution: make the interface automatically cluster bills.

Alternatives

• exponentially decreasing threshold
• Debian’s Standard Resolution Protocol

Demo!

Future of Burgess

• pilot groups
  • sound editor’s guild
  • Caltech student houses
  • non-profit board of directors
• email integration
• plugins for calendars, budget?