Ronald Siebes

Parademo

– a parallel democracy

Parademo – a parallel democray, is an academic project to investigate if computer technology can help to improve the voting process of our democracies.

Vergroot

think out of the box? -

Currently we can vote around once in the four years, on one party. What if we could vote for more than one party? What if we can ‘retract’ our vote before the 4 years if we are not happy with the party. What if we also like to vote on some specific persons and topics, or even solutions? What if we know some colleagues or friends who are more knowledgeable on a certain issue, perhaps we can delegate part of our vote on that topic to them?
In Parademo, we focus on a simple solution: votes can be cut into smaller pieces by a voter, which can be placed not only on several parties, but also persons, issues and solutions. Although the ownership of the vote stays at the voter, the voter can decide to delegate some allowed part of the vote to another voter of which (s)he thinks has more expertise on that certain topic.
Inspired by James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” and Jeff Howe’s “Crowdsourcing” ideas, we envision a government run by using the wisdom of the highest knowledgable members of the community.