Civicracy: Establishing a Competent and Responsible Council of Representatives Based on Liquid Democracy

Abstract

This paper describes Civicracy, an experimental instantiation of a system for enabling collaborative decision-making through liquid democracy. Civicracy was established as a research initiative in 2012 at the Vienna University of Technology, where a prototype was instantiated and a model tested under laboratory conditions. A real-world experiment was planned, however failed to come to life due to a lack of support by potential target environments. Compared with other liquid democracy models like Zhupa, or LiquidFeedback, Civicracy constrains the liquidity of vote delegation through a dampening algorithm to increase stability of representation, and focusses on the liquid-democratic constitution of a council of representatives, rather than policy-making or general decision-making, respectively.