We revolutionized democracy last weekend at Junction 2024 for Sitra’s Digital Democracy challenge - only to discover on Saturday evening with 14 hours to go, that we had accidentally plagiarized liquid democracy while independently developing the same exact concept entirely in a vacuum.

Not only had we come up with something similar but we actually built the entire theoretical framework from scratch ourselves using the same exact concepts, which we had even named exactly the same, except for the system itself, which we called Digital Distributive Democracy - what we then thought a more descriptive name for our modern solution. Even our description was uncannily close to the Wikipedia article’s introduction almost word for word.

Having most of our work be essentially nullified right before the last night due to one of our teammates giving our pitch to ChatGPT and it responding with a pre-existing name for the concept was a large blow in terms of the hackathon but also kind of validating after overcoming our initial disappointment. As they say, there are no new ideas under sun.

Having spent an intense weekend debating the topic from two perfectly opposite views - that of making direct democracy more feasible about which I had written more in the past and that of making representative democracy better reflect the true distribution of popular opinion about which Aaron had written more in the past - had, however, fortunately got us even a bit further in tackling the issues typically associated with liquid democracy. In the resulting generalized democracy of democracies, both of our approaches ended up being just as valid with both direct democracy and representative democracy being simply subcases of our system.

Very simply put, liquid democracy allows for voting directly on all proposals but also allows people to forward their votes to delegates in different categories, who can then use the entrusted votes in addition to their own on a proposal in the given category or forward all of those votes further to yet another delegate so that each proposal is voted on by perceived experts whom society deems the most competent and trustworthy on the topic.

Our theoretical contributions include an incentive system to encourage and reward direct voting on the most important issues while disincentivizing populism and so focusing conversation on policy instead of people, leading to much healthier and productive public discourse, and conditional voting along with meta-voting, which aim to aid in self-governance of the system while enabling better compromises that better reflect the views of all voters.

To make democracy about compromises on policy instead of people, we believe it is time to revive and evolve the conversation about this entirely forgotten idea. Go check out our 3-minute video and read our report on the weekend’s discussions here and tell me what you think! In the time of need for radical ideas, how about we start by truly maximizing democracy?