Decisions

People are entitled to directly initiate discussions and vote in legislative matters, which includes setting goals and budget and choose from eligible candidates to fill leadership positions for each branches of power. Decisions are initiated in nodes of the tree, and “bubble up” until they reach the node they are meant to be relevant for. Anyone can initiate decisions in their own group, legislative representatives can initiative decisions in the metagroup they are elected in.

The building block of decisionmaking is based on the Debian Standard Resolution Procedure with appropriate parameters. It is a proven process which includes formal decision preparation and designed using both relevant theoretical results and experience gathered by the open source movement for decades.

The decision preparation consists of gathering a menu of alternatives for the decision. An alternative decision will get into the menu if it meets certain criteria (a quorum of supporters in groups, the ability to bubble up in metagroups). The individual proposing an alternative becomes an “issue representative”.

Decision preparation in groups is conducted directly, while in metagroups the elected and issue representatives are entitled to conduct the debate and expected to gather feedback.

Vote is conducted with Condorcet method, employing a dummy alternative “the choices below are unacceptable” in order to cover the whole decision space, and provide a way to signal the boundaries of acceptability.

When voting for a committee, the CIVS proportional representation method is used to determine members.

Every member of the subtree is entitled to one vote (even if member of multiple groups).

In order to enable people to choose their level of their participation while ensuring good decisions, votes can be delegated in liquid democratic manner, but only to legislative or issue representatives.