Upgrade Democracy Unconference

At a moment when our electorate is increasingly divided, when global populism is destabilizing political convention, and trust in public institutions has fallen to new lows, we are seeing an explosion of interest in ways to level up our democracies in the U.S. and around the world. The Upgrade Democracy Unconference brings together the people and projects currently or potentially creating new tools and approaches to participatory governance and elections in the network age. This means improving the structures we use for collective decision-making.

The window of opportunity is wide today for upgrading our system, and is unfolding in many places. A few examples:

• Liquid Democracy 
  Allowing more direct (and delegated) citizen participation in policy

• Instant Runoff Voting (a.k.a. Ranked Choice Voting)
  Cultivating less negative campaigns, reduced “lesser-evil” voting, and more choice

• Fixing the U.S. electoral college system
  Addressing the structural unfairness in our national elections that allows some votes to be weighted many more times than others, and the distrust/instability that ensues

• The epic battle against gerrymandering

• The movement to overturn Citizen’s United
  Fighting the role of Big Money on our everyday politics

• The clamor for better “sense-making” tools
  ...in our media and social networks, including the fight against “fake news” propagation

• Decentralized organizations based on the Blockchain architecture for transparent governance and elections

• Europe’s Pirate Parties & related international projects such as VTaiwan

The Upgrade Democracy Unconference will bring together the community of designers, developers, thinkers, and community-builders interested in working to achieve more participatory democracy. The goal is to accelerate the momentum for transformative new democracy initiatives by increasing their visibility and fostering vibrant collaboration within the community. The event will include specific activities to promote projects and bring together those working in related areas.

What is an unconference?

Unconferences are self-organizing events where the attendees collaboratively create the program. Participants start the event by co-creating a schedule of sessions that reflect their immediate interests, and coalesce in these ad hoc groups throughout the event. Shareable note-taking (usually via collaborative wiki) is prioritized to allow the sessions to generate value beyond the in-person meeting, and to encourage follow-up action. In addition, unconferences may include some combination of networking activities, hackathons, show-and-tell presentations. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4310607/]