Airesis

= voting software, in the vein of Liquid Feedback

Characteristics

"● Airesis allows to manage public and private assemblies according to group requirements. Thanks to role management it is possible indeed to select who can insert a proposal, who can discuss it, who evaluate it, who voting it, if it is visible externally on the Internet or keep it private in the group or discuss it with people who have specific roles. It's a flexible instrument to accommodate all forms of participation. In LiquidFeedback roles are assigned from sections, and if necessary the parlamentary referent can have the privilege of skipping the first acceptance quorum. For the rest, one equals one, there are no privileged users.

● Airesis is a tool which aims towards participation and transparency and addresses the common citizen as final user, this is why the interface, contextual information, guided processes and logic have been devised much more intuitively compared to LiquidFeedback. LiquidFeedback is illogical for someone who hasn't studied liquid democracy first...especially for IT people who expect certain things in a certain way. Who has been taught the concept however understands because some buttons do certain things in a certain way. Everything makes sense finally, it's less complicated than the ticket machine at the train station.

● Airesis is constantly being updated: the software is in continuous improvement upon feedback by users, based on ther requirements. LiquidFeedback too, there are actually various pirate groups at international level who offer alternative versions to the standard one, like for example Pirate Feedback or Bombay Crushed.

● The Airesis philosophy is that the proposal elaboration phase to resolve problems must be based upon reasoning, collaboration, information, creativity and, consequently, upon the power of ideas and collective intelligence. The debate process is focused on two simple steps: in the first one can debate the problem and also include new solutions, in the second you vote. Idem.

● In Airesis one really has the value of one and direct democracy is finally realized! Thanks to the synthesis emerged in the elaboration phase it will be easier to get informed and vote in a conscious manner. Who has the time to participate in the entire development and modification process of a proposal can do it, who however has only little time can participate in the final vote only. LiquidFeedback has been developed exactly because direct democracy doesn't effectively lead to 'one equals one' but in reality favors the ones who impose themselves, who have time (maybe someone pays them to do so...) or who vote more because they do it more superficially. To avoid the installment of a dictatorship of the actives, some scientiests of American politics conceived liquid democracy and LiquidFeedback is its most advanced implementation. See the standard LQFB presentation to better understand this concept.

● In Airesis it's possible also to insert different proposal templates to the standard one with alternative solutions, to regulations structured in articles and commas, to expenditures budgets, to press communiques and resolutions. In LiquidFeedback for now there's only a wiki language, the structure you need to learn how to do it

● Airesis is devised to help groups, associations , citizens, to build networks. Who works on a proposals of putting water services public by the M5S (Movimento 5 stelle) can see if there are similar proposals emerged inside, for example a group of Legambiente (green party of Italy) or a committee of common citizens, instead of in the common space. The groups who want it then can work togetether to give more voice to their ideas and elaborating better proposals. And how do you do it...keeping all data of all political projects in the same place? You can also do it with LiquidFeedback (thanks to the section hierarchy) but generally you would not want to do so....

● Airesis provides many more functions compared to LiquidFeedback: for example a calendar tool in which to mark group initiatives, tools to facilitate research of particular skills in the realm of the group, a home page for presentation of the group, a page on which to publish news. There's also integration with practically every social network included. In practice Airesis could substitute Meetup. Our philosophy is to integrate all necessary tools for a group in a single space. LQFB on the other hand doesn't want to loose focus of its initial scope which is the simulation of a virtual parliament without becoming an office and a smartphone. But if Airesis is good at doing these things it could be integrated into LQFB.

● The system is written in Ruby on Rails, which allows high scalability. It's a modern language, which allows for rapid development and is particularly suited to program an evolving tool like ours. According to http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/, Lua, the language of LQFB , is much faster than Ruby. Once understood, lua is easy to use and fast. However you can also use other languages through the API." (http://my.pages.de/lqfb/LiquidFeedback-TabellacomparativaconAiresis.pdf)