Adhocracy helps create a future of political engagement
Summary
Founded in 2009 in Berlin, the Liquid Democracy association has been developing an impressive array of open source software tools that support civic and political participation in youth projects, urban planning projects, participatory budgeting, NGOs, political parties, and institutions. The best known of these tools is Adhocracy, a modular decision-making platform that allows participants to collect ideas, discuss them, and refine them in text propositions that can be further amended. This modular structure has been mostly used in civic participation projects in Berlin, but also in political parties such as the Green Party, the SPD, and institutional contexts such at the German Federal Parliament.
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A few weeks ago, I paid a visit to the new headquarters of the association located in the former Kindl brewery in Berlin’s Neukölln district, a massive red-brick building hosting the new Kindl Center of Contemporary Art. In the spacious and still largely unfurnished rooms on the second floor, I met Rouven Brües, a PhD candidate in politics at Goldsmiths, and currently one of two managing directors of the company. Our conversation touched on a number of topics, including different implementations of Liquid Democracy (also known as delegative democracy), the relation between online and offline deliberation, participation and representation, as well as the cultural impact of new technologies on the democratic imagination.