Digital Ecclesia: Towards an Online Direct-Democracy Framework

Citizens envision the transition from the representative democracy to the online direct democracy. Inspired by the ancient Athenians' direct democracy, we propose an initial version of the framework Digital Ecclesia. We model the Digital Ecclesia as a social network that offers dynamic and large-scale reachability of citizens. Citizens are dynamically notified to participate and vote on discussion topics of new working groups. To address scalability and privacy challenges, the architecture of the Digital Ecclesia is distributed, i.e. each node runs a local program with its own storage that executes the voting procedure in parallel with other nodes. Nodes communicate to each other via exchanging encrypted messages in a scalable manner. We model the voting procedure as a non-cooperative game and we specify an algorithm for employing the voting game in a distributed fashion. Finally, we conduct the preliminary evaluation of the algorithm on a corpus of real-world votes.