Welcome to Designing Open Democracy. I'm with Ben from Flux, and I will be your host, Brian Koo. So, Ben is a representative of the Victorian branch of Flux Party, which is a issue-based democracy party, which uses smartphone technology to help people have a more direct say in how the government should act.

But before then, we actually met a guy from Flinders Street station, was it?

Like, where was it again?

It was at federation Square. Yeah, we did down on federation Square, just before I met you for this. Yes, yes.

And we met a guy named Owen, who like came from the UK. You remember?

Yeah, well, you introduced me, you introduced him to me as a political refugee. Of the Brexit. Yeah, but yeah, it was claimed to have left Britain due to the results of Brexit.

So, yeah, it was quite a spicy conversation to come into as a pro-digital democracy advocate or whatever I want to title myself as. Yeah, like I think the most important here is that it provides us with the introduction onto the background of where your party is trying to slide into, which is, for example, the UK had this issue of the referendum, which led to the Brexit, and his feeling was that it came as a total surprise to him and his left-leaning friends. Yeah, I love that it's, well, I don't love that, it makes me sad, but, you know, Brexit's definitely pointed to as this example of democracy.

But even in that chat, you know, I was talking with that guy, this is for quite a few years, you know, he's seen Brexit as this terrible example of democracy that went wrong. But I guess getting to have a chat with him and, you know, even just bringing up that, you know, who made up the question?

What was the wording of the question?

Like, why wasn't, why did it take two years to implement?

Like, these are what people's real problems are, or, you know, at least it turned out in his case. So yeah, it was just a good chat, because it's sad that Brexit is a negative for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah, and I think this led to a very good starting point of this loss of faith in democracy in general.

And like, what do you feel led to this kind of loss of faith?

And of course, we can then talk about, like, the issue based democracy that you're fighting. That's a huge question there, Brian, right off the bat. But yeah, I mean, it's something we got to with him.

There's so many facets to it. It's how is the question asked?

Who's it asked?

What's the, you know, how are people incentivized to give an answer they truly believe in?

You know, like, you could look at Brexit again. It's the first time people have had a referendum in decades. How many people actually really, truly thought about the reaction and the result?

And how many people were like, Teehee! There was two events that I thought was quite interesting. For example, one of it was Boris Johnson, big red bus with a gigantic letters of how much it's going to cost to.

Sold to people comes in, yep. As well as... After the referendum, the biggest search was what is the EU?

Yeah, exactly that. Yeah, exactly. You know, what...

Is it a true representation of democracy when the people who voted and took part in the vote didn't have a clue or didn't even really care or didn't even really know what they were voting on?

Yeah, that's definitely is a takeaway from, at least from direct democracy as we think about it now, and something we're aiming to fix with Issue Based Direct Democracy, or we believe we fixed with Issue Based Direct Democracy. I will definitely follow up on that aspect. Before we start with that, like a couple of years ago, we had an event on citizen juries, and Nicholas Groen had this group, which I find quite interesting.

What we're seeking for in the system is the well-considered opinion of the population. Is that what you're thinking of as well?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, we focus it through, I guess, the lens of specialization. You want people who specialize in the question to be answering the question.

I see. So yeah, now we can start actually getting to, if I remember, you said Flux is an Issue Based Direct Democracy. What is an Issue Based Democracy?

So, the philosophy we're calling Issue Based Direct Democracy is for what I call, I guess, a progression of a few of the thought processes around direct democracy. So, it combines, obviously, direct democracy that we know, being able to vote yes or no. But this comes with problems, which BIST has been discussing.

People have to vote yes or no. They have to give a response. They might not be informed about the subject or they might not care about it.

Also, in other countries, you don't have to vote, but in Australia, you have to vote. So, maybe I should make this clear for those who are overseas. In Australia, it is mandatory to vote.

Right, I'm talking about something different. This would be direct democracy. Direct democracy.

Not voting on politicians. So, in a direct democracy, for instance, Brexit vote, you had to vote yes or no. There was no option not to vote.

There was no option to do anything else with your vote. So, this is where Flux comes in. So, we're not just a direct democracy.

We've added in another element called liquid democracy. Liquid democracy. So, this is when you don't know about the subject, but you do think it should be dealt with by professionals or by insightful people or scientists or however, you know, a leader that you trust.

So, you can delegate on that one issue or in that one field to have someone else use your vote and tell you where it should go. So, that's the second portion. Where it should be directed to.

So, where it should be directed, you delegate to them, they move it on. So, this cleans up a lot of the problems with direct democracy, but it also brings in, I guess, a few extra problems in that there's the hubris. People are just going to keep going to the same leader when it's not necessarily the best idea.

Is that kind of related to the tribal effect that we're seeing?

Yeah. I mean, it'd be a much smaller version right now. We see it in the whole party, but you'd still go, you know, Dr.

Carl is my science and tech guy, and he always will be for the next 20 years, because I know him, but he might not still have the best ideas. So what you actually want is a way for people to specialise and hyper specialise in their skills. So the other addition, apart from liquid democracy, is the ability in a vote where none of the answers are any good to you.

The addition, the ability to not vote at all, and abstain from voting, and then you would store up a little bit of that vote's energy, and then you can put it towards your own novel idea, or something you're really, really passionate about. Because yeah, we don't want, we also want a reward. We don't want to incentivise people just giving away their vote.

obviously, liquid democracy is easier, but it might not be the best answer for you. So in other words, it sounds like you're almost trying to, like, get people to abstain from certain issues if they are not passionate enough about that particular issue. A hundred percent.

Like I remembered, you made an analogy between those who are Christian, and those who are atheists, and in regard to, say, the abortion debate, if everybody has the same amount of vote, they may not choose to vote in a way that is suitable for the entire nation, but instead you want to get them to actually make a decision of what they care more about. Maybe they care more about religious right rather than banning abortion completely. So maybe you could tell me a bit more in your words.

Is that the angle?

Yeah, I don't remember the specific analogy, but I'll pick it up. I think it's that the, yeah, you know, it's, or even the alternative of maybe you believe in every single Christian value except for being anti-abortion. So even taking it from the other side, and then it's like, you would have to be right now, if you wanted to have support for all of your other 49 values, you have to, by default, support that other one.

And that's not necessarily what we want, because that might, you might not truly view that as the best, you know, let's say Christian values, sticky one to stay with, but let's go with it. You know, Christian values of kindness and humility and being kind to others, you might see them being upheld in every other way, except for this one. So it's kind of like similar to having to choose a cable TV packaging, but like a lot of them forces you to also choose.

Hey, there's an analogy I feel much safer going into. Yes, exactly. And this is, oh, that makes me feel so much better.

Right now in your voting, you could specialize just in the sporting package. Yes. And you would be...

Everybody wants the sport. You just want that sports package. You don't care about anything else.

And you would be rewarded by, instead of saving money for not buying those other packages, you would be rewarded by getting more political energy that you can spend on sports related things. I like that. Oh, thank you for giving me that analogy rather than me tiptoeing through Christian values.

But yeah, that's a really great analogy though. Okay, so I think now you explained a bit more about Issue Based Democracy, and so the audience will at least know what IBDD stands for. But there's also this other model which you would have heard of quite a bit, and I've mentioned not too long ago, about Citizen Juries.

And Flux, on the other hand, implements IBDD. So I'm kind of curious, why didn't Flux use Citizen Juries?

Why IBDD?

I'm laughing about this because I was jokingly being a little rough on Citizen Juries. So Citizen Juries and IBDD, I think come from the same place in that they're both trying to fix bad representation. They don't want us to be represented poorly by people who aren't us, the people.

So in that way, I think Citizen Juries are really great. They empower ordinary people who are interested and don't actually want to see the change happen. But what they don't do is they don't reward specialization, and they don't reward someone getting the correct answer.

Someone doing really well in a Citizen Jury may never be called up again. And that's something Flux wants to limit with IBDD. So we focus on- It's kind of similar to how you notice with the modern day society, everybody is starting to hyper specialize in their own engineering, doctors, fields and so on.

Yes, that's almost perfectly it. If everybody's specializing in their fields, we want to reward that. We don't want to try and create these representatives that are really great at most things, or jack of all trades at most things, when we could have masters at everything, delivering the results that are given to, you know, that are confirmed by the people, as opposed to...

So, maybe the other analogy you could probably make as well is the pattern system, and how a lot of the issue with the pattern system is that those that do the revoke of the pattern systems are not always the same people that are specialized in understanding how it works, especially when you put it to the jury system. What do you mean?

At the moment, if I understand, when you have pattern conflicts, people need to call up experts to talk to the juries, but a lot of the issues is that the juries, in a very short amount of time, have to pick up the network stack, all sorts, computer theory, etc. And this can, in some ways, overwhelm the jury system in trying to deal with making the right choices of who to order pattern to, or whether the pattern is valid or not. Yeah, I think so.

And I think it's like... And I think this ties into the aspects of what you're trying to say about the need for hyper-specialization on maybe even on the complex issues. Yes, that's exactly it.

It's like, you know, you could... You can hope that, especially in this patent case, you can hope that a jury will be able to see the just thing to do. And, you know, they might be...

If someone can explain it to them correctly, they can make the correct decision because they have less... You know, they don't get... They have no dog in the fight, so they're going to make the correct decision because that is their task as the jury.

But you're adding in the fact that they know that they can be bamboozled or just jargoned until they don't actually know what they're looking at, whereas that's something you could never get... You couldn't do to a specialist. So instead of having that jury, you have a specialist everybody trusts, and they can't be bamboozled, hopefully.

Of course, the biggest issue is that we delegate and our trust to a politician. What's not to say that this isn't going to happen as well with those we delegate our trust to?

Yeah, that is, like I was saying, a flaw in liquid democracy that used the term hubris. But also that... Liquid democracy, IBDD?

Yes, it's within IBDD. Oh, within IBDD. So that's a problem.

It is great that you can delegate to someone, but they can either get lazy or they can be corrupted. The best thing about IB or within a digital liquid democracy is the second they do that, you pull that power back. I see.

So there's a accountability feedback loop that you're saying that is missing from the original. Liquid democracy that was applied by the Pirate Party of another country, if I remember. They tried to test it, but pure liquid democracy, but they had a bit of issue that you were talking about.

Yeah, actually. What would you say in this IBDD, Issue Based Direct Democracy is an evolution of liquid democracy?

Yeah. evolutions, maybe not the term I'd use, just liquid democracy is just one facet within IBDD that serves a purpose. It serves the purpose to remove the staticness of direct democracy, and make it a bit more fluid, and make it sure that people who care and people who want to help can be empowered.

But it's not so much an evolution in that it's a logical progression of... progression. Because they serve separate purposes, and the three keys, direct democracy, liquid democracy, and the issue based vote sharing, they all serve different purposes.

They're not necessarily like a linear thing. I think that's pretty sensible. So people are unengaged.

They're not aware that they're not in a democracy. The media doesn't tell them the choices. Even if I like this whole concept of the Flux IPDD system, how do you get people to use it if they're not aware of this system, or could find it difficult to understand it?

It's a difficult one. I mean, obviously, we're looking at the most straightforward thing. Get a member represented.

An elected and a representative into parliament. So obviously, election campaigns and running successful ones of those are the black and white answer to that question. That's our hope.

That's our goal for it all. Secondary to that would be we're hoping to release an app that allows people to mirror parliament and have their vote and then have it displayed according to their community. And we're hoping that that as a method of people lobbying their representatives and the idea could really catch on.

The idea that what's happening in parliament, I'll have a look, I'll vote on it and I'll push it to my friends and more importantly my MP. Yeah, that's the stepping stone to getting to people that are really interested. I certainly hope it does.

So, well, once you do get it in, like every kind of curious to know about the algorithms and like, how would these issues be selected?

Like as representative as possible. Yeah. So initially, I imagine with one MP, a lot of the time we're just straight reacting to other parties, and we're allowing every person in our electorate to vote yes or no, to what other political parties want.

But what you can do with when you elect not to vote on things in that parliament, you store up that energy and then you can put that up into like, I guess, a separate voting mechanism in the flux ecosystem. So yeah, you could renege from making up these numbers, but 50 votes and that should afford you enough to be able to put forward a piece of legislation that you yourself can write up. And then yeah, everyone can vote on that from just within your community.

Nice, nice. What is the theory and the philosophy behind IBDD and flux?

So we now explored citizen juries and flux, but I'd be curious to know between flux and IBDD, like how, what is the relation of IBDD to flux?

Yeah, flux, so IBDD is the democratic model that flux the political party uses. So IBDD is just a voting system. So in that regard, it only, I guess, it only touches on the legislative arm of government, parliament, MPs voting on things.

That would be what IBDD does. As opposed to what flux does. Flux is a political apparatus.

It's going to put MPs into parliament, who obviously, they vote. They vote according to IBDD. But they also have to look into, you know, how do we make government transparent, as transparent as possible, that's safe, so that we're giving people the information so they can make the right decisions.

And they're, but you know, we're not maybe giving away enough that we could damage national security or commerce, which will be a lot of what we're doing, actually technically, you know, also following up other parties and making sure where their information comes from, making sure that's transparent. That would be a lot of, you know, flux as a political party and actor, not related to our democratic system that we use. So about the interest groups, like part of the concern that a lot of people have been talking to me is about, like parties are doing things in the interests of big donors, and they're gaming the systems.

How would you stop this in your proposal?

Like... That's one of the best things about the blockchain technology we use. It gives a full ledger that shows every single vote.

obviously, these votes are anonymized, so you can't actually link them to a human, a person, and find their house. But you can rest assured that it is one person that took that vote. So this means as long as we, as a party and as MPs, as long as we stick to literally one rule, we vote how the app says, we can't actually be corrupted by the usual, you know, here's a briefcase full of money, vote no.

And if we do, everyone will know at that one second, and then we're dead in the water. So it means that if these big companies and stuff do want to manipulate people, or manipulate the political process, they actually have to manipulate the entire community. I see.

So now you're looking at, you know, they have to do mass media or a mass information campaign, which for them is going to be incredibly expensive that it can't be manipulative or based on a lie. And that's the current issue right now. There's a lot of people concerned with the concentration of media, if I remember.

Yeah. So it's, you know, it's like, we can't storm in and say that we're going to destroy Murdoch and only use this open-source internet-based media system. Like, that's not how to level, or it might work eventually like that, but that's not how it works nowadays.

But what it does do is it means that these parties and these financial backers have to get the voting of the people. And to do that, they have to inform them. And if they lie, they lose our trust forever, and they just blew $8 million on an advertising campaign.

So it would be better for them not to lie. And to give an idea that doesn't suck. I do remember in our last election in 2019, Clive Palmer dropped the money.

Yeah, put $90 million down or something. I think it dropped, was it nearly $60 million on advertising?

Yeah, something like that. Yeah, can't remember. Yeah, for sure.

But yeah, exactly. And it's like, and what's worse is, people point to that as like, Clive Palmer did that, but if you remember his ads, they were idiotic. They gave you nothing.

They were just like, Australia, yeah?

If he wanted to blow $60 million to affect one issue, it's not gonna work just being like, vote yes. It would actually require, inform me why I should vote yes, because Dave on his couch just did a live video on YouTube for free, and it explained why I should vote no. Yeah, so that's what I think.

It's like, you can't destroy money wanting to affect politics, but you can make a system where it's stupidly expensive to try and lie, and you have to be transparent to the people. That's what we're going for. That's quite interesting.

So like, for the audience who listen to your theory and understand the idea and actually accept and want to see this happen, like some of the consensus would have in terms of the implementation is, if you manage to get a representative into parliament, how is it going to work with the normal system that we've got?

And there are soon to be autonomous actors, so couldn't they just vote the way they want against the wish of flux?

Yes. That's the longer short of it. It's...

So if we think of normal party politics, and this ability for a parliamentarian to always be able to vote however they want, it's actually a really nice thing.

When you think about normal politics, it means that the liberals can't go sign this contract that says you'll vote how I tell you, or you owe me $10 million. They can't do that sort of thing, or you'll go to jail if you're the government. Without this protection, that sort of thing could happen.

So it's actually a good thing. When it comes to representing the people, it's a negative, obviously. I believe these people, an MP, could openly go against the people's voting.

However, if they did that, then they're not able to ever come back.

You know, you can vote against the Liberal Party and then be like, oh, I just disagreed on that one, but I agree with the rest, I'm back. Or you can just sit as an independent and still pretend you're holding up the values that you said you would at the start. So it's kind of like how you don't really see members of one political party switch to the other and then switch back.

Yeah, it's, I mean, what have we got?

We've got, you know, Corey Bernardi's, one of them, I think Santafond did it as well, but you know, these people that, they're able to backstab their party and not vote how the party wanted, which is the only thing they agreed that they would do and why they got elected, because they're able to go, oh, the party has changed, or the party's views changed from mine. Whereas if you're a Flux representative, the only thing you're ever holding is that you'll do what the people say. So to go against that, you have to be like, I believe I'm smarter than the people.

And you're just dead in, you know, you've just ruined yourself. Maybe I should phrase it a bit more of what you say is that, isn't it more that I no longer believe in the system that you run?

Because like, of course, every party says is, I believe in the will of the public. But essentially, if you're part of the flux, I think the theory here is that you believe in the strength and accuracy of the flux system, so you will vote with it. But if you're voting against it, then in some ways you're saying that you lost trust.

Exactly, it's something where, like I'm not gonna lie, if someone did that, it would look shit. It would look terrible for us as flux. But it wouldn't kill flux.

It wouldn't kill the idea of being represented by the community voting. It would just ruin that person. It would say they don't trust the people.

It doesn't ruin that voting can happen, and that's how we should be represented. So it'd be sad, but it's not a death knell for us. Okay, so what kind of results do you need to see in the next election before you could get a representative in parliament to demonstrate this kind of system?

Because we have had an election last year, so it's going to be a kind of a few years ahead. But it'd be interesting to know what ideas have been, what it's going to take. Yeah, for sure.

It's, what, I can't remember percentages, unfortunately, right now, but I'm going to make them up. So we just got out of a federal election where, you know, when you look at Senate writings and preference slides and things like that, I believe it was possible with about 4% of the vote for us to get someone elected, you know, in a lower Senate seat. It'd be very, very unlikely for us ever to get a lower house seat.

obviously you need to get 50% or 40% of the vote. It's quite hard. But in an upper house seat in federal, call it 4% of the vote.

Upcoming, more importantly, in the next year, we've got the WA state election. And due to some specifics around WA election law, and also, I guess, the strength of micro-parties, our micro-parties in particular, our in WA, we could be looking at something with maybe 2%, 2% to 3%?

Yep. Which, you know, it sounds tiny, but it's a big thing in real politics. But it's certainly not crazy anymore.

2%, 3%, some sliding, some, you know, strong team-ups with other micro-parties. And it wouldn't be crazy to see something come out of this WA state election. But obviously I'm always blindly hopeful.

Of course. I think we're covered pretty much most of what we needed to think about. But for those who are interested in the Flux system and like maybe, maybe they're from Finland or maybe they're even in Australia, like what's next for them?

Well, the first thing you can do is reach out, voteflux.org or on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and reach out and get in touch with one of us. Other than that, we have a Discord, which is getting there, a couple of few hundred people on our community who can, you know, will fill in a lot of these questions and answers like it doesn't have to be me. So discord.io/fluxparty, especially if you're in a country other than Australia, or if you're in Australia, in South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, or the Northern Territory, please get in touch and we can help you get a party registered in your area.

Well, that definitely sounds exciting. And I really appreciate that you took your time to come along to have a chat with Designing Open Democracy. Well, thank you very much.

It's been a long time coming, the DoD and Flux collab. So I'm glad we got it done, man. Awesome.

Thanks.