Global crises, democratic solutions—within days

Version 1: Fostering cooperation agross large online groups
On April 1 2020, Fabio Balli was invited by a team of the European Commission to co-organize a three-day online hackathon against covid. First involved as Swiss curator, he rapidly became Project manager Civil Society. On the decision-making meeting of April 8, Fabio presented a method to foster cooperation across all participants, available on Zenodo:


 * Team-building and information flow for large groups such as online hackathons

After it was refused, Fabio worke with the Civil Society team to help the 20’900 participants cooperate.

Version 2: Alternative to top-down decision-making
Early May 2021, the model proposed was presented as a one-page visual, to raise awareness about alternatives to centralized decision-making, available on Zenodo:


 * Collective crisis, collective solutions – within days. 21st century democracy, Swiss made. houseofcommons.ch (editable), also in French (editable) and Italian (editable)

"In a national emergency, the population is capable to respond with adequate solutions within hours, provided they have a platform to prioritize needs (popular consensus), and create common projects. Such participatory process avoids the pitfalls of top-down, centralized decision-making: power stakes, misconception of field realities, limited workload, popular resistance, unintended consequences. We present how the Swiss culture of direct democracy can be boosted with open-source technology."Building on this, a proposal was submitted to the Prototyping fund. The jury did not select the project.

Version 3: Building popular consensus during short online events
In September 2021, the model was further refined as a scientific project, for submission to a joint program of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Innovation Agency. Building on this proposal, a five-page policy brief was released on Zenodo:


 * Global crises, democratic solutions—within days. Using Internet to empower citizens, reach popular consensus, and ensure democratic decision-making [Preprint ], also in French

In the last months, governments around the world have adopted public policies to promote large-scale vaccination, and covid certificates. Whether such measures are adequate or not has been largely debated. But why have such debates emerged? To this day, alternatives to centralized decision-making have been limitedly discussed.

Here, I present how an online platform could help thousands of citizens express their needs (plurality), agree on common priorities (popular consensus), and pool resources to become the protagonists of a common project, like body cells coordinate in real time to preserve life.

Building on the commons, on the free/libre and open-source movement (crowdsourcing), on short online events (hackathons), and on a method to coordinate large groups, I sketch how such a platform could help citizens build solidarity-driven solutions during three-day events. The project was refused. Reasons should be communicated early December.

Version 4: soon
A new proposal is being prepared.