@Jano, I appreciate that you have a grand vision of how democracy should be done. I too had such a vision about 5-6 years ago. I was quite enthusiastic about it at the time. I named it Polly and I wrote about it quite a lot. It had many similarities to the system you described. I’m also a Software Engineer by profession, so I was inclined to just go code it, but I had reservations about the way that real actual humans might actually engage with such a thing, so I decided to spent time just doing policy work manually, to see how it worked.
What I found out was that doing good policy work is hard. The issues are complicated. Even if you break them down into their constituent parts it doesn’t really get much better. It’s like there’s a massive complex set of interdependent requirements and there’s a massive complex set of potential solution components, and we have to come up with a clean way to integrate all of that into a simple easy to explain solution as policy, that everyone will understand enough to vote for. Often it requires specialised knowledge.
The next problem, is that most people are not up for that level or kind of engagement. Of those that are, not all of them are inclined to that sort of skill set anyway. Some would rather talk, or run events, or organise people, or do the accounts, or make artwork, or run campaigns.
So what happens instead?
Well, we have a universally open policy development process.
We have open public forums for discussion. You are on one of then here.
Anybody can attend policy meetings. They are all online. No limits to access.
Anybody can put their own policy forward.
Anybody can join a more formal policy development group with regular meetings…
Anybody can put their own subjects forward for policy development.
First drafts are typically formed by everyone typing away madly together in a common Etherpad document, just bashing together all of the knowledge and sources that are relevant and munging through iterations of the many considerations until some kind of consensus appears (it’s quite marvellous to see this happen).
Once policies are semi-formulated, they are put out to Discourse for wider discussion and improvement.
Once a potential new policy has consensus amongst the contributors, it is transferred into a Wiki, were it can be more formally structured, complying with formatting and citation rules etc, as well as now being subject to versioning.
From there, it is read out at a party congress meeting. Congress debates the policy and votes whether to put it to a general vote of the membership.
A general vote of the membership happens via an electronic voting process whereby each member is sent a single-use link to the voting system. They place their votes and the results are reported.
At this point, we typically get well over 90% agreement on acceptance of the policy.
This process is not top down. This process is not perfect. It could do with some refinement, but I don’t think it’s so bad that we’re all doomed to “die without a chance for a real humane change.”
It produced all of this: Platform - Pirate Party Australia Wiki
Maybe try considering all that an how your process can be applied given all of that?