Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.
Often, these groups have their origins in decentralized structures such as the Internet and place particular importance on the need for anonymity to protect an individual's right to free speech in democratic systems.
[3] In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by democratic institutions:[4] Some models are significantly more sophisticated than a plain wiki, incorporating semantic tags, levels of control or scoring to mediate disputes – however this always risks empowering a clique of moderators more than would be the case given their trust position within the democratic entity – a parallel to the common wiki problem of official vandalism by persons entrusted with power by owners or publishers (so-called "sysop vandalism" or "administrative censorship").
Some advocates of these approaches, by analogy to software code, argue[citation needed] for a "central codebase" in the form of a set of policies that are maintained in a public registry and that are infinitely reproducible.
Founded by Angela Bischoff, the widow of Tooker Gomberg, a notable advocate of combining direct action with open politics methods, IH brought a few dozen activists together to compile a platform (using live meetings and email and seedwiki followup).
The project had not only changed its original goal from a partisan platform to a citizen questionnaire, but it had recruited a previously uninvolved candidate to its cause during the election.
During the election, it gathered input even from Internet trolls including supporters of other parties, with no major problems: anonymity was respected and, if they were within the terms of use, comments remained intact.
Audrey reported that the motivation for her work was personal uncertainty about the nature and accuracy of models, estimates and assumptions used to prepare policies released with the 2014 Australian Federal Government Budget, and whether and to what extent their real world impact is assessed following implementation.
It takes special care for instance to deal with equity differences, geographic constraints, defamation versus free political speech, accountability to persons affected by decisions, and the actual standing law and institutions of a jurisdiction.