Democracy
In Your Hands
Democracy in your hands is an App
that can be used by anyone around the world. It is a tool tat can help take power away from the politicians and to distribute it horizontally among all the citizens; or It can be used to help self organize small communities, and societies, from a neighborhood organization to a workers union, a private club, an NGO or a school.
The Problem
We do not live in real democracies. Democracy means government by the people, not government by the politicians elected by the people. This is not only rhetoric or syntaxes, but in fact, it is the difference between living in elective monarchies, elective oligarchies, and real democracies.
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People in the ancient world understood that voting to elect people to govern you is not the same as governing yourself. In fact, in many ancient kingdoms, the citizens voted to elect their kings. In ancient Athens, before they invented democracy they voted for their kings, but once elected, it was the king that ruled over the citizens, the citizens did not rule themselves. Their political system permitted the citizens to choose their rulers bud did not permit the citizens to rule themselves. When Athenians invented democracy, they did not consider voting for rulers to be democratic, they considered it to be oligarchic. Because few people had power and governed over many people. For them, Democracy meant government by the people, so they developed a political system that organized the citizens so that they could govern themselves. The political system was a combination of direct democracy to legislate and sortition democracy to execute. If you want to know more about this, click here.
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We have been told we live in democracies, but that is a lie. Elected politicians have power and rule over the people who, once they have voted, they are powerless to influence their government.
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The politicians make decisions that affect all our circumstances, the opportunities we have, who we are, and how we see the world. This power to influence our lives so much should not be in the hands of a few politicians. If we do not live in real democracies, we are being oppressed, even if we do not notice it, because our circumstances and lives are being influenced by the politicians that rule over us.
The Objective
We want to peacefully transform our governments to true democracies so that we can be free human beings that freely interact among ourselves to form free societies.
The Solution
Democracy in your hands is an app that will help the citizens take power and responsibility away from the government and distribute it horizontally among all the citizens.
We understand it will be unlikely that a government will completely change overnight from our current non-democratic systems to truly democratic political systems. Therefore the app will have different features that can be gradually implemented.
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For example one of the features will help make it easy for citizens to implement participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting is the process by which the citizens themselves decide where the government is going to spend or invest its money. Participatory budgeting can be implemented right now in our current political system.
Another feature will provide the tools to make it easy and efficient for citizens to do participatory fiscal policy. This means that the citizens will do participatory budgeting and participatory tax policy. The citizens decide, who, what, and how much to tax.
Implementing participatory tax policy is also possible right now because the main structure of our political system will remain in place while more power and responsibility is taken away from the politicians and is distributed evenly among all citizens.
Right now one of the main functions of the elected government officials is to determine the tax code and the government’s spending. If we take those functions away from the politicians we will take a lot of their power away from them and we will embark on the path towards real democracy. The APP, "Democracy in Your Hands" should make the process of democratically choosing taxes and the government’s spending easy for all the citizens.
People around the world can pressure and demand their governments to implement participatory budgeting this year, and in a couple of years, they can demand to implement participatory fiscal policy, and, if we continue to organize ourselves we might be able to peacefully change the whole system to a true democracy.
If you want to know more about participatory budgeting, click here.
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If you want to know more about why our current system is not democratic and what a real democracy would look like, click here.
If you want to know more about the concept of democratic economy, click here.
People we need
Join our team from anywhere in the world. We are working remotely to develop this project.
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App Development:
Front end designer, Back end coders, and developers, Digital development project manager.
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Didactical information:
Voice actors, motion graphics, and 2d animators to develop videos explaining the functioning of every aspect of the APP to the activists that will promote it and to the general population.
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World wide expansion:
Translators, and writers in various languages. Lawyers and costumes experts.
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App promotion and marketing:
PR agent, motion graphics and 2d animator, voice actors, graphic designers, videographers, video editors, actors, influencers, marketing creatives.
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Volunteer part-time for this project, click here.
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Join this project full-time, click here.
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Join as a full-time owner worker of the Cooperative NGO, We Just Co-op, click here.
Donate
We are very ambitious, we basically want to reorganize society to make it more just, free, democratic and environmentally sustainable. We need resources, if you can donate a couple of dollars, a dozen, a couple of hundreds or thousands we will put them to work to achieve our common objectives.
We need to cover developing expenses.
We need to pay hosting, domian and other developement expenses.
We need to pay salaries for full-time workers/owners.
We need to pay advertisement expenses and fees.
We need to pay legal fees.
To know how the Co-op is organized, how salaries are decided, and how your donation will be used, click here.