Frequently Asked Questions - Solon ================================== Q: Where does the name come from? --------------------------------- A: According to Wikipedia, *Solon* was the man who wrote the first democratic constitution in ancient Athens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon To honor him, we named Solon Voting after him. And it's a simple name that wasn't taken. Q: What is *delegated democracy*? --------------------------------- A: Delegated democracy is a hybrid between representative democracy and direct democracy. Basically, the problem with representative democracy is that you can only delegate your powers to one elected representative (or worse, one that doesn't even get elected), who will then *represent* your powers for the next four years and there's nothing you can do to stop him. With the arrival of the internet, the argument goes that a more direct form of democracy is called for where each citizen can impact legislation directly, at any time. On the other hand direct democracy has the problem that nobody will have the time to properly familiarize himself with and then vote on all the issues a typical Parliament handles, which would lead to poor policymaking. Delegated democracy is therefore a hybrid approach: Citizens can delegate their powers to any other citizen - much like in representative democracy - but also they can at any time change their delegation, or just vote directly on an issue, so that their delegation is not kept "hostage" for a four year election period by a corrupt politician who didn't keep his election promises after all. You can read more about delegated democracy at these links: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy * http://liquidfeedback.org/mission/ * http://openlife.cc/DirectDemocracy Q: Can Solon be used for just normal, traditional elections? ------------------------------------------------------------ A: With Solon we are primarily motivated by the rise of various delegated democracy platforms. As far as we know, nobody is even thinking about, let alone implementing secure e-voting that would meet the needs of a delegated democracy platform. We are aware of one simple and promising e-voting solution that was designed for use in traditional elections: [Helios Voting]. If you are interested in secure e-voting for traditional elections, you should probably look into it. [helios voting]: http://heliosvoting.org/ The current plan is to use Helios as a backend for Solon, with Solon providing features needed by delegated democracy use case. For example, we will implement Solon in a way that it will also be possible to use more modern voting methods, such as various variants of preferential voting. This requirement comes from the fact that Liquid Feedback uses one such method: Schulze ranking. Q: I'm against e-voting / e-voting doesn't work / etc...? --------------------------------------------------------- A: If you are speaking about traditional elections, then I am also against e-voting. This problem space can be broken into a few different things that can go wrong, usually all of them go wrong. For one thing, the systems sold by e-voting vendors typically lack any security at all, or even when the vendors try, they are still not aware of cryptographic algorithms actually created for this purpose but offer some terribly naive, unfit-for-purpose solutions. The other problem is simply that paper ballot elections work well, and trying to replace them with a complex and expensive computer system is just not very smart (even in the case that such a system would actually implement some secure voting protocol, which to date has not even happened. Note that while Helios Voting does implement proper, albeit simple, crypto, it hasn't actually been used for government elections.) [helios voting]: http://heliosvoting.org/ Solon was not created to be used in traditional elections. The motivation behind Solon is to enable secure voting for the burgeoning delegated democracy movement. Here the arguments for and against e-voting have a slightly different balance: Delegated democracy is only practical using computers and the internet - an active participant might want to vote and propose amendments every day. If you believe that delegated democracy is preferable over traditional representative democracy, then you are already using computers and hence e-voting. In the real world this is already happening in Central Europe, where the Liquid Feedback platform is used. In that case the only question is, how can we make it as secure and trusted as possible, since people are already doing it anyway. Q: Can I use Solon in production? --------------------------------- A: **Definitively not.** The current code is just a mockup demonstrating code flow and a simple user interface. There is no cryptography at all yet, and it won't be complete for months (or maybe years?) to come. This is an open source project in development. Contributors are welcome, users not yet. Q: How can I help / contribute? ------------------------------- See the [README.md] and [TODO.md] for how to get in touch with us and what you can help with. [README.md]: https://raw.github.com/henrikingo/solon-voting/master/README.md [TODO.md]: https://raw.github.com/henrikingo/solon-voting/master/TODO.md Q: How is Solon Voting licensed? -------------------------------- A: All of Solon is open source and licensed as GPLv3. As an exception, the patches against Liquid Feedback which are kept under `liquid_feedback_patch/` are licensed with the same license as Liquid Feedback itself, the MIT license. Q: I'm trying to install Helios Voting but can't get it to work... ------------------------------------------------------------------- A: The install instructions at http://documentation.heliosvoting.org/install are a bit outdated. See the file [docs/helios-install-howto.md] for what you really need to do. [docs/helios-install-howto.md]: https://raw.github.com/henrikingo/solon-voting/master/docs/helios-install-howto.md