About half a year ago, we published the first issue of “The Liquid Democracy Journal on electronic participation, collective moderation, and voting systems”. Meanwhile it is available as electronic edition in three different file formats: First, the PDF version with the original layout of the printed edition, secondly a HTML version for better reading on displays, and third a plain text version with Unicode encoding for enhanced accessibility. The archive of the electronic edition is available at the homepage of the journal at: http://www.liquid-democracy-journal.org/
We thank all our readers, the new subscribers, and those who criticized us constructively. With this strong motivation, we finally completed the second issue today and we are very pleased to present seven articles, from which we think that they are worth reading.
This issue's main topic is introduced in the first article with the question “LiquidFeedback: Gamification of Politics?”, asked by Andreas Lange, director of Berlin's museum for computer games. In the following main article “Game of Democracy” and in “How Chaos Protected the Status Quo”, both written by Jan Behrens, we will take a look into game-related aspects of democratic decision-making.
While implementing LiquidFeedback 3.0, two requirements with the need for special algorithms came up. These two topics are covered in “Dividing the Pie” about the visualization of majorities in pie charts, and “Search for a Tie-breaker” about the challenge to find an appropriate mechanism for solving ties.
The article “Liquid Democracy Provides No Alternative to the Republic” by Andreas Nitsche explains why LiquidFeedback was not intended to replace the parliamentary republic, but to strengthen political parties.
About one and a half year after the start of the promising participation platform LiquidFriesland in the County of Friesland, Germany, the article “Liquid Democracy for Civic Participation - A View on LiquidFriesland” makes a quantitative analysis of the participation rate of the people of Friesland.
As last section of the journal, we introduce a new series of articles: “Readers of the Journal Asked - LiquidFeedback Developers Answer”. In this series, developers of LiquidFeedback answer to questions sent in from readers of the journal respectively questions, which are often asked in general.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, do not hesitate to contact us. Please also feel free to send us your article for publishing, if you think it fits into the journal.
We wish you a pleasant and enlightening time reading this issue.
Note: The print version of this issue contained an error in Figure 6 on page 26. In this electronic version, we added the missing unit (360°) to the equation.