It has been a while since the last issue of The Liquid Democracy Journal was published. Since then, a lot has happened. Just days after the last issue, the Association for Interactive Democracy was invited by The Office of the High Commissioner for Peace to the Colombian government. It was an honor to join the “Conectados por la Paz” conference in Bogotá. We congratulate president Santos and the Colombian people for the successful peace process ending 50 years of an internal armed conflict.
Meanwhile in Europe, the Swiss water economy discussed challenges Switzerland's water economy will encounter. During the process LiquidFeedback was used and the final study “When water becomes the new oil. How Switzerland will handle the conflicts of the future.” suggests “Liquid Decision Making” for the cooperation of stakeholders.
The Association for Interactive Democracy intensified the scientific cooperation with several universities. In the field of computational social choice, we delivered a keynote on “LiquidFeedback and a fair process of decision making” at the COST Action Industry Day in Toulouse, France. The LiquidFeedback team was also invited by the University of Bologna, Italy to present at a workshop on “The Future of Democracy”.
After LiquidFeedback 3.1 paved the way for democratic software and product development as well as a more democratic collaborative knowledge management, the upcoming LiquidFeedback 4 will come with an authorization and integration module for the seamless interaction with engagement platforms and third party applications in general, introduce geo-tagging and geospatial indexing while keeping up its standards in regard to the task of ensuring fairness and equal treatment of all participants for democratic decision-making. The interface of LiquidFeedback will change to material design with a focus on accessibility.
This issue will reveal new details on the origins of Liquid Democracy and give an account of some aspects of our current development and scientific work in the context of the European research and innovation action “WeGovNow – Towards #WeGovernment: Collective and participative approaches for addressing local policy challenges” and take a closer look at LiquidFeedback's new “Issue Limiter” approach and the challenge of fair distance calculation for location-based searches in geospatial systems.