Facilitating more thoughtful policy is one of our fundamental goals for Liquid.

We have an opportunity to transform our legislative process from one-bill-at-time, among a tiny set of legislators, to asynchronous online debate.

Currently, the party with majority control strictly limits the items brought to the floor.

And too often, they treat proposals they do support with an attitude of “This is our only chance. Stuff everything in there! Rush rush rush!”

By transitioning to a digital democracy, our legislative process can begin to look more like the open-source world’s Pull Request system.

Many more proposals can be offered and debated simultaneously, each in their own independent thread.

There will be strong incentives for new law to be much more tightly scoped, instead of monolithic pieces of legislation.

And debate can last as long as necessary, until real consensus is reached.

Here’s a fantastic short video from NYU Professor Clay Shirky elaborating some of this vision:

Liquid democracy proxying makes this practical at scale. Trusted leaders will be able to more faithfully represent large communities, all in real-time.