Real Democracy

Real democracy in its core meaning is nothing more that this: Each person of a population represents himself and so has the right to vote over all significant decisions in the day to day activity of the government.

That was an utopia 100 hundred years ago because of practical impediments. It was simply impossible for the entire population of a country – or a significant part of it – to cast a vote many times a week. There was no technology to support that. People would have to travel miles in order to cast a vote and then go back. That would be a nonsense; so political parties were created in order to represent subsets of the population.

But we are in the XXI century and internet has made possible for people in very distant places to communicate with each other in real time. Current technology can make it possible for any number of people to vote without having to travel. All is they need to do is to push a button. Real democracy is technologically achievable with the current state of technology.

We believe that technology can help to support a real democracy and it is the objective of this group to analyse and implement what is needed in order to provide tools to support real democracy.

Objectives of this project

Technology is a tool. Internet enable us to communicate but in order to achieve a real democracy that can get things done we need more than that. We need formal processes and tools.

We need a formal process that people can follow in order to propose new ideas, vote them and validate them.

We need a tool that people can use to exercise their rights to real democracy.

The objective of this project is to create a formal process and to implement a tool to support that process.

Community

Google group:

https://groups.google.com/group/real-democracy

Code:

https://github.com/DemocraciaReal/propotype

Project management:

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/295165/settings

IRC room:

#realdemocracy

Issues

Bugs, feature request, ideas, comments -> https://github.com/DemocraciaReal/propotype/issues

Development Guidelines

We follow the Behaviour Driven Development agile methodology.

To add features:

1. Fork
2. Create a new branch
3. Create acceptance tests
4. Make the tests pass
5. Commit
6. Send pull request

Development References

There are a couple of technologies and methodologies that we follow.

Rails

The version of rails is >=3.1.0

Testing

• RSpec
• The RSpec Book
• [RVM](http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/, 'RVM)
• [Spork](https://github.com/timcharper/spork, 'Spork)
• Capybara
• Machinist2

Authentication

• [Devise](https://github.com/plataformatec/devise, 'Devise)

Database

• MongodDB
• Mongoid

Javascript

• Jquery
• CoffeScript

Views

• Haml
• Sass – .sass syntax