The Your Party Founding Process has been an experiment in digital democracy: from the drafting of constitutional documents, from regional assemblies to crowd-editing, to the motions and amendments presented to the Founding Conference. We wish to extend thanks to the many volunteers who worked hard under testing conditions to bring this together.
The Democratic Socialists have participated in good faith in this process, with our supporters putting forward our arguments at assemblies and making suggested edits to the founding documents and drafting amendments for the founding conference. We have been pleased to see that many of our campaign demands have made it in the founding documents through this process, while at the same time being disappointed in the rushed timetable and exclusion of certain amendments without sufficient cause, a system that excluded many members from participating adequately.
You can read a technical breakdown of the crowd editing tool by one of our organisers Inacio by clicking this link.
We believe that new forms of democracy require new forms of accountability. Throughout the process there have been major problems with transparency leading to a democratic deficit.
We, Democratic Socialists, call upon the organising team to release data and information pertaining to four key areas: tooling and vendors, models and processes for all algorithmic decisions, founding documents logs, and anonymised participation data.
In detail, we are calling for:
Tooling and vendor disclosure
Your Party must publish full details of the digital tools used in the roadmap process, including:
- The identity and role of external organisations involved in the unique digital crowd-editing tool (including DiEM25 and any contractors).
- The status of the custom-built coding, topic-modelling, and analysis tool (who wrote it, who maintains it, and who can access or modify it).
- Any contracts, data-sharing agreements, NDAs or vendor relationships governing those tools, including where member data is stored and processed.
Model/process cards for all algorithmic decisions
For any use of AI, machine learning or algorithmic analysis in the roadmap process, Your Party must publish clear process cards, in plain English, covering at least:
- What inputs were used (assembly notes, thumbs-up/down, proposed wordings, etc.).
- How analytical tools quantified the trends and how strong consensus was defined for the purpose of making evolutions versus drafting roadmap amendments.
- What thresholds, parameters or rules were used to decide when a proposal was accepted, parked, or turned into a leadership-drafted “roadmap amendment”.
- What exact algorithms were used and what bias checks or manual reviews were carried out, and who had final sign-off.
Log of founding documents
- An audit log of when evolutions were applied, when roadmap amendments were formulated, and which data or processes were cited as justification.
- A clear distinction between changes driven directly by member input and changes introduced by the leadership or staff (for legal, political or tactical reasons).
Publication of anonymised participation data
Your Party must release, in anonymised form and under an open licence:
- The full dataset of contributions from regional assembly note-takers (group notes, coded themes, counts).
- The full dataset from the online crowdediting tool (sections edited, proposed alternative wordings, thumbs-up/down counts, timestamps).
- Any codes, tags or categories generated by the in-house topic-modelling tool, linked to the underlying anonymised material.
- Data should be anonymised to protect individuals but detailed enough to allow independent researchers, members and tendencies to verify claims about strong consensus, broad approval, and the representativeness of the inputs used to justify evolutions and roadmap amendments.