Democracy

Democracy includes all forms of participation of all members of a system in all decisions that change the system. Democracy has a strong direct and indirect relationship to technology, and participation method is defined by technology that facilitates it.

Democratic technology innovation includes many aspects of the system. Technologies are developed by scientists and engineers and distributed and tested by companies. After they are proven successful by companies, technologies are tested in small democratic systems such as counties and cities, and then are finally implemented in large systems such as states and countries.

Current technologies used in democratic participation are parliaments, market research, referendums, and others. Most of them are based on indirect decision making and representation. Even referendums, which are a form of direct democracy, are limiting – they do not allow the freedom of creativity to participants by giving predefined choices, they require a minimum number of participants, and allow citizens to vote only on specific dates.

Open innovation

Companies – motivated by competitiveness to cooperate more with competitors, experts, and customers – have developed a new participation method and supporting technology – open innovation.

In open innovation a system is transparent about its innovation challenges and open for anyone to suggest solutions to those challenges, or any other innovations they want. With open innovation companies publicly communicate their innovation status and describe the next steps they need to solve, and then they expect customers, users, partners, experts, and competitors, using that public information, to suggest solutions.

Open innovation, as a participation method and technology, allows systems to be transparent about their innovation goals and collect suggestions from citizens, experts, companies, and other systems.

This would allow citizens a more direct influence over innovation in their system, and would remove the limitations such as predesigned questions, deadlines, and location.

Direct democracy

Direct democracy includes all participation methods which do not have representatives. It is considered a superior form of democracy compared to representative democracy. The most common form of direct democracy is a referendum in which members answer premade questions with simple premade choices.

Open innovation is a superior form of direct democracy. It always guarantees transparency and focuses only on innovation.