Develop

The Petities.nl foundation is set up in 2005 under Dutch law and resides in Amsterdam. The main goal is to promote the online petitions website in the Netherlands. The code is written with Dutch grants and should therefore be open for everyone to use. Starting April 2010 the code for the new 3.0 website using the Ruby on Rails framework launched in December 2009 should be properly documented and ready to be published.

DemocracyGame / Democratiespel

Another project of the Petities.nl Foundation is democratiespel.nl, funded by a grant from the Dutch ministry of the Interior. This game is written in Python with the Django framework and the code can be found on Github.

The game is designed to be without an interface (although an improvised interface exist to test it) so third parties can design interfaces for it or integrate it into an existing interface using the API. The gamerules and the data is centrally stored.

In this game the Dutch parliamentary system is simulated, although the elections are every day and political parties are not included. Every citizen can vote on issues formulated by players higher up in the game. One can vote in favour, against or with a motivated blanc vote. The motivation gives feedback to the author of an issue. By voting a player gets points, with enough points you can contribute issues. The most succesful players eventually become opinion leaders and can nominate themselves to get one of the 150 seats in parliament. The 150 players in parliament can make any issue from anyone into law (for points) if a majority agrees.

The parliament elects 15 ministers on different topics who are expected to propose a coherent policy. Any player can become a minister at any moment. Ministers can write laws as long as a majority agrees to keep them. The longer a minister stays in power, the more points for the minister.

There is a graphic showing a pyramid with the levels of gameplay [1]

status

Currently the game works in the improvised webinterface, without the top 2 layers of gameplay. Clustering of players and issues is also not fully implemented.

ideas

The most urgent developments are the implementation of the top levels of the gameplay. All kinds of clustering is needed: clustering of issues based on voting, clustering of players based on their voting. Python - Django is absolutely required. The game should supports English and Dutch, but currently the issues in the database are written in Dutch.

If you have suggestions, the easiest is to leave them under the English blog entry about this project. [2]

contact

To get to know more about this, contact ReindeR Rustema at reinder@rustema.nl | AIM rrr@mac.com | Skype rrustema | Jabber/Gtalk reinder@gmail.com