Petition Drives —

DirectDemocracyP2P5 is an open source platform developed in JAVA and offering peer-to-peer and mobile ad hoc wireless communication capabilities. The platform offers an API supporting plugins, beside its main application: deliberative petition drives (aka citizens’ initiatives with integrated argumentation) [1]. An authentication-by-reputation technique based on digital signatures and peer review [2], [3] is integrated into the platform via this main application. Each peer manages independently its database of items of interest. The items of interest are encapsulated as self-contained pieces of information and uniquely identifiable using a system of global identifiers (GIDs). Each GID consists of a combination of public keys with creation dates, or digest values. Communication is based on a combination of push and pull mechanisms. [1] In the main application, deliberations develop around motions (concept from Robert’s rules of order, similar to petition and initiative), where justifications represent the arguments for gathered signatures (aka votes). Each motion is relevant to an organization (organization = rules defining a constituency and its jurisdiction). Organizations are independent of each other. The main predefined types of exchanged items are: peer, organization, constituent, motion, neighborhood, witness, justification, vote, news, translation, and tester. These items are synchronized between the peers specifying an interest for them. Users have various possibilities to control what kind of data their agent disseminates and what data it stores. For example, they can block all data related to a given organization, motion or constituent. Alternatively peers may accept only data related to specified organizations, motions or constituents. News items are related to contexts defined by organizations, motions, and justifications. They can be controlled with quotas per constituent and function of their creation date. Translation items refer to the labels of the platform for the graphical interface related to specific organizations. They constitute the basis of a P2P recommendation system for the translations of these labels into the preferred language of the user. The system also handles plugin-data items that do not have GIDs and are exchanged only between peers specified by the corresponding plugins. Currently there are two distributed applications supported by plugins and available with the system: a spacecraft racing game, and a chat application. The DirectDemocracyP2P system consists of several modules, such as: Data Handling, GUI, Internet and NAT, Su-