LiquidFeedback 3.1 for democratic software and product development 

Today the Public Software Group published the software LiquidFeedback 3.1. LiquidFeedback is a software for proposition development and decision making using the internet and allowing large scale groups to develop and decide on propositions in a fair democractic process. The most significant innovation of version 3.1 is the possible integration of revision control systems as first described by Björn Swierczek in Summer 2015 in the paper “Democratic File Revision Control with LiquidFeedback”.

Björn Swierczek, inventor of the new technology: “Revision control systems are already used in many contexts to allow collaborative project work. Due to organizational reasons in large projects the decision process has been reserved to a small number of privileged people. This limitation is what I want to overcome: LiquidFeedback 3.1 not only allows democratic software and product development using the internet, but also paves the way for democratizing of collaborative knowledge management.”

Other than that the release date also marks the start of the development of LiquidFeedback 4. In a brief statement, Jan Behrens, in charge with the LiquidFeedback core development, explains that the admission mechanism is planned to be complemented by a new method which shall allow LiquidFeedback to scale up to an unlimited number of participants. Details of the new approach can be found in the developers' mailing list and in the paper “A Finite Discourse Space for an Infinite Number of Participants” by Jan Behrens, Andreas Nitsche and Björn Swierczek.