Direct Democracy
A more precise description of the Core Civix Platform is Semi-Direct Democracy … where residents vote on all significant community decisions. Only a few of the Cantons in Switzerland practice true Direct Democracy. Civix advocates for Semi-Direct Democracy for West Vancouver.
Semi-direct democracy is a type of democracy that combines the mechanisms of direct democracy and representative government. In semi-direct democracy, representatives administer daily governance, but citizens keep the sovereignty, being able to control their governments and laws through different forms of popular action: binding referendum, popular initiative, revocation of mandate, and public consultations. The first two forms—referendums and initiatives—are examples of direct legislation.
Wikipedia
Practically, in the future, Council would continue to make 80% of the decisions and 20% of the time WestVan residents would vote on or hold a referendum on significant community decisions including: zoning bylaw changes, re- zoning, Official Community Plan changes, Annual Budget (Participatory Budgeting), Capital spending in excess of $x, Local Area Plans, and ??
At the core, Direct Democracy requires that the opinion of citizens on a specific community decision must be obtained from The Community.
There are a few ways of gathering this information:
survey every single citizen and ask for their opinion in some fashion. Ballots, electronic voting or
use a referendum method - it is like the original vote for council; slow and expensive and perhaps not always practical
Use statistical sampling surveys of a modest number of the community and extrapolate the survey results to the rest of the population. See and explanation of survey below":
We frequently hear WestVan staff or councillors or others use the phrase: ‘The Community’ favours or opposes project rezone. Why is this statement likely meaningless? Because The Community is never defined and more importantly the question is not asked in a structured manner that enables statistical analysis.