On the global stage, citizens have no meaningful forum to express their concerns, articulate their decisions, or cast their votes directly and immediately.
Why GloCo?
Issues like climate change, globalization, and migration transcend nation-states and defy the local, short-term scope of conventional politics. They are global in nature; they demand global solutions.
In the current international decision-making systems, however, the crucial players are governments, not individuals. Citizens’ votes count, but they depend on elected representatives to be heard.
There is, in other words, no direct democracy on a global level. And that is what we aim to change. We believe that all human beings, regardless of nationality or citizenship, have the basic right to a voice in the decisions that shape the world we share.
How we’re organized
GloCo.ch is the society that is building the Global Community, an online democracy platform. The members of GloCo contribute with their resources to make the Global Community become a reality. GloCo members are organized in different working groups as described below. If you are committed to supporting the building of the Global Community, join us and become a GloCo member!
In the Global Community, every global citizen can become a Global Voter and thus help to identify global issues, find solutions to those issues, and also cast their vote about any proposed solution. To stay informed about the Global Community and to be one of the first voters, sign in as a Global Voter today!
Working Groups
GloCo is set up in working groups, where each member can apply to participate. With the underneath named working groups, we aim to achieve our mission. In these working groups we either develop new technologies, create effective platforms, and look for synergies with our growing network of partners.
Global Community Principles
Define GloCo’s principles of a global democracy.
Those principles will form the foundation of our own digital implementation and the collaboration with our partners. Some national and community-level democratic processes will work on the global scale; others won’t. We will evaluate the merits and flaws of existing procedures and generate original approaches based on our findings. Our work will involve the study of democratic processes in different regions of the world, including scientific analysis and public perception. We will also focus on specific structural aspects of our project, such as problem identification, public consultations, ballot creation, voting mechanisms, and liquid democracy.
For these tasks, we are looking for a diverse group of collaborators ranging from scientific researchers to passionate laypersons.
Global Community Partnerships
Create dynamic, effective synergies with like-minded individuals and partner initiatives across the globe.
Our cause is very ambitious. We will need as much collaboration and interaction as possible to realize our project on a global scale. We are reaching out to all citizens, organizations, and movements dedicated to developing and strengthening democratic systems beyond the nation-state. Our vision is a global network of individuals and collectives working together towards a more responsive, democratic system to solve global problems.
Our Working Group welcomes all conversations, perspectives, and critical thoughts that bring us closer to our common mission of a global democracy. Let’s exchange experiences and ideas, and empower each other to grow beyond the sum of our parts.
Global Community Technology
Devise and test prototypes of the democratic processes we develop at GloCo.
In close coordination with our partners, we are interested in the topics of unique voter identification; electronic voting, consultation, and deliberation; the visualization of liquid democracy processes; and the technical dimensions of redundancy, resilience, and security. We will translate these concepts into actionable strategies for the experiments we design and conduct. These trials will guide us as we build a global platform for all to voice their concerns, present their solutions, and vote on the decisions that affect their lives.
Our working group is looking for collaborators with backgrounds in relevant digital technologies (especially block chain), network security, and identity management.
Global Community Promotion
Advance GloCo's outreach activities.
Our cause is very ambitious. We will need as much collaboration and interaction as possible to realize our project on a global scale. We are reaching out to all citizens, organizations, and movements dedicated to developing and strengthening democratic systems beyond the nation-state. Our vision is a global network of individuals and collectives working together towards a more responsive, democratic system to solve global problems.
Our Working Group welcomes all conversations, perspectives, and critical thoughts that bring us closer to our common mission of a global democracy. Let’s exchange experiences and ideas, and empower each other to grow beyond the sum of our parts.
Our Story
We founded GloCo to address the greatest global challenges of our time using modern technology and direct democracy.
We founded GloCo in Switzerland, where direct democracy is enshrined in the national constitution: a majority of citizens can change the constitution by popular vote. GloCo was first conceptualized in 2017 under the name "The Global Community" and officially founded as a Swiss society (“Verein”) on 16th of September 2019 in Zurich. Founding members included:
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Gery Colombo (Uster)
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Filip MukiDobranić (Ljubljana)
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Ursula Freiburghaus (Basel)
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Tom Häussermann (Wangen)
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Peter Hostettler (Oberwil)
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Daniel Jositsch (Zürich)
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Ingo Kirchhoff (Russikon)
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Thomas Künzli (Zürich)
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Lucy Koechlin (Basel)
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Samuel Koechlin (New York)
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Lars Lünenburger (Mellingen)
Like any political system, the Swiss one is far from perfect. GloCo isn’t trying to export it or replicate any other national model. Rather, we view GloCo’s place of origin as a unique democratic experiment, one of many case studies to guide us as we build a democratic community on a global scale.
Our initiative is committed to being unbiased and politically neutral. GloCo welcomes participants of all national origins without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran, or disability status.
Global Democracy Initiative
There can only be one global democracy on earth and that is why all organizations working towards the same goal should collaborate. The GDI is the task force we started jointly with six other organizations aiming to implement the global democratic system. Using all our synergies the GDI will achieve the implementation of our goal much faster.
Rather than pursuing our synergistic missions independently, all member organizations of the GDI will work together to achieve the goal we all share
— a Global Democracy.
The origins of the Global Democracy Initiative was in fall 2019, where GloCo initiates a dialogue among like-minded partner organizations with diverse backgrounds, skillsets and resources, unified around their shared vision of a global democratic system.
Since spring 2020, the circle of interested parties grows, the interorganizational effort gains momentum. In 2021, seven organizations from around the world are supporting the GDI mission.
Already active in the development of the initiative are Global Online Democracy, Democracia Global, Young World Federalists, Global People Power, World Citizen Government, Democracy Earth, and GloCo.ch.