This past spring, city legislators agreed to take part in a five-month test of the platform starting in August. Residents of Buenos Aires will have the opportunity to discuss and vote on three upcoming bills, while lawmakers will report on the results during their sessions. “The members of parliament aren’t saying they will vote according to what the citizens tell them,” Mancini noted. “What they are saying is they want to see what this is all about.” In this way, the party has managed to gain a measure of influence in the council without getting a member elected to the body. Its technology, in effect, has been elected. As Mancini’s co-founder and boyfriend Santiago Siri observed last year, “The political party is the way that we have to inject this Trojan virus into the congress. We are making the political system believe that we are playing by the rules but actually we are inserting an entirely new logic into their system.”

Mancini describes DemocracyOS as a tool that will help citizens who don’t have time to attend local government meetings, follow new laws, and monitor elected officials. “We have a team of volunteers that goes to every committee meeting in the city legislature,” she explained. “They feed the app with updates and the legislation that is going to be discussed that particular week. We explain the rules, we try to strip out the legal jargon. We say, ‘This project aims to do this. Those who are against, argue this. Those who are in favor, argue this. Feel free to argue yourself and post your comments.’ And so there’s a discussion that is raised and you can vote how you would like your representative to vote.” At the end of every week, Mancini added, she and her colleagues can compare how people wanted their representatives to vote with how the representatives actually voted.

One recent debate on the public beta of DemocracyOS, for instance, centered on whether the house where Pope Francis spent his early childhood should become a protected historical site. The consensus among city legislators and DemocracyOS voters was ‘yes,’ though nearly 22 percent of DemocracyOS users abstained. It’s unclear, however, whether results on the platform and in the council would be as similar for more controversial and partisan bills—like, say, motions to erect a statue of former leader Juan Perón in the city center. I asked Mancini about the potential in the project for conflict of interest—after all, DemocracyOS was developed by a political party. She responded that since the software is open-source, anyone can audit it.

One of the most controversial aspects of the experiment planned for the Buenos Aires legislature is its lack of anonymity. Users of this official version of DemocracyOS must be of voting age, and must sign up using a national ID card and a second piece of identification (early plans to use Facebook as a means of authenticating users’ identities were dropped over concerns about making the platform overly reliant on a U.S. tech firm). And how a person votes on the platform is not secret.