This fluid delegation system can produce:
Any member-based organization that collects dues, donations or distributes dividends is probably suitable for deegov.
We all know the saying "Think global, act local." While governance and politics at the national and state level leaves much to be desired, we believe that deegov can make an immediate impact on improving governance within the communities listed above.
It is free to go and use with your community.
We are currently in the pilot phase. If you are interested in bringing deegov to your community, please schedule time to meet us or send an email to deegov@proton.me.
The purpose of the pilot program is to measure the impact deegov is having and gather feedback to make improvements.
Firstly, many members would want to be more involved and included in community decisions but they lack the time (e.g., for bi-weekly 5 hours board meetings) or skills (e.g., knowledge of parliamentary procedure). Or maybe they decide they can get involved. However, the next election cycle may be years away or require an sizeable investment of money. And there is no guarantee of winning.
The flip side of this is that people who do volunteer for leadership positions, or put themselves through tiresome and expensive campaigns to get into their elected position, often find the job is very thankless. Those whom they represent can judge and criticize from the sidelines, but this can feel unfair as they have none of the active involvement or responsibility in that which they are criticizing.
Those are the problems in the best of cases. But in the worst of cases governance of a community is prone to another set of problems. These issues occur in the smallest communities and at the largest ones.
Extreme demonstrations of these tendencies can be observed by reading the news and seeing how power has been co-opted and abused within, for example, the Boy Scouts of America, the Catholic Church, the Court of Master Sommeliers, the United Auto Workers (UAW) Union and the City of Anaheim CA, just to cite a few.
Of course, a community does not need to make the news to be biased, dysfunctional, inefficient or ineffective. Nor do the problems have to be so terribly bad for a group to want to find ways to improve levels of collaboration or trust.
A simple example that many people can relate to is being part of a Homeowners Association. These typically have a hard-working and well-meaning, volunteer HOA Board, which makes important decisions impacting everyone. Many homeowners wish to have more of a say but do not have the time to get fully involved. Deegov provides a way every member of the community can have input without a fixed time commitment. Their level of involvement can vary week-by-week depending on what's happening in their life, and they can change or revoke delegates at any time.
The letter d stands for many things:
We'll also note that the member-based communities that can benefit from deegov today are those which collect dues, donations or distribute dividends.
The "gov" in the name stands for "governance" and not Government. Governance is something communities, volunteer organizations and even businesses must work through, whereas Government refers to State & Federal authorities which is not the primary focus.
Though deegov is focused on the local level, we are learning from historical and present-day lessons of governance at all levels. Whether a community has 1000 members or 100 million, the theory is very similar with respect to how people organize, distribute, share or grab power, and make decisions for the group.
Deegov derives inspiration and insight from these foundations:
The democracy of the Athenian City-State from 440 BCE looks absolutely nothing like today's democracies. Far from being an improvement over the ancient predecessor, today's democracies are structurally more similar to the aristocratic or oligarchical rule that preceded (and followed) the original democratic state in Athens. Features that modern-day citizens assume to be at the very heart of a democracy - campaigning, elections, re-elections, political parties, fundraising - were very intentionally excluded from Athenian democracy. Their re-introduction (by every major democracy in the world today) takes us further from the ideal, not closer. Governance in deegov does not include any of the aforementioned features, instead going back to the more advanced methods developed in Athens, and then supplementing with a few simple modern technologies & techniques to help the process scale to larger entities.
The democracy envisioned by the Founding Fathers of the United States looks nothing like the society we have today. These visionaries wrote about a proportional representation as the antidote to concentrated power. Unfortunately, the US Congress threw out that basic principle in the early part of the 20th century. That along with a number of other changes has resulted in the type of unchecked and unrepresentative power that the Founding Fathers were trying to break away from in England. Deegov again goes back to first principles and uses modern tools and techniques to get back to the type of governance model that is designed for and capable of lifting people up, not holding them down.
We are collecting insights across 16 active projects around the globe (in addition to a half dozen inactive ones) that are focused on community governance through a modern digital interface. A number of key strategic decisions for deegov have come out of the lessons from these projects.
The hotbed of experimentation has been concentrated in Spain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil & Argentina. There are also active projects in Israel, France, Switzerland and the UK. The United States has little in the way of currently active or ongoing projects, but a number of ambitious attempts have been made in the recent past.
We have put together a market map of currently active projects. In addition, Participedia.net contains a large database of case studies and community initiatives from around the globe. The P2P Foundation is another useful resource for learning about projects.
While many of these projects share similar types of aims at the highest level, deegov is distinct in many ways. Deegov has made a particular focus on leveraging the ingenious innovations of Ancient Athens and the (largely unrealized) vision of the Framers of the US Constitution.
Secondly, deegov has incorporated some of the processes and frameworks used in software companies to promote productivity sidestep the usual blockers.
Deegov's secret sauce is in blending the following four things:
Concretely we observed that existing projects have blazed the trail for additional progress and that where the with recent projects have encountered friction in expanding their footprint, it has fallen into the following groupings:
We have taken many lessons away from examining these solutions which have given us increased clarity about what we are working towards achieving with deegov in contrast with what has been tried. These analogous projects have fed into the feature design of our platform and approach to community roll-out and adoption.
Following from this, it may be helpful to explain what deegov is NOT. It is not:
It is:
A few points here are a bit nuanced.
Deegov is not a place to have raucous debates, yet people from all different perspectives are coming together to propose changes, make decisions. How is this possible? It is possible because the full spectrum of beliefs ought to be represented within the taxonomy of Domains & Beliefs. To use a silly example, let's suppose a potentially fractious issue is around raisins. Some love them and some despise them and believe they are the root of all evil. If this is pertinent to decisions this community may need to make from time to time then it ought to get encoded into a Domain (e.g., Cuisine) and a Belief (e.g., "How do you feel about raisins?" "Love 'em" vs "Hate 'em"). Members setup their profile and fill out their preference on this and other Beliefs. This helps find reps that share those Beliefs. If a proposal comes up for a dish that features raisins and you don't like raisins, then you can vote it down. Or you rep would vote it down if you selected a delegate who shares these views. There really isn't a strong focus within deegov on trying to convince everyone else in the community that raisins are evil. During the Proposal Drafting phase, you could make a suggested edit to remove the raisins but it is up to the Author to accept or reject your suggestion. And you are free to make a competiting or subsequent proposal for a different dish without raisins. If the Author rejects your "no raisins" edit, keeps in the raisins, and the Proposal passes by a majority, then well... that's a functioning democracy!
Ok, but what if there is an issue that is very important to you and the community can only have one vs another option. For example, we either allow homeowners to fly flags outside the front porch or prohibit it. For starters, many things are not just black and white and through the drafting / editing process you can have success in finding a middle ground (e.g., pro & college sports flags and current state & country flags are ok, others are not).
Yet there is often a desire for people to share their POV with others, have some back-and-forth, and debate a topic. Deegov however isn't specifically designed for that, but nor does it preclude it. There are many other platforms that are designers for this kind of debate, and also Zoom meetings or in person meetings may be appropriate as well within your community.
In other words, people will form their opinion based on lots of inputs, and potentially debating with other members is one of those inputs. (Though it may be more rare than we think that someone changes their mind in such a format.) Nonetheless, the world does not necessarily need yet another way to debate, but we think it does need a way for communities to self-govern and so we've focused on the idea-to-proposal phase, delegation and other unique features and presume that each community will decide how and where debates take place.
Please send an email to deegov@proton.me and let us know how you'd like to chip in. We are most interested in volunteer organization leaders who are excited to pilot this in their community and can manage the initial organizing, training and measurements.
We are always happy to have more developers, publicists, content creators, legal experts and subject-matter experts across the types of communities that deegov targets.
These are the fundamental tenets of the setup:
There are 3 bodies:
The General Assembly is akin to Ecclesia in Ancient Athens, which was where all matters public and private were discussed, debated and voted upon, a couple times per month. Any eligible member of society could attend and speak before the entire assembly. At times, attendees were lightly compensated to encourage widespread participation from all corners of society. In deegov, the General Assembly:
The Governing Committee is akin to the Boule in Ancient Athens, which was a governing council of 500 people (approximately 1% of the full citizenry) chosen by lot, composed of members seated for 1 year, with a maximum of 2 seatings in a lifetime, separated by at least 10 years. At times the position was compensated. In deegov, the Governing Committee:
Sprints are akin to the Prytaneis in Ancient Athens. They divided the year into 10 segments of 36 days each and seated a smaller body of citizens to be available day & night during that period for any matters that would arise. During a Prytany all the committee members actually lived together in the same building and worked in shifts. They rotated leadership of this executive committee to ensure all parts of society had equal representation. In deegov, the Sprints are:
The day-to-day management of the Sprints are run by a Committee which has certain responsibilities around the mechanics but no greater power than any other member for the ideation, drafting or voting.
Sprints Committees:
Members are bound to the guidelines set by the Governing Committee and approved by the Assembly. Repeated violations of this code has consequences established by the community. This is akin to the formal process of Ostracism in Ancient Athens, which prevented the most highly divisive figures or rising tyrants from gaining power.
These consequences are up to the community to decide but may include:
Within the online platform you'll create a private space for your community.
Next, you'll invite all the community members through email.
Now it's time to get a show of hands from everyone who is willing to be seated on the Governing Committee. If the number of volunteers exceeds the desired size of the Committee, then you'll select them by lot (random drawing). You can decide how this done.
It is recommended that your Governing Committee be 1/10th to 1/100th the size of your entire membership base so it is large enough to be reflective of the population, but that is a decision you will make. Smaller communities may need a larger proportion to get a represenative sample.
Next you will divide the Governing Committee into smaller sub-committees, each responsible to draft proposals around key oversight areas. Examples include:
Once the inaugural Governing Committee has worked through these types of decisions, your community will be ready to begin its first Sprint. The first few Sprints will be a learning process for the community and surface topics for the Sprint Committees and the Governing Committee to address.
Very soon, however, the community will get into a comfortable groove of conducting business through this system and find that overall participation has increased while the time burden on any individual member has decreased due to the distributive and delegatory features of this framework.
An Idea can be anything: a problem that needs solving, a rough solution, a goal to shoot for. But it is generally short (1-3 sentences) and does not yet have implementation details. Anyone and everyone in the community should have ideas they want to submit from time to time. There is no big process involved and if a member has some idea in their head they can submit it onto the platform in 10 seconds.
A Proposal is a detailed description that should include all the necessary specifics for community members to vote it up or down, and all the specifics needed for the implementation or execution of that Proposal. Proposals can be many pages long and take significant energy, research and collaboration to draft. That said, given that a Sprint creates a time constraint, Proposal authors will find themselves motivated to scope the Proposal to something that is reasonable to complete in the alloted time. For larger initiatives, the community will need to break up the Proposals into discrete chunks that can be handled in subsequent Sprints.
The author of an Idea is not committing herself to taking any further leadership steps in the case that that Idea wins and moves to the next phase. It is perfectly fine if one person submits a winning Idea and other members flesh out that Idea into a Proposal. If however, an Idea makes it to the Proposal phase and no one steps up to own the Proposal drafting then of course that Idea will not go any further (though it can be resubmitted as an Idea in a future Sprint).
Once an Idea gets promoted to the Proposal phase, multiple Proposals can be created by different authors in response to the winning Idea. It is not only the author of the original Idea that gets to create Proposals.
Each Proposal author is then responsible to finalize the draft during the alloted time in the Proposal drafting phase before the Proposals get locked for voting.
Within a given Sprint, the ideas with the most votes are eligible to move on to the Proposal phase. How many top ideas get promoted to the Proposal phase depends on the Sprint Committee and how they have configured that Sprint, but it will be visible for everyone to see.
Once an idea gets promoted to the Proposal phase, multiple Proposals can be created by different authors in response to the winning idea. It is not only the author of the orignal idea that gets to create Proposals.
Each Proposal author is then responsible to finalize the draft during the alloted time in the proposal drafting phase before the Proposals get locked for voting.
There is not only one "right" answer to this, as different communities can solve this their own way.
The deegov platform has basic comment threads enabled but there are many other options you can choose. One way is to have the Proposal draft live in a Google Doc, and give the whole community Comment rights. The Proposal's author can then respond to the commenters via Google Doc and choose to incorporate whichever suggestion s/he wishes. A more technically savvy community may use Github. A less technical crowd could gather comments and edits over an in-person meeting, conference call or Zoom call.
The Proposal's author is under no obligation to include anyone's comments or suggestions. However it may be to their advantage to do so if they want to garner the most votes for the Proposal.
Here again there there is not only one "right" answer to this solve.
The deegov platform has basic comment threads enabled but there are many other options you can choose. For example the website Kialo has a very nice visual interface to enable multiple levels of advocacy for and against a position.
Holding a meeting in-person meeting if feasible or over Zoom if not, or discussing on Discord or Slack or any other number of tools can work too.
No. Deegov does not solve nor intend to solve those use cases. If you are using something like Personify WildApricot for your organization's website, dues collection or events calendar you would continue to do so.
No. Communities are using Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Nextdoor, Zoom or any number of other tools to communicate.
Deegov is not a replacement for these tools. Deegov is for something very different... decentralized delegatory decision-making at scale. Deegov is not intended for nor designed for chatter, open-ended debates, news and views or direct messages between individual members on topics of interest only to them.
Rather, deegov is a set of processes & tools for large communities to work within time-bounded sessions to propose and craft bylaws and make decisions both fiscal and normative to be voted on by the entire community, either directly or via proxy.
No. Deegov does provide day-to-day operational support to carry out the decisions your community votes on and approves. If for example, you are an HOA and have hired an external company to manage MRO functions for your community, you would continue to use them.
Deegov is a set of tools and techniques to give each community member a voice in the decisions impacting them.
No. Communities can choose to incorporate in-person or virtual meetings to discuss or debate any and all topics, or for brainstorming or other working sessions.
The deegov online platform is the place where the entire community can see the ideas and proposals under consideration, and ultimately vote on them. But other forums including live discussions can be used alongside the platform.
Some communities are using Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Deegov is designed for something very specific and likely not to replace anything you are doing today.
Quite possibly so.
Anyone that's been involved with any voluntary associations will have some familiarity with Robert's Rules of Order. It is used by city councils, charitable organizations, church groups, cooperatives, HOAs, nonprofits, student governments, trade unions, and more.
If you have been involved with the legislative assemblies of state or federal governments then you'll know that Mason's Manual of Legislative Procedure is the governmental equivalent of Robert's Rules of Order. There are many similarities and some differences.
Corporate governance is yet another sphere which has its own set of customary practices.
Deegov aims to extract us from the esoteric minutiae of these formats. They may rightfully be criticized as archaic, bloated and filled with levels of obfuscation that prevents high levels of active, authentic community involvement. When an organization uses a parliamentary rule book it immediately reduces the inclusiveness to only those that are trained and comfortable with these procedures. Robert's Rules of Order is a 700 page book, and even the Chair of the organization who should know it well has by his or her side a Parliametarian to act as counsel with regards to how to interpret the situation with respect to the rule book.
Needless to say, the more we can streamline and simplify the inputs from each community member, so that every single member can participate with ease and confidence, without the need for advanced training, the more good ideas and trust that will come out.
This idea is not at odds with Robert's Rules, actually. Robert states it is only to be used whenever the organization does not already have a way of dealing with a situation. It is meant to be the fallback when there isn't already a better solution. Deegov is a better solution in today's day and age for most of the collaboration that needs to happen, but where parliamentary procedures solve problems an organization does not have a better solution for then by all means use it.
Parliamentary procedures were created to solve a very real and important problem: when there is a meeting of a finite length, how can we assure that it does not dissolve into chaos and that there is a set of rules that everyone should be following in order to move the process along, ensure some level of fairness and maintain decorum.
For live meetings of a fixed length, some norms, rules and procedures are probably a good thing and may very well have utility under these conditions.
What's changed, however, is that collaboration, debate, negotiation, compromise and decision making is happening more today in an asynchronous environment, not in in-person meetings. When there is a Google Doc or Slideshow or Spreadsheet that people can contribute on, comment on, and accept or reject comments, that takes the place of a raucous debate in many situations. Where there is a Slack channel with comments and also threaded messages, that again takes the place of a live debate. People can contribute to the discussion at whatever time of day suits them, and no one is limited to the number of minutes or number of comments they can make.
In today's world, people are not required to travel by horse and carriage, by bus or train over great distances in order to spend an intense but finite set of hours together with other decision-makers in a room to hash out decisions. The rules set out by Robert or Mason may have outlived their usefulness for many use cases in many communities.
Many professionals today are very comfortable working in Google Docs, or Microsoft Office 365, or Github or Slack or Jira with any number of other collaboration tools.
If the ultimate aim is to surface good ideas from the community and forge those ideas into concrete, practical proposals that can be voted up by a community and then executed, then there are more efficient and egalitarian methods of doing that today. That is where deegov comes in.
Is there still a place for live debates and discussions? Likely yes. Presentations followed by Q&A is one example. Brainstorming sessions are another example people usually cite here, although research has confirmed that the most productive brainstorming is done with alternating sessions of synchronous and asynchronous components. Details aside, live discussions will always have a place, but they no longer need to be the one tool for every use case for every community.
| Theory | Reality |
|---|---|
| Creates an even-playing field for all members |
Creates an intimidating power structure:
In fact, just knowing the basic rules is not sufficient to be able exercise one's rights as a member. Entire courses (such as this 53 minute class) are taught to help people learn how to fight for their rights within meetings. Robert's Rules do not "give" people an equal playing field. Rather it like any game or competition with a complex set of rules and tactics. Whoever can play the game with the most cunning is the one that dominates. This ends up being people that have put many, many years into practicing their skills Parliamentary procedure is used like a weapon. The side that can wield it the best uses it to bludgeon their opponents. |
| The role of the Chair is a fair, unbiased arbiter. | The Chair effectively has the power of a King to do as he pleases. All rules or bylaws are the mercy of his whims. Ok... this is technically not true, and there is a parliamentary tactic to Appeal the Chair's actions. However, so few people know about this or how to use it, the existance of the appeal is almost moot in many communities. Even if a member knows how to appeal the Chair's decision the Chair himself may not know about or believe this procedure and so therefore disregard this one check on his power. |
| Intended to minimize chaos, disorder and unhealthy conflict | Can feel like a battle between the Board who is trying to through their business, and the members, whom the Board often treats like a petty nuisance and so uses parliamentary procedure to give short shrift to them if they include them in the agenda or recognize members at all |
| All members are welcome to participate in meetings | Boards typically have open sessions and closed executive sessions. A lot goes on behind closed doors that broader membership base is never privy to. The Board decides how frequently to have open sessions. In many organizatons it is only once a year. |
| Any members can make a proposal (a "motion") | Only possible in open meetings, during the New Business section, if the Chair has indeed included a New Business section on the agenda. |
| The Board only has power by way of the members, who can override them if they wish | Overwhelming members have no knowledge of this, and never muster the power they theoretically have. Even if they understand they could bring a motion to get a majority of members to override the Board, most do not have the courage or confidence to undertake such an endevour. |
| When a motion can't be disposed for lack of data, a subcommittee is formed. | This is one of the causes of why the bureaucratic process can take so long. During the subcommittee working time after the meeting they are not getting real-time questions or feedback from the decision makers (e.g., the Board of the members). So when they come back in another month or two to deliver their report, they get challenged only then. Which requires more subcommittee research, and the process goes on for months. Better to fix the overall timeline for a decision and have asynchronous back and forth with the research subcommittee during that time. |
Decentralized Automatic Organizations (DAOs) sound similar to deegov. DAOs are part of what's called Web3 and many think they might be a big deal. There are many articles and explainers out there on what a DAO is and isn't.
In theory, DAOs are groups of people that work together without a tops-down hierarchy. They may be complete strangers, and don't need to trust each other. The interactions they have and decisions they make are mediated through smart contracts that are written and executed in code. Something either does or doesn't fulfill the contract, and no single individual can make a decision or spend money etc that violates the contract. DAO members can vote with their tokens on what the contract says.
At this point in time, getting involved in a DAO takes an enormous amount of technical sophistication and understanding of very esoteric jargon. While this may someday change, deegov is focused on the volunteer organizations in the here and now, composed of members of all ages and levels of technical sophistication. We see the overhead of learning and explaining how DAOs operate to be something that is currently impractical and out of sync with most existing and legacy organizations.
Beyond that, there are still many aspects of operating a real-world DAO that are unproven. The current use cases are mainly related to group investing, with a very constrained set of decisions to be made. It is unclear how the ongoing management decisions can a complex organization can be turned into code, and how the truth of non-digital events can be proven and automatically verified in blockchain.
Holders of tokens of today's DAOs are typically looking to see the value of their coins go up. And in many DOAs the more coins an individual purchases with fiat currency, the greater say s/he has in the decisions. While some of these dynamics are potentially configurable, some of these motivations are not aligned with how deegov sees decentralized organizations functioning.
There are many important features of deegov such as domain-specific delegation which would have to be worked out in a DAO structure. And while this may all be solvable, it is not a focus at the moment.
Even so there may be a place for DAOs at some layer within deegov, such as specifically with regards to making open and transparent financial input and outputs. Though even today there are other simpler ways to accomplish the same goal.
We will continue to look at DAOs and determine where and when they might be folded into deegov.
Participatory democracy is a generic term used to indicate that the members of the community are involved in decision making on a regular basis, beyond simply voting for elected officials every other year.
We find it quite telling that we should even need such a modifier on democracy. In a way it sort of reveals that what has become the default system is a non-participatory democracy. And how can a system in which the people are not regularly participating in meaningful ways actually even be a democracy?
Deegov certainly fits under the general banner of participatory democracy, with its own blend of approaches to realize more meaningful engagement.
Liquid democracy is the idea that a system does not need to be a fully direct democracy (everyone must vote without any intermediaries) nor a fully representative one (everyone must give up their voting to an intermediary). The idea is that a system can be set up to flex between those two extremes depending on the time and interest of the members.
Deegov has built out the ability to delegate votes on a domain-by-domain basis, or to allow members to vote and participate directly. And they can have delegates for some areas and engage directly for others. Or they can have delegates for a domain but take back their vote on a proposal-by-proposal basis if they choose, while keeping the delegate as a backup.
Deegov has built a system to match members with the potentially best-fitting representatives within a domain while giving the member to ability to select anyone who volunteers as a rep, not just the recommended matches.
Deegov has built a system to assess the faithfulness of a rep to his or her stated preferences and beliefs, enabling members to make better choices about who to select or maintain as their reps.
While liquid democracy has been discussed for decades, existing political systems at a state or federal level have not made room for them to thrive or survive. The efforts at this in various countries have focused more at creating a political party that has discussion boards amongst its members. These experiments have fallen quite short of a true demonstration of the power of flexible, delegatory self-governance.
Deegov is focused on volunteer associations that are enthusiastic to explore how self-governance can work for their communities.
Participatory budgeting is the idea that community members should be able to brainstorm and work out how the investment in their community is spent. Who better to make these decisions than the people that live in the community?
There have been numerous participatory budgeting workshops around the world, and they are generally viewed as successful by the community members.
The participatory budgeting is normally an in-person full-day or multi-day workshop. Also, the scope and funds at the heart of the process are usually limited - a very tiny fraction of the community's overall responsibility. And they have been one-time or very infrequent events within the target community.
Deegov is about finding a way to scale that level of input and ownership.
Proportional representation is the idea that the number of leaders or lawmakers should grow as the community grows, so that the diverse interests of the members still get reflected in decisions. It also keeps power from concentrating in the hands of a few.
The United States Constitution describes proportional representation in Article 1. In fact it is only 21 words into the Constitution that the Framers define how often elections occur and what the proportion of representatives to voters shall be. The Constitution guarantees that there shall be 1 representative for every 30,000 constituents.
Despite how critical this clause was for the Framers to their vision for America, the United States does not have proportional representation anymore. If it did, there would have 10,000 lawmakers for the 300 million constituents. People tend to think it does because US States differ in the number of congressmen according to the population. This is incorrect however, because the total number of congressmen has been fixed at 435 since the 1911.
Proportional representation also played a role in Ancient Athens. In order for the Ecclesia to pass new laws, a quorum of 6000 attendees was required. Given that the total citizenry was estimated to be up to 60,000 people, the 6000 required represents a proportion of 1 to 10.
Both of these historical analogs presuppose that it will not be practical for everyone to participate, and also that some guardrails ought to be used to ensure diverse interests are represented and power does not amass in the hands of a few.
The architects of these great societies of course could not rely on people collaborating remotely, as the Internet and the universal adoption of mobile phones and laptops would not occur until the late 2010s. (In 2022 97% of Americans own a mobile phone, and that number is 84% globally).
Today, it is more than possible to have full participation given that people can collaborate, draft documents and vote - and even debate face-to-face on Zoom - all remotely from practically anywhere. Still, not everyone will want to be involved with day-to-day decisions, but their preferences can still be represented through a one-time setup of their profile where they choose the points of view that reflect their beliefs and then select a default slate of representatives to proxy for them whenever they don't vote directly themselves.
Proportional representation may have been the best concept that could achieve their ideals back in their time, but how would the Framers of the Constitution use today's tools and technologies to forge an even more perfect union? And can communities of all shapes and sizes take advantage of this opportunity even if governments will not reform for some time to come?
No. Each community establishes and evolves its own set of values, rules and guidelines through the core processes & structures described above.
Deegov provides an underlying framework and set of tools concerning the distribution of power.
Yes. But if you volunteer to represent others as their proxy voter, then your votes on issues related to those topics are of course transparent for everyone to see.
Ancient Athens is one of many inspirations from across the ages that feeds into the starting point for our model.
But Ancient Athens was far from perfect. In Ancient Athens, only men could participate. Women, slaves and foreigners were not given the same access to the Ecclesia. This system reflected their society's values at that time. Ironically, the Framers of the US Consistitution held the same worldview - slavery still existed and women were not given suffrage either.
Today most of us would hopefully scoff at those values, but at the same time Athenian Demcoracy was a monumental improvement from the prior systems in Athens whereby all power was held by a handful of aristocrats or a tyrant. So when the Dēmos (common people) suddenly had a seat at the table, even if it was only a subset of the common people, it was world-changing and paved the way for many nations that would follow two-thousand years later.
Nonetheless it helps to highlight an important reality: deegov cannot (and should not) impose a new set of values on the community. Rather, it helps to open up the decisions around what those values are to a larger fraction of that community. Or stated in reverse, it is a framework to prevent a small number of people or special interests from gaining a stronghold over the community and its values.
If an overwhelming percentage of the society believes a certain [dangerous] thing, what is to prevent them from carrying that out?
The unfortunate truth is "nothing". We are waking up to the reality that the same thing is true of an "advanced democracy" (or more accurately a "constitutional federal republic") like the United States. But this is not new. Slavery is but one example where either the majority or possibly a strong and powerful minority, believed a thing which was horrible and wrong and they carried it out anyway to serve their own purposes and ultimately ended up in a civil war over it.
In the end, no set of rules or procedures can prevent atrocities if enough people believe strongly enough in a dangerous idea and are willing to put their money or muscle into perpetrating it. Nurturing humans to hold values that are fact-based, sustainable and devoted to human welfare is an even bigger topic than governance models alone.
In deegov, every member has a vote, and the relatively large governing councils are chosen by random selection from the general population for a short term seat on the council. This certainly mitigates against sanctioned harm perpetrated by a small elite or minority. But it does nothing if the overwhelming populace wishes to do harm. But nor does any other governance system we know of.
Naturally there will always be similarities as well as differences between local community governance and that at state or federal levels. We can all relate to how the government functions (or doesn't) at a national or state level. And it is logical that insights gleaned from one realm may apply to the other, though of course not always!
We agree. It's always better if the current system can be adjusted slightly to meet your goals instead of trying something new.
If your community is working well overall, but there are just a small number of known issues that the members can rally to solve, then by all means do that.
If on the other hand, there are long-standing problems that are resistant to improvement, or your list of structural issues needing attention keeps growing longer, or you notice that your problems are the same ones facing other communities like yours and no one has yet found a solution, then these are the types of scenarios in which you might be open to experimenting with something new and different.
That said, calling deegov "new" is debatable, since it is largely predicated on the system designed 2450 years ago (430 BCE) in Ancients, the birthplace of democracy. We're only applying modern technology to implement the same system to help it scale.
In fact you may say that we too are in fact "fixing" a system that had a lot going for it, but just a few areas that needed updating.
It can't. At least not at first. Deegov isn't an immediate cure-all for all the things that are broken.
However, let's root cause where the polarization comes from. The efforts to polarize communities have been well-organized, well-funded and executed with focus, flexibility and cunning over many decades. They have been funded by interests both domestic and foreign. The "culture wars" have roots both financial and dogmatic. It plays out in both analog and algorithmic battlefields.
There is however, one common thread: the financiers of the culture wars do it because they know if they can demonize the other side, you will vote for their candidates. If they shock you enough you'll tune in and stay glued to their channel. If they anger you enough you'll click, engage, come back and view more ads.
When we replace elections with selections, we eliminate the usefulness of political parties, which are fundamentally an apparatus to vet and groom candidates and provide the infrastructure to run complex and costly elections. With political parties gone, we don't have "two sides" anymore. So there is no one to demonize.
When we replace clatter and chatter media channels with ones purpose-built for practice and collaborative problem-solving, we start to heal and come together. The algorithms that reward outrage and extremism have no place in deegov.
Yes, absolutely. Which isn't to say that volunteers shouldn't receive some renumeration to encourage participation even from the working class, as they did in Ancient Athens, but purpose and structure would be entirely different.
Politicians - even within small communities and volunteer associations - spend much of their time fundraising and appeasing special interests that will make or break their re-election campaign. Only a small fraction of their time is actually put into productive activities for the community vs their own political career.
They often need staffers to do research because they aren't experts in most of the underlying domains into which they are being required to make decisions. This flips on its head in deegov where the experts themselves are volunteering in the narrow docket of issues where they can provide authoritative information and recommendations, without the need for large staffs.
People are motivated by rewards other than money and power, and that does not get leveraged in the current systems of goverance. Under the right conditions, people will passionately invest their time and expertise to help make a better community or world, or for the feeling of accomplishment and comradery.
Think of all the thing that we use every day that were created by volunteers, often strangers to one another, working not for a salary but for the satisfication of contributing to something larger. This list includes:
We need to start by breaking down the different types of business that arise in Board Meetings and determining the optimal way to handle them. We will have to do this by looking at some examples.
City Council meetings spend a lot of time hearing from developers who have plans to build new houses, buildings or shoppings centers. The general zoning laws for the city ought to be something the whole community has equal input into if they wish. Executing on those zoning regulations is the job of a functionary or department, not so much in the scope of self-governance. So most development projects do not - or should not - need to be pushed back through the City Council. It's only when a developer is asking for an exception to the established rules that some new decision needs to be made. Should that decision be vested in the hands of 7 individuals out of a community of 40,000? We don't see this as ideal in the least. If for example the community at large voted to keep fast-food chains a certain distance from public schools, and then later Wendy's petitions at a City Council meeting for a waiver from that rule, it seems that ought to go back to the people who voted on the zoning in the first place - the entire community.
Other business within a City Council meeting is to raise an issue, and hear from various points of view their side of the issue. It is education and information gathering in advance of deciding if some action needs to be taken, or what actions those should be.
Deegov does not take a stance of the format of these expositions except to note that if the decisions involved are ultimately ones that ought be in the hands of the whole community, then the exposition itself should be done in the most accessible format for all. This means that even if the actual session takes place in City Hall that it is recorded and posted for everyone to have access to.
Where deegov does have a stronger point of view is that after the exposition phase, the whole communitiy ought to have the same access to propose ideas, draft recommendations and vote. And if they would rather give that responsibility off to a representative, that's fine too. But they ought to be able to revoke that delegate at any time and choose another one. And not just every 2 or 4 years. Any time day or night. And they shouldn't only be able to choose from a tiny slate of delegates that have already been filtered through the lense of who could raise the most campaign funding, or scare portions of the community into voting from them by demonizing the other side with half-truths and playing on human's base instincts. Rather they ought to be able to delegate their voting rights to any members they choose so long as that member has signed up for that responsibility and doesn't already represent too many people (so as to avoid concentration of power).
How do you keep track of the members and ensure that only the current, active members have access to the platform? Employers who give out emails to their staff have a solution for this kind of thing and it's called Single Sign-On. The employer is the one deciding who is a current employee and who isn't. And they can grant all kinds of access to different systems, internal and external, to current employees and as soon as someone leaves the company, cut off access to every system and tool with the flip of a switch. These are called Managed Identities.
An HOA on the other hand does not have Managed Identities for its members the way a company does, handing out emails and such. However, they will typically have an industry-standard membership database and keep track of who lives where, who has paid dues, and who owes dues. To be the most streamlined, therefore, deegov should sync with the system-of-record for a community's active membership.
The ease of doing this will depend on the community and what they use as the system of record.
If anyone tells you that no hackers will ever be able to penetrate their system they are lying. We can make the platform as secure as possible, and open-sourcing ensures that lots of people have the opportunity to spot vulnerabilities. But the architects of every system in the world should ask themselves the question “What happens if a threat actor gets in?”.
In the case of deegov, it seems the kind of data that would be potentially sensitive and upsetting to people if it got out is people's preferences on the beliefs in their profile setup, and people's votes on proposals.
Practically speaking, lots of people make their views about social and political issues known on social media today anyway. And if it gets out into the public sphere that you voted within your HOA for “increasing the fees to support the pool renovation” probably that reveal won't have a material impact on your life.
In Ancient Athens the citizens in the Ecclesia voted simply by raising their hand. Everyone could see what they were voting for. There was secrecy there. The only place that secrecy was enforced was in the casting of the votes for ostracism. Here people would write the name on a piece of clay pottery with the one person they want ostracized - which meant they would be banned from Athens for 10 years. It's obvious to see why that would be kept anonymous.
In the modern world, so much of our data is out there on the Web already it might not seem like privacy would be a concern. However, in thinking through the scalability of these type of systems there are some scenarios that could be potentially troubling. Let's imagine a day when all voting is digital. If all the votes a person makes across all the communities they belong in are available as a data file for download, then that could be fed into a system used by advertisers to target ads to them. Dating sites could import those voting records to predict compabibility with a potential match. Employers could use your political voting record as an input to the decision to hire. So there are valid reasons to try and find solutions to questions of security & privacy.
Incidentally trying to set up a system where the votes occur through blockchain is not a complete solve to the problem of ensuring anonymity. On the blockchain everything that happens is public and inspectable for all. It is considered pseudonymous however because the blockchain contains identifiers but not names. However, it is theoretically possible to work backwards and piece together some of the names to identifiers under certain conditions.
When we talk about privacy concerns that result from a security breach, there may not be a silver bullet. However, there are new techniques available such as the ability to search within files that are using encryption-at-rest. This may reduce the surface of attack in some scenarios. Data retention policies can help reduce the size of the problem as well. After a vote there may be a defined window in which to verify and contest and after that the underlying datapoints get deleted.
A challenge that such projects have had goes like this: people need confidence the votes are being counted corrected with no tampering, and the only way to do that is to publicize the names and votes of everyone so they can be checked and inspected by all. But that creates a privacy problem, and it limits the willingness of members to participate in certain contexts.
We would challenge this however. First, by publishing the list of names and votes, how exactly does that prove that the election results were not tampered with? You only know how you yourself actually voted, so in a file of 50,235 votes for example, there is really only one row in that file you are capable of validating.
Second, you can't inherently trust other people when they claim that their vote was tampered with. Some person or some group wishing to cast doubt on the legitimacy of an election result could publicly claim that they voted "Yes" but in the record it is says "No" and therefore their vote was changed. It could be a complete lie.
There may not be a perfect solution here that solves for every possibility or eventuality, but here is one proposal.
The voting system has built within it a public-private encryption model for the following purpose. At the time of a data download of the voting records, each voter's unique public key is used to encrypt their voting responses. So the columns would be user id (e.g., email, or unique username), question, answer (encrypted) and timestamp. A voter can only decrypt their own voting responses using their own private key. In this way, an honest person can confirm for herself that her vote is in the vote log, and that it is correctly showing her vote response.
But then how do you stop a dishonest person from falsely claiming they made one choice but the record shows another? Use a public-private encryption key again but in reverse. Upon the submission of a vote, the application creates a local file for the user with a receipt of her vote choices. Except this receipt is not in clear text and editable. It is encrypted by a public key from the Community. Only they can decrypt it with their private key. So if someone wants to claim that their vote was tampered with, they would have to hand over their encrypted receipt to then be decrypted via the Community private key to see if it supports their story or not.
Using this approach, we can:
It does stand to reason that the list of who voted still needs to be made public, but their voting selection does not. The clear-text data about who voted is important to inspect and verify that:
It does get slightly more complicated when we introduce the idea of proxy voting. If John is proxy for Mary, who shows up in the log? Whose key is being used? How does Mary get a receipt? The answer is that every constituent gets their own records in the voting log, and has their own private key, and gets their own receipt. But for the case of Mary, her receipt will have to sent to her (stored in the app for when she logs in, or emailed to her). And her private key will have to be stored in the cloud, since we can't rely on her client application to have it because she won't have logged in herself so the app can't pull it from her device. And o course there ought to an additional column showing who cast the proxy vote for Mary.
We could take these concepts even a step further by creating an auditable voting log without ever saving or storing data that could be gathered in a breach to connect a person with their vote choice. Upon the vote function being called, the software would update the running tally but not store a pairing of user with vote preference. The table would have the following fields: auto_id, updated balance, signature, timestamp. If for row #410 the yes votes totaled 200 and this new vote which will be row #411 the user also voted yes, then the updated balance is 201. The signature is name, nickname, special word - anything - from the voter but encrypted using the voter's public key. No one else can decrypt it but that user.
So as in the prior scenario, the honest voter can check the logs to see that in the running total balance of votes, her vote is in there. She would know which row to look at because the filename of her local file receipt would give her that information. As in the prior scenario, the voter would get a receipt of her votes encrypted with the Community public key, which she would need to file a complaint charging that her vote was registered incorrectly. Her name or unique identifier can be stored in another table, disconnected from the actual tally, to help validate that only legitimate voters have participated and no one has participated twice, but some attention would need to be given around the issue of updating votes and it not appearing as if the person voted multiple times.
We have become complacent to the idea that much of the business done within our community should be allowed to be done behind closed doors - with some members "in the know" and other members "in the dark". This leads to the objection or concern that deegov is “too open”.
Let's consider an HOA. The Board Meetings are only for Board Members and regular homeowners have no right to attend. Of course the Board could allow them to attend on a case-by-case basis, but it is not a member's right. And open sessions if and when they are occur are by definition open to all members. But all to frequently most of the time and action is happening in the closed Board sessions.
One of explanations for why the meeting is secret is because they have to discuss sanctioning certain homeowners for violations of bylaws. But why should this be allowed to occur in secret? Doesn't that enable subjectivity and bias to work its way in? Maybe the Board in secret decides they don't want to sanction Bill because they play golf together or do business together, but at another time have no trouble sanctioning Wanda because they don't like her or have no special affiliation with her.
If there are bylaws that carry with it punishments, shouldn't it be transparent to all how those rules are enforced?
Another reason Boards have secret meetings is to discuss contracts with vendors that are bidding on projects. Again, doesn't the secrecy invite grift, favoritism and abuse?
Yet a third reason for the secret meetings is to discuss potential hires for staff-level positions. Here we may see some validity to not have the Board critiquing others in the open. On the other hand, why can't other members be privy to the candidate evaluations, pros and cons and ratings? A meeting between members is still a private meeting and not a public forum. Assuming the Board kept their candidate evaluations to relevant job experience, there should be nothing to hide and nothing to fear from inviting other members to see how they evaluated candidates. One should only be worried if they are making the decisions based on race, creed, appearance, age or other irrelevant and biased factors.
A clear and obvious situation in which a community must keep a meeting secret is when it pertains to an external threat (e.g., one country is at war with another country) and there is a legitimate fear that if the whole community were to be included in the dicsussion of tactics of strategy it would leak out and could tip the other side off.
A second place where secrecy may be warranted is when a legal proceeding is going on.
Each community will decide for itself what is secret and what is open, but the underlying structure with the Assembly, Governing Committee and Sprint Committees is designed to discourage
By eliminating elections, and therefore campaigns, and therefore campaign financing and with it the lobbying industry, we hope that the power of special interests decreases dramatically.
However, it should be noted that there is nothing to stop a special interest group from using advertising, public relations, social media, owned media companies, other shadowy intermediaries and so forth to try to win the hearts and minds of members directly.
We expect they can and will continue to use those avenues open to them.
A community will want to have certain rules in place about what level of participation constitutes a quorum for purposes of counting a vote on a proposal as legitimate.
Should a community find that these levels of participation are not being met, it will need to take measures to address this. Those determinations will need to be made based on the particular facts at issue, but nonetheless this is a scenario a community may face at some point in time.
In the shift from a small cadre of full-time or elected politicians to a much larger body of volunteer subject-matter experts we are led to wonder whether there will be enough productivity amongst the volunteers.
Looking at other realms where users are contributing without a guaranteed payday, we don't expect this to be a problem in most cases. Generally speaking if there is an important problem or opportunity there will be people to step and throw their energies at it. And if no one is willing to invest their own time, how crucial can it possibly be? That said, if this occurs, the remediation will need to be based on the facts in that situation but it should be on the list of items to be monitored and measured.
A few different issues can arise with one's chosen repreresenative.
In deegov we have a several ways of handling this.
In deegov, a member can choose more than one delegate within a specific Domain. This helps address the Ineffective Representation problem above. But then whose amongst the multiple chosen actually casts the proxy?
It is the delegate that votes first. This is the simplest solution and it also offers an incentive to representatives who want their proxy votes to count. The early bird catches the worm.
Getting a community up and running on deegov from scratch is a bit different than once it has gotten traction. Here's an example: When the first few people log in and set up their profile, selecting the preferences across different beliefs, the system will want to show them close matches to other members who have volunteered to rep. However, those won't be enough other members at first. Even if there are a few, there won't be enough to have reps that have close enough scores for it to feel like your beliefs are really being proxied by someone else.
To solve this, in the early phases of a community's life on deegov, members will have to set up their profile's beliefs preferences first, and then wait for a notification to tell them there are close matches they may want to select as their delegate. Later on, the preferences and delegate selection can all be done in one session.
Keeping things simple, straightforward and understandable to every man, woman and child is no small task. But one that should be undertaken at every step of the process.
The Ancient Athenians were brilliant in the way they kept things simple that could have been complicated. They divided the calendar into 10 working sessions. They divided society into 10 tribes. Those tribes were designed to be a mix of 3 different types of landscapes: city, coast and rural. No one could serve on the Boule more than 1 time in a 10 year period, and only twice in a life. The Boule consisted of 500 people (about 1/10th the entire population) Each Prytany had 50 people (1/10th the Boule).
Why is this so brilliant? It's easy to remember. Any citizen could remember this. It didn't require an advanced civics class in college. It's honest. They were doing the best they could, and didn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Think of all the gamesmanship, trickery and maneuvering they avoided by having dead simple rules instead of a complex intertwined thicket of densely written legal clauses to wade through and then weaponize to one's advantage.
If you take a city council as an example, you'll find for example 7 elected councilmembers serving 2 year terms. They may get paid $1000/months and have to attend each meeting and prep beforehand. There is a learning curve to get to know the key players, the parliamentary procedures, and so forth. There's a small number of them, they are very public, and so they are a "responsible" management team. Or at least that's the idea.
Can a collection of volunteers fully replace this? And in fact improve upon this model? Yes, but there is still a role for a smaller set of people are are more dedicated and responsible for a period of time. These people have familiarized themselves with the key players, procedures, guardrails, etc. They can ensure the process runs as designed. And in the case of exceptions, they can convene and figure out how to deal with the anomoly.
This was the role of the Boule in Ancient Athens ("Governing Committee" in the deegov framework) They sat in their position for 1 year, and were the connecting glue between what the people want and the basic structures of the governing system.
There was also Prytany ("Sprint Committee" is deegov). The Boule was divided into 10 groups called Prytaneis. Each Prytany served for one-tenth of the year ("Sprint" in deegov).
The people were the source of power, new ideas, and legitimacy to the whole system. They were all equal, and could all participate in self-governance without any barriers. The Boule & Prytany was the grease to ensure things all ran smoothly, exceptions can be dealt with, and they could make improvements to the overall functioning of the systems.
The big key difference is that the people serving in Boule (and by extension the Prytany) were chosen at random from the set of all volunteers who wanted to serve. The process of random selection is called sortition in the Athenian system. So in this sense they were very unlike our current Board members, Council members, and so on who are generally elected or appointed. Each of those processes has it's own issues. And serving on Boule was limited to 1 year at a time, twice in a lifetime, and separated by 10 years or more. So this was all very intentional and strategic to ensure power would not consolidate, and big powerful interests would have a hard time getting toehold on power.
Being in charge sounds exciting. But the reality is the much of the work of legislators, board members, etc is very boring. In the realm of governing, it is the exception - not the rule - to have big important decisions that creates strong opinions amongst the community members. Most of the time the governing body is involved in minutiae. The Minutes of a typical board meeting concerns topics around extending contracts, paying bills, dealing to grievances from one staheholder or another, or determining the underlying issues that need to be addressed to comply with some regulation or requirement.
A typical meeting or session may in fact have 10 or 20 such business items, each of which should ideally be understand well by the decision makers. This involves some amount of pre-reading, familiarity with esoteric jargon, and often times a briefing from colleagues on the backstory.
In short, this is boring work that most members of a community will not have the time nor interest to invest themselves in. So in crafting the specific cadence for which a governing body chooses to modernize their methods, some thought should be put into separating out the tactical minutiae from the important strategic matters that the community wants to be have a say in. This is one of the topics the Governing Committee for each organization should discuss and determine how they want to solve this for their community of stakeholders.
Embedded in the notion of democracy is that we should do what majority of people want to do. Deegov is first and foremost trying to get closer us that vision. However, it's worth asking the opposite question, "Are there times that the majority will want to do the wrong thing?"
Obviously it is a difficult question to answer, but probably the answer is "yes". The problem of "mob rule" is just one formulation of this problem. In that scenario, a minority can have its rights trampeled upon by a majority. Of course it the community is based on a set of shared values and ideals and preserves the rights of minorities, and there are enforcement mechanisms to keep that in check, then it may be ok.
On the other hand, the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776 started out with "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And yet it was country the would hold slaves and go to war internally to keep slaves. And of course women could not vote either. So having values and sticking to them are two separate things. This scenario could be characterized as Mob Rule in a way.
There are other scenarios that are not expressly about the rights of minorities vs majorities, but more strategic decisions that may be hard for the majority to see, but a set of wise leaders could do so. Generally, plans that require sacrifice in the short term for a potential gain in the long term are the types of things that a majority might vote against.
A majority might not fully grasp the fiscal realities of the communitity and try to spend beyond it's means. Or it may not understand the complexities of how costs are sometimes externalized and fail to take a systems-view of the problems at hand.
One wonders then, how a more perfect democracy would deal with these problems. It is likely that it will get some of these decisions wrong. At least first. But hopefully learn from mistakes. The other side of the coin however, is whether the leaders are in today's imperfect democracies are on the whole making wise and forward-looking decisions. Are they looking out of the good of society 2 or 3 generations down the road? Or is it mainly about what they need to do to get themselves personally re-elected or enriched through other backchannels? So in the end, it's a question of comparing - and hopefully finding a middle ground where certain strategic decisions can be made by an trusted and informed set of experts who have the backing of the majority.
Within the working of a typical city council or non-profit board for example, there are topics that get raised which then require some functionaries to go and do research before it can move to the next stage. For example the city may wish to approve the construction of a shopping mall, but there needs to be an environmental study that takes place to see what issues need to be addressed in order to comply with local, state and federal statutes. How does something like this work its way through the Sprint system in deegov?
In an initial Sprint, the Idea prevails, gets turned into a detailed Proposal, and the Proposal get approved -- but, pending resolution of whatever outstanding issues need to be addressed. The work proceeds "offline" (outside the Sprint cycle) and when the studies are ready to be brought back before the community it goes through another Sprint cycle.
This is very similar to how a city council will have business on a matter that will span multiple board meetings, and in between, the city employees will do the legwork to investigate outstanding issues and propose options. So in deegov it mirrors this, except it is the whole community that gets to weight in the choices that come back.
In a HOAs the members start out on the same playing field, and over time a set of dynamics can create tension and suboptimal outcomes. Ultimately this can effect the market value of the homes in the community, and the happiness of its residents.
Many homeowners appreciate the lawn care and other services afforded by the HOA, but don't really know what the HOA does and where their money goes. They may see the fees rise over time, feel uneasy, but not have an outlet to get a healthy perspective.
An owner may find they've run afoul an HOA bylaw, and end up feeling raw about how the interactions have gone.
When prospective homeowners are looking to purchase a home and see high fees, talk with neighbors and find they can't defend the HOA fees very well, they look elsewhere.
These are all scenarios that can have improved outcomes once homeowners are more involved, included and brought into the process. It's hard to see the reason for something, or put yourself in the shoes of a Board member or administrator when you've never sat on that side of the table.
With deegov, rules and processes that are opaque and out of reach start to look clearer once each homeowner has a seat at the table.
Why would this work in churches and other religious organizations?
Firstly, it may be only valuable in some aspects the commnunity's activities and not all.
For starters, congregants who feel more ownership are more likely to contribute - both time and money. Those who feel the decisions are all made by someone else may be less sure of how much extra they can donate.
Of course many congregants already put in volunteer time. As non-profits, churches rely on this.
However, the default structure of how committees are setup tends to favor A-type personalities. Those who love to talk in front of a group, immediately take control when they enter a room, and like thinking on their feet are natural leaders for these committees. Sometimes it's not the best idea that ones but the idea from the most dominant person in the room.
The flip-side is that this leaves out a huge swath of the congregation that may have good ideas, expertise and time to put towards church life but does not thrive in that environment.
As an asychronous decision-making platform, deegov gives more opportunity for people to contribute their ideas and preferences in a format that may suit them better.
Church leaders want to know how to make their ministry more appealing. Some are very good at seeking out input. However, the natural difference in positions can lead to a filtered set of information getting up to the ministry leadership.
That's where the concept of self-governance can be applied for some aspects of church life. Social programs, education programs and the like may be good places to start and see how this changes the dynamic or the quantity and quality of participation.
Since the governance at the local level often mirrors quite faithfully the sort of power structures within Government, it's worthwhile to understand a bit more about the historical underpinnings of the Governmental power structure. So we'll take a brief look at the two most “famous” democracies: American and Ancient Athenian.
The Framers of the Constitution of the United States of America only copied one idea from the Ancient Atheniens who coined the term “democracy.” That one thing? They both excluded women and slaves from the system.
The one big terrible mistake of Athenian political life is the only thing America's Founding Fathers borrowed. And it wasn't an oversight. How much of a person a slave should count for was one of the top two hotly debated topics of the constitutional conventions. (They ended up deciding a slave would count for 3/5th of a white person. The slaves couldn't vote but their masters could.) The other hot topic was proportional representation which we'll get to in a here.
All the smart bits about Athens (and there were lots) were completely ignored. All the things that Athens purposefully avoided and for very good reasons, America made the centerpiece of its model.
What did Athens intentionally avoid? Elections. And anyone having more than 1 year of elevated power within a 10 year window. And factions based on class or ideology. And divisive political figures bent on power.
What did America end up with as the centerpiece of our system? Elections. Re-election campaigns. Political parties that split on class and ideology. And divisive political figures bent on power.
One could make the argument that they both had some notion of proportional representation. Athens did not call this out explicitly, but by having a quorum required for Ecclesia to make binding decisions they had some nod to the basic idea. The de facto proportion in Ecclesia was 1:10. At worst, there was 1 person present in the Ecclesia to represent 9 other citizens. On a good day, more people showed up and the ratio may have been 1:5.
The Framers of the US Constitution explicitly included the formula for proportional representation. It was supremely important to them, being the focus of both the first Article in the Constitution and the original First Amendment (see next question). The proportion stated was 1:30,000 - one representative for every 30,000 citizens. So here is another argument against claiming that America borrowed the idea from Athens. The scale is so different - 1:10 vs 1:30,000 - that it becomes a different thing altogether.
Proportional representation was incredibly seminal to the vision the Framers had, but it didn't last. In 1911 Congress decided they were not going to enforce that Article anymore. They didn't amend the Constitution however. So the makeup of our Congress and Senate are currently out of compliance with the US Constitution - and by a wide margin. The excuse for this is that to follow the Constitution wouldn't be practical with such a large population. But this is not true. It takes a failure of imagination to believe that no group larger than 535 can collaborate together and make decisions. Every Fortune 500 company except for 8 has more than 535 employees. A great many F500 companies have over 200,000 white-collar workers. If they could work together towards a common purpose, it is unclear why we could not have 10,000 representatives or more working together too. Of course specialization is a key piece of making that work, but if the decisions facing the nation are specialized and technical in nature, and require domain-level expertise, this should be a feature not a bug of a functioning system.
The original First Amendment statement was indeed about proportional representation. But you think the first Amendment is about Free Speech or Religious Freedom, not proportional representation. But this is historically inaccurate. The Framers wrote 13 amendments, not 10.
However, the first two were not immediately ratified and so the Bill of Rights we all know of is actually amendments #3-12. There was some confusion over whether amendment #1 was every ratified by enough states. Amendment #2 had a similar fate but was eventually officially ratified in 1992, and is in fact the last amendment to the constitution (#27) in our current number systems. (source )
Based on a modern review of historical documents it appears that the original amendment #1 probably did meet the threshold for ratification but that lawmakers at the time would not necessarily have known that, due to the confluence of a fire set by the british in the library of congress, an increasing set of States being added to the US over a period of years, and the length of time it took for State's ratification letters to make it across country to be counted.
Whether the original #1 amendment was every ratified or not is actually moot however. That is because proportional representation was already guaranteed by Article 1 in the Constitution - and still is! All original amendment #1 did was to refine the formula a little bit to include a graduated schedule that alters to the proportion from 1:30,000 to 1:50,000. So the Constitution itself has the strongest formula, and the amendment just modifies it a bit. (source)
Specifically we borrowed that term from software companies. It comes from the agile development methodology. Agile development basically says “Don't sit around and plan and think and debate forever, and don't let perfect be the enemy of the good… introduce small changes and improvements every week or two. They'll be easier to accomplish and you'll get instant feedback as to whether they are helping you achieve your goals. Knowing how the last change or feature did helps you to prioritize or modify the new features you want to release next week or next month. If you try to release 400 new things all at once, it will take years, probably never get done, and the things you do end up releasing will be out of date and irrelevant by the time you do get them completed.”
Short-window Sprints, be it a week or two weeks or six weeks become a forcing function to help teams to de-scope their lofty goals and settle on something practical that everyone can agree on moving forward with. There may still be disagreements on some other features but rolling out small changes every week or two gives the whole team more concrete data to work with, and having that data actually helps resolve some of the arguments that prevented other work from moving forward.
Coincidentally enough, the Ancient Atheniens also used agile development methodology. That's exactly what they were doing when they divided the year into 10 parts, and rotated in a new committee to manage the day-to-day operations of each 36 day “sprint”. They called this a Prytany and not a Sprint, but it's basically the same thing.
One option for a vote delegation system is to allow for the delegations to be transitive. That is, Alice choose Bob as a proxy, but then Bob decides to choose Charlie as his proxy.
This can be viewed as a benefit, in that a member may not know the best person to choose on a topic, so they can choose someone they trust in general, and then that person may have someone else they know to be even more knowledgable on the topic.
Deegov has taken a different direction on this however and does not enable transitive delegation. The first reason is in deegov the member is shown a choice of representatives who match their own Beliefs in a Domain. If that representative then links off to another representative, that person may not match the first member's Beliefs and they won't be well represented.
The second related reason is we belief this creates less transparency and more opportunity for special interests to manipulate the system. Once transitive delegates start to take place, it becomes more of a fog regarding who exactly is doing the voting. Alice picked Bob, but then Bob picked Charlie, and Charlie picked David, and David picked Edgar. Does Alice really have any idea who is making the choices for her? What if Edgar is actually a paid shill for the energy industry which she is totally against? Somewhere along the way, the chain of trust got broken and she has no way of figuring that out.
It actually doesn't need to be from malicious intent either. There are "smart" people on both sides of any contentious issue. There are practicioners, professionals, PhDs, Princes and paupers all across the spectrum on any topic. So we don't believe that choosing a delegate it about simply finding "someone knowledge" about the subject, or finding an "expert". What we want is to find someone knowledgeable who has the same beliefs and values in this realm of affairs as I do. A chain of transitive delegates may retain some "expertise" or even strengthen the expertise factor possibly but it is unlikely to retain a shared belief system on it own. Even if each person in the chain chose a delegate that was only 5% different from them in Beliefs (in either direction), after a few more steps in chain it becomes similar to "random walk" seen in unpredictible systems like the stock market. (mathematical paper here)
Transitive delegation also adds more complexity to the system for not much gain (or maybe a net loss). For a governance system to work for the masses, it should be simple to explain and simple to understand. It's not so very difficult to explain that Alice could delegate to Bob who could delegate to Charlie. But it is difficult to understand "who has voted for me," "when did it change from who I selected," "why did it change"? Visualizing complex network graphs, and edge cases is, we believe just not needed at this junction.
What happens if Alice delegates to Bob who delegates to Charlie who delegates to Alice? Are we stuck in a loop where no votes get cast?
Democracy 1.0 was direct democracy. It existed mainly in the ancient Athenian city-state and a few Swiss cantons. It didn't scale.
Democracy 2.0 is Electoral democracy. This is what all current democracies use. Despite the successes, power has become highly concentrated and $$ from billionaires, big industry, and special interests dominates the outcomes.
Democracy 3.0 is built upon concepts like Participatory Budgeting and Liquid democracy but also going to back to Athens which actually got a lot RIGHT! In this iteration, we eliminate the corrosive influence of money in politics by eliminating elections and the fundraising that comes along with it. No more lobbyists or gerrymandering. Instead, we choose our reps by topic and can change them anytime day or night, 365 days a year via a secure digital platform.
The same problems that exist in federal and state government exist locally, in your community organizations. Let's start there and improve the governance in realms easier for us to have influence over. Learning how to apply self-governance in our social and volunteer organizations will be a bit step towards fixing larger issues. Think global, act local.
