Hi everyone,
I recently wrote a paper about how the ideas of open-source
development could be used by citizens to control their local
government or co-operative business. It's really just a theoretical
proposal right now, because it hasn't been tried yet, but I'm trying
to spread the idea and see what people think. Below is a summary of
the method, and the full paper can be read at
http://efficasync.blogspot.com
or downloaded as a PDF at http://www.geocities.com/mikemussman/
SUMMARY:
How ideas of open-source software development can be used to make a
direct democracy.
---Overview
Efficasync, a compound of the words 'efficacy' and 'synchronous,' is a
way for group members to create and maintain their group's governance
using a programmer's paradigm. This method of organizations is
premised on a belief in the people's ability to solve many of their
own problems. Efficasync may further democratize
local governments and cooperative businesses by offering a coherent
way for multiple people to collectively control their organizations.
At its core, Efficasync is a combination of many ideas including the
Nomic, the wiki, and the open-source method of software development.
Each of these ideas will now be explored with greater detail.
---The Nomic
Peter Suber invented a game called Nomic, where "changing the rules is
a move.*" Nomic illustrates two central
aspect of governance. First, governments and businesses operate with a
set of rules, which Efficasync calls 'governing statements' or
'nodepages.' Suber provided an initial set of rules for Nomic and,
accordingly, Efficasync suggest an initial set of governing
statements. Second, these rules may be changed. Representative
governments are structured so that professional politicians make and
change rules in the name of other people, their constituents. In
contrast, direct-democracies are arranged so that the people affected
by the rules are the same people able to make and change the rules. An
Efficasync group is a nomic that begins, and hopefully endures, as a
direct-democracy.
* Suber, P. (1990). The paradox of selfammendment: A study of the law,
logic, omnipotence, and change. New York: Peter Lang Publi****ng.
Retrieved June 26th, 2007 from
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm.
---The Wiki
A wiki webpage is a do***ent whose content can be changed by anyone.
Often, a wiki has a community of regular contributors who add or
update relevant content and review the content added or updated by
others. A wiki may keep an archive of its previous versions so that it
can be restored to an earlier state by anyone who feels the wiki has
undergone undesirable changes. Wikis are somewhat like the concurrent
version systems (CVS) used by software developers to keep track of
changes made by different programmers upon a shared piece of code.
Like a wiki or CVS, Efficasync allows multiple versions of a governing
statement to be generated. However, unlike how a wiki assigns 'active'
status to the most recent version, the member****p of an Efficasync
group decides which version of a governing statement is considered
active by voting. An Efficasync group's governing statements are
arranged along a wiki continuum that runs from abstract ethics to
concrete embodiments derived from those ethics. Each statement on this
continuum is justified by linking it to more abstract statements,
which creates a web of integrated ideas that is constantly scrutinized
and periodically altered by the group's members.
---Open-Source Development
Just as anyone may contribute to or modify the code of an open-source
program, any member of an Efficasync group may contribute to or modify
their group's governing statements. These contributions and
modifications are not automatically accepted, but are considered
proposals to be rationally and critically debated by the member****p,
who may enact them. Developing a governance with Efficasync is meant
to be somewhat analogously to the way open-source programmers develop
a piece of software. A programmer's environment provides the tools to
write, update, and debug pieces of digital logic. Likewise,
Efficasync's environment describes tools used by a more-general type
of programmer called a 'citizen,' to write, update, and debug
democracies.
END OF SUMMARY.
Hope you thought it was interesting. The full paper can be read at
http://efficasync.blogspot.com
or downloaded as a PDF at
http://www.geocities.com/mikemussman/
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