Author: Greg S Cassel
published on Medium July 2, 2019
This text is openly licensed via Creative Commons CC BY 4.0
We can develop ungoverned digital networks through valuable technical standards such as http, but ungoverned networks have failed to create much systemic coherence and shared value.
By contrast, much digital activity currently runs through bureaucracies of all sizes, including Facebook, Google and Amazon. Such digital empires rule with technically absolute authority over their users’ diversely governed subsystems such as specific facebook groups, Google Drives, etcetera.
Activity in all centralized systems, large and small, is inherently compromised by the personal interests and limited capacities of the exclusive groups which govern them. All individuals and subgroups have limited intelligence, perspective and work capacity compared to the creative resources available in any genuine community which they seek to serve. All agents of personally concentrated authority are constantly at risk of inadvertently abusing that authority, or burning out from the stress of trying to fairly shepherd diverse groups of free individuals. We are all inherently free.
Shared ownership and responsibility for distributed data signaling, storing and processing are essential to building fair, inclusive, participatory collectives in the 21st century.
We can develop inclusive peer-to-peer digital networks, right now, which slowly but surely supplant our centralized systems, fostering fairly shared resources for all persons and groups. To do so, however, we must create inclusive pathways to participate in each digital network’s activities, including its governance functions. For example, we must prioritize personal discretion and permissionless innovation by making it easy for participants to perform and to document actions which require minimal shared risks or investments. For weightier actions with substantially shared risk or investment, we must practice inclusive discussion, design and decision which supports diverse perspectives, freedom of expression, and the emergence of collective intelligence. This practice requires reasonably safe and welcoming environments for all age-appropriate parties who are sincerely interested in each network’s principles and goals. Such reasonably safe and welcoming environments require minimal, but critically important, collective governance functions.
- encourage activity which supports collective principles and goals
- discourage irrelevant activity
- discourage activity which contradicts collective principles or goals
- minimize officially restricted activity
Inclusive governance requires broadly and fairly distributed roles for the functions above, with open pathways to participation for all roles including collective stewardship. Deeper participation roles should be earned by providing demonstrable value to collective members, and earning the trust of one or more members in each relevant organizing team.
We can use official agreements to develop massively scalable and sustainable collectives, communities and networks which help us all to plan, coordinate and regulate mutually influential actions. Agreements can help participants to build relationships, reputation and trust by practicing mutually accepted plans. Effective agreements can create shared responsibility for all genuinely shared resources, including all networks which help people to create and develop other resources.
Distributive Governance Framework (renamed from Inclusive Governance Framework) suggests generating official agreements whenever wanted or needed, with a consent-based co-creative framework such as Consent-Based Governance, for distributing group governance and administrative roles equally to all stewards of specific media channels. An open, accountable and sustainable system of p2p media channel governance could invite participation, and potentially stewardship, by any interested parties who meet clear and easily-processed entry requirements. Complex collectives, communities and networks can develop several levels of participation, and their relationships with each other, through such consent-based p2p processes.
Organizational clarity has been a chronic failure point for complex groups and institutions. Major improvements in social tools and techniques, however, are well within reach. These improvements will dramatically favor collective activities which are based on direct, intentional, consent-based agreements instead of violent, coercive, confusing or deceptive forces.