BitShares Forum
Main => Stakeholder Proposals => Topic started by: cryptillionaire on September 24, 2014, 02:38:19 pm
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A consortium is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal.
I was thinking, instead of working towards a closed access foundation, how about a democratic consortium where delegates can discuss/vote on important topics as representatives of the users they were elected by?
I've found a few of the following, what do you think? Think the voting DAC that's been recently snapshotted would be more suitable?
Open source:
http://agoravoting.com/
https://github.com/mockdeep/better see demo: https://better.boon.gl/
http://liquidfeedback.org/
https://www.loomio.org/ git repo: https://github.com/loomio/loomio
Closed source:
http://www.citizens.is/
Not released yet:
http://democracyos.org/
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This is a great list of existing possibilities. I am definitely against anything closed, censoring, or that will become in any way beurocratic or slow at scale. The Bitcoin Foundation is proof of how, like congress, primitive systems become increasingly fractured and polarized as they scale.
Here is a list of "liquid democracy" or "amplification of the wisdom of the crowd" capabilities I think are critically important and possible today:
- Real time vote tallying: Ability to change your vote (or delegation of such - see below) at any time. There must be the possibility of rapid change of direction on any issue.
- Vote on everything: Ability to open up a vote on anything anyone thinks is an issue, including minor details and issues, without the system bogging down at scale.
- Focus on consensus building: The fundamental issue with any democratic process is consensus building. No matter what anyone wants, as soon as you have enough consensus (primitively, enough capital being the most important), it will just happen. Building enough consensuses is the hardest part, so techniques to facilitate consensus building in grass roots uncensored ways should be the focus.
- Camp hierarchies: Whenever one is seeking to build consensus on any important issue, lesser important disagreeable things always come up. The focus of all current systems then moves down to this level and gets stuck in infinite yes / no arguments that polarize everyone. What is most important becomes a casualty, and is often completely ignored and lost. The system must have the ability to "push" such lesser important disagreeable issues out of the way of building consensus camps. People should have the ability to create supporting sub camps resulting in hierarchies of camps. This enables the focus and consensus to remain on the most important issues, while the lesser issues are valued, tracked and sought to be fulfilled or resolved in creative ways, just at lower consensus supporting sub camp levels.
- Bottom Up: The system should be network based and bottom up. Anyone should be able to start building a consensus on any issue, with zero barriers to getting started in a grass roots way. The people with all the money and power have had their turn at the top of their hierarchies focusing on what they want. It is time to put the focus and biases towards knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone at the bottom wants. What the people at the bottom want should now dictates the direction the crowd moves, with the ultimate goal being first finding out what everyone truly wants, and then never giving up until we get it all for everyone.
- Filter the output, not the input: Primitively, in order to scale, all traditional systems resort to censoring the input. We are no longer bound by such limitations. Rather than censoring input from anyone, people should be able to get what they are currently interested in by selecting from diverse sets of "canonization" algorithms that include such things as the amount and kind of consensus. One person's experts are another's "religious bigots". Everyone should have the ability to choose the experts in way they trust and 'canonize' things accordingly. Even if you have bad experts, knowing, concisely and quantitatively, what they all think is better than what anyone can do alone. That which can be measured, concisely and quantitatively, will improve.
- Infinite delegation: The ideal is of course, to have everyone weigh in on every issue, so this must be supported and encouraged as much as possible. However, nobody can be an expert on and involved in all issues. It should be possible for anyone to delegate any vote on any issue to anyone. For example, children could delegate to their parents. Parents could delegate to their trusted friends, who could delegate to known field experts, who could delegate to a few world-leading experts and so on. A world-leading expert with a large delegated tree could drastically change the direction of the crowd, on a dime, just by jumping camps, taking their entire tree with them. Everyone would know, quantitatively, how many people would be on board with such a change in real time. If any leader ever screwed up, their large delegate trees could vanish instantly.
Does anyone have any other important capabilities that are possible today, which I've missed? Unfortunately, all of the systems mentioned to date, do very little, if any of this. We are working on an open source prototype system that does all of this currently up and running at http://canonizer.com .
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Cannonizer looks cool, but it's centralzied. Also, what's the mormon transhumanist association and why is it sponsoring this? If you don't mind me asking... Are you begining a religious political delegate campaign?
Is there a consensus on bitshares' stance about the seperation of church and DAC?
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Direct democracy is too unwieldy to implement on a large scale. Ancient Greece had it. New England-style town halls have it. But these are much smaller populations that can fit in one place. Most modern democracies are representative in nature because they're too big to let everyone participate at once in decision-making. This does concentrate some power, though it is less centralized than a monarchy where a king or queen rules. The one other example of DD is ballot initiatives, such as some U.S. states allow, but the cost is prohibitive (limited to rich interest groups) to get the right # of signatures or a legislative vote to place these proposals on the ballot.
You just cannot put the whole population in a room and try to make decisions. But can you do this electronically, using the security of the blockchain? With some selfless facilitators, such as delegates, I really think it could work. We would need some sort of gate-keeping mechanism, though, or else would be inundated by crap and spend all our time voting on this and that. I'm not sure how to run that gate-keeping function, because delegate elections at some point might start to resemble what we have now for our elected representatives. We must think about how to do better.
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Direct democracy is too unwieldy to implement on a large scale. Ancient Greece had it. New England-style town halls have it. But these are much smaller populations that can fit in one place. Most modern democracies are representative in nature because they're too big to let everyone participate at once in decision-making. This does concentrate some power, though it is less centralized than a monarchy where a king or queen rules. The one other example of DD is ballot initiatives, such as some U.S. states allow, but the cost is prohibitive (limited to rich interest groups) to get the right # of signatures or a legislative vote to place these proposals on the ballot.
You just cannot put the whole population in a room and try to make decisions. But can you do this electronically, using the security of the blockchain? With some selfless facilitators, such as delegates, I really think it could work. We would need some sort of gate-keeping mechanism, though, or else would be inundated by crap and spend all our time voting on this and that. I'm not sure how to run that gate-keeping function, because delegate elections at some point might start to resemble what we have now for our elected representatives. We must think about how to do better.
Direct democracy is the future... and Vote DAC will make it so impossibly easy to implement, that even the government will have to agree.
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Direct democracy is too unwieldy to implement on a large scale. Ancient Greece had it. New England-style town halls have it. But these are much smaller populations that can fit in one place. Most modern democracies are representative in nature because they're too big to let everyone participate at once in decision-making. This does concentrate some power, though it is less centralized than a monarchy where a king or queen rules. The one other example of DD is ballot initiatives, such as some U.S. states allow, but the cost is prohibitive (limited to rich interest groups) to get the right # of signatures or a legislative vote to place these proposals on the ballot.
You just cannot put the whole population in a room and try to make decisions. But can you do this electronically, using the security of the blockchain? With some selfless facilitators, such as delegates, I really think it could work. We would need some sort of gate-keeping mechanism, though, or else would be inundated by crap and spend all our time voting on this and that. I'm not sure how to run that gate-keeping function, because delegate elections at some point might start to resemble what we have now for our elected representatives. We must think about how to do better.
Direct democracy is the future... and Vote DAC will make it so impossibly easy to implement, that even the government will have to agree.
Exactly.
The only reason hierarchies, such as Kim Jon Un, in North Korea, have any power, is because, to date, it has been impossible to know what the general population wants.
If you could air drop some kind of celular phone networking system to the entire population, and if you could use an efficient bottom up consensus building / voting system, to find out, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone wanted, suddenly Kim Jon Un would have zero power, and everyone could just ignore him, as long as he wanted something different than everyone else.
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Direct democracy is too unwieldy to implement on a large scale. Ancient Greece had it. New England-style town halls have it. But these are much smaller populations that can fit in one place. Most modern democracies are representative in nature because they're too big to let everyone participate at once in decision-making. This does concentrate some power, though it is less centralized than a monarchy where a king or queen rules. The one other example of DD is ballot initiatives, such as some U.S. states allow, but the cost is prohibitive (limited to rich interest groups) to get the right # of signatures or a legislative vote to place these proposals on the ballot.
You just cannot put the whole population in a room and try to make decisions. But can you do this electronically, using the security of the blockchain? With some selfless facilitators, such as delegates, I really think it could work. We would need some sort of gate-keeping mechanism, though, or else would be inundated by crap and spend all our time voting on this and that. I'm not sure how to run that gate-keeping function, because delegate elections at some point might start to resemble what we have now for our elected representatives. We must think about how to do better.
Direct democracy is the future... and Vote DAC will make it so impossibly easy to implement, that even the government will have to agree.
Exactly.
The only reason hierarchies, such as Kim Jon Un, in North Korea, have any power, is because, to date, it has been impossible to know what the general population wants.
If you could air drop some kind of celular phone networking system to the entire population, and if you could use an efficient bottom up consensus building / voting system, to find out, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone wanted, suddenly Kim Jon Un would have zero power, and everyone could just ignore him, as long as he wanted something different than everyone else.
He'd still have the full force of his military.
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Direct democracy is too unwieldy to implement on a large scale. Ancient Greece had it. New England-style town halls have it. But these are much smaller populations that can fit in one place. Most modern democracies are representative in nature because they're too big to let everyone participate at once in decision-making. This does concentrate some power, though it is less centralized than a monarchy where a king or queen rules. The one other example of DD is ballot initiatives, such as some U.S. states allow, but the cost is prohibitive (limited to rich interest groups) to get the right # of signatures or a legislative vote to place these proposals on the ballot.
You just cannot put the whole population in a room and try to make decisions. But can you do this electronically, using the security of the blockchain? With some selfless facilitators, such as delegates, I really think it could work. We would need some sort of gate-keeping mechanism, though, or else would be inundated by crap and spend all our time voting on this and that. I'm not sure how to run that gate-keeping function, because delegate elections at some point might start to resemble what we have now for our elected representatives. We must think about how to do better.
Direct democracy is the future... and Vote DAC will make it so impossibly easy to implement, that even the government will have to agree.
Exactly.
The only reason hierarchies, such as Kim Jon Un, in North Korea, have any power, is because, to date, it has been impossible to know what the general population wants.
If you could air drop some kind of celular phone networking system to the entire population, and if you could use an efficient bottom up consensus building / voting system, to find out, concisely and quantitatively, what everyone wanted, suddenly Kim Jon Un would have zero power, and everyone could just ignore him, as long as he wanted something different than everyone else.
He'd still have the full force of his military.
Only IF his generals think they are better off under his regime...
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Sure, that's the source of power for most governments: military force. Where the military goes, so goes the power.
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Cannonizer looks cool, but it's centralzied. Also, what's the mormon transhumanist association and why is it sponsoring this? If you don't mind me asking... Are you begining a religious political delegate campaign?
Is there a consensus on bitshares' stance about the seperation of church and DAC?
I consider myself a "Mormon Transhumanist Atheist", which is much like a "Cultural Jew". The Mormon Transhumaninsts are just the first organization to officially support this prototype effort.
For me, an atheist, trying to convert any theist, I just like to measure, concisely and quantitatively, how effective any arguments are, or to find out, what proof would be required to convince most of them. What works for me, usually doesn't work for them. But when I find something that measurably works, that is what rises to the top, and that is what enables building the most consensus the soonest
Again, that which you measure, improves.
While it is true that the current incantation is just a centrally hosted prototype, it could easily be converted to use block chain technology. And the simple rules of the system prevent anyone from being censored. Once you "support" a camp, you can object to any proposed changes you don't agree with.
Any of the canonization voting algorithms (such as one could allow people to vote all their BTSX, with a bias towards those that hold fewer shares, and so on) could be validated or reproduced, by anyone that might question such vote counting, and so on.
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Sure, that's the source of power for most governments: military force. Where the military goes, so goes the power.
The funding for the military comes from the people. The funding, will always eventually follow what the people want. Not knowing that is the only problem.
And you could also know, concisely and quantitatively, what any such "military" (simply a subset of the people) wanted. Knowing that would enable everyone to work within whatever that was. Again, that which you measure, improves. And the ultimate goal is to get everyone everything they truly want, and never give up till it is achieved.
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Sure, that's the source of power for most governments: military force. Where the military goes, so goes the power.
The funding for the military comes from the people. The funding, will always eventually follow what the people want. Not knowing that is the only problem.
Not exactly, it requires the masses to be extremely principled. They would have to be willing to risk sacrificing their lives and fight against tyranny in order to eventually destroy the government's military power. If they stand up to the government and refuse to be a cog in the economic machine that powers the military, that will hurt the economy and the ability of the government to maintain its military power (someone needs to build and maintain the weapons, ammunition, surveillance technology, the energy to power this all, etc.). However, in a tyrannical government, the hurting economy will preferentially hurt the people more than the military power that gives the government control (communication infrastructure breakdowns will hurt the masses ability to organize prior to hurting the military's ability to do so with their proprietary networks, the military will have larger reserves of stored energy to power their operations compared to the energy that provides civilians with good quality of life, the hurting economy will preferentially lower the standard of living for the regular people rather than the ones sustaining the government's control, food shortages and rationing would preferentially hurt the rebelling civilians, etc.). So, it becomes extremely difficult for people to put up with these poor standards of life for the noble goal of bleeding the military dry and taking back control of their governance; thus they might rather just give in to at least get a slightly better standard of living.
Today, at least with many humans involved in the military process the fight against tyranny is a lot easier. The military personnel should have empathy towards their fellow citizens. If they are able to access the verified consensus of the citizens that shows it is against the current rulers, they can decide to turn the military power against the current rulers rather than use it to kill their fellow citizens. But, what happens as military technology becomes increasingly automated? As fewer and fewer people who are sitting miles away from the actual action are able to direct drones and robots to do their crowd control and killing for them, it will be even more difficult to use the people's consensus to sway the decisions of these people with disproportionate amount of power.
At any given time there exists a certain amount of physical power made possible through technology. Control over this power is distributed among humans unevenly. When there is centralization of the control of this power to too few hands, that results in a situation where the extremely small minority of people with the disproportionate amount of power are able to control the other vast majority of the population, typically resulting in a lot of suffering for the majority because power corrupts. The goal should be to avoid getting into such a situation of extreme centralization of power to begin with.
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A consortium is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal.
I was thinking, instead of working towards a closed access foundation, how about a democratic consortium where delegates can discuss/vote on important topics as representatives of the users they were elected by?
I've found a few of the following, what do you think? Think the voting DAC that's been recently snapshotted would be more suitable?
Open source:
http://agoravoting.com/
https://github.com/mockdeep/better see demo: https://better.boon.gl/
http://liquidfeedback.org/
https://www.loomio.org/ git repo: https://github.com/loomio/loomio
Closed source:
http://www.citizens.is/
Not released yet:
http://democracyos.org/
BeyondBitcoinx.net is actually working on this problem. I also contacted FollowMyVote's Dev about potentially using the Voting DAC for some very important things. Looking forward to eventually unveiling a concept I have in the works, but not (quite) yet. :)