Update 'README.md'
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README.md
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README.md
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@ -13,6 +13,7 @@ An Open Governance Body (#OGB) - for which the codebase is named - is a decentra
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For the fediverse, three groups - Stakeholders[^stakeholder], Users[^user], and Affiliate Stakeholders[^affiliate] - are used to provide a balance of perspectives and interests, with Stakeholders being chosen from and representing the people running instances, Users representing the people using the instances, and Affiliate Stakeholders representing other coders, organizations and groups supporting the fediverse.
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## How it works
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The specific process used to achieve outcomes is determined by the wider community and remains mutable. The job of the codebase is to provide the [#KISS](link) tools and variables that facilitate this process. The workings of an open governance body is meant to be messy. There are few set laws or statutes, but instead a growing body of mythos and traditions that people can build and reference when making decisions. To ensure accountability and maintain trust within the community the model includes the power of recall, which is enacted at any time, for any members of the Voices[^voice], Groups[^group] and Body[^body].
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@ -21,31 +22,34 @@ The “[Tyranny of Structurelessness](#link-here)” helps design democratic and
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The system incorporates a “Security Group” to detect bad actors, and “recall” process to demote individuals who do not align with the goals of the community. The structure is designed to be flexible, where variables and options may be redefined to suit the specific needs of the community.
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The codebase includes templates for many different views of [#4opens](link first use) governance, for example with options to aid/onboard new Roles by having an overlap with the old roll-holder where they share the role during a transition. The size of the #OGB Body can be reduced to human levels by using sortition to limit the number of participants in any pools within the Party. For example within the fediverse use case, 100 Stakeholders and 100 Users. This would be matched by a smaller number of Affiliates, providing a balance of perspectives and interests. [maybe link this as its complex]
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The codebase includes Templates[^template] for many different views of [#4opens](link first use) governance, for example with options to aid/onboard new Roles[^role] by having an overlap with the old roll-holder where they share the role during a transition. The size of the #OGB Body can be reduced to human levels by using sortition to limit the number of participants in any pools within the Party[^party]. For example within the fediverse use case, 100 Stakeholders and 100 Users. This would be matched by a smaller number of Affiliates, providing a balance of perspectives and interests. [maybe link this as its complex]()
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It should be noted that the idea of sortition and open governance is not new. It is a way of organising that has been used in ancient Greek city-states, modern courts and jury's and more recently by #XR to address the climate crises. It’s implementation in our roll out example within the #Fediverse is a new and exciting way of building decentralized and democratic governance.
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It should be noted that the idea of sortition and open governance is not new. It is a way of organising that has been used in ancient Greek city-states, modern courts and jury's and more recently by #XR to address the climate crises. It's implementation in our roll out example within the #Fediverse is a new and exciting way of building decentralized and democratic governance.
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### Consensus
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This refers to a level of agreement or acceptance reached by a Group or community on a proposal or action. In our case it is not a specific process or method, but rather a general principle that guides decision-making within the Group. [link]
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## Consensus
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The #OGB has several mechanisms in place to mitigate the risks of capture by special interests or bad actors. By allowing all Members of the Body to participate in the formation of Groups and the formation of Agreements, the system is designed to reduce the power of "capture" by any one group or individual.
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This refers to a level of agreement or acceptance reached by a Group or community on a proposal or action. In our case it is not a specific process or method, but rather a general principle that guides decision-making within the Group. [link]()
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The #OGB has several mechanisms in place to mitigate the risks of capture by special interests or bad actors. By allowing all Members of the Body to participate in the formation of Groups and the formation of Agreements[^agreement], the system is designed to reduce the power of "capture" by any one group or individual.
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[![OpenWeb Governance Diagram](http://hamishcampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/OGB.png)](http://hamishcampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/GOVERNANCE-BODY_REV-March-2022.pdf)
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### The Body, Voices and Groups
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Groups are formed around issues that receive a level of support from Members of the Body. Agreements are reached through discussions and consensus-building within a Group.
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## The Body, Voices and Groups
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Groups are formed around issues that receive a level of support from Members[^member] of the Body. Agreements are reached through discussions and consensus-building within a Group.
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Additionally, allowing Members who were not selected by the sortition to still submit proposals for Group decisions directly ensures the input and perspectives of all Members are considered.
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Voices, which are a subset of Members, have the power to both initiate Groups and enact Agreements reached by Groups.
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The number of Voices is dynamic and would depend on the size of the Pool(s), but a small number, such as 3-5, would be ideal to ensure that the system is nimble and responsive to the needs of the community.
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The number of Voices is dynamic and would depend on the size of the Pool(s)[^pool], but a small number, such as 3-5, would be ideal to ensure that the system is nimble and responsive to the needs of the community.
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The Affiliate Stakeholders would bring additional expertise and perspectives to the table and their membership application would have to be ratified by the Body to ensure that they align with the goals of the community.
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### Community and the tradition of recall and dilution
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## Community and the tradition of recall and dilution
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The Voices are representatives of the Body, but ultimately it is the Body who holds the power and makes the decisions. It is meant to be messy and not a traditional power structure, a “native” approach working within the decentralized and disorganized nature of the #openweb commons..
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@ -53,53 +57,57 @@ The Groups and Voices have the power to make decisions, but they need to work to
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The recall and dilution mechanisms provide a way for the community to self-regulate and course-correct when necessary. Voices have limited terms and are replaced by members the Body, so their power is not permanent.
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### Messiness
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## Messiness
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The proposed system embraces the messiness of _real-world governance_ and is designed to work within it, rather than trying to impose specific ideas of order. It is built on the principle that power should be distributed horizontally and that decisions should be made through community wide consensus-building.
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### Issues
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## Issues
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- Prioritization: The proposal system allows for prioritization by allowing the governing body to decide which proposals to take action on and which to ignore.
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- Spam: The use of standard moderation tools and community flagging systems would help to address the issue of spam. [LINK]
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- Spam: The use of standard moderation tools and community flagging systems would help to address the issue of spam. [add-link]()
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- Centralization: The #OGB takes into account the potential for centralization and addresses it by encouraging participation and giving power to those who actively contribute to the community.
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### Fediverse use case
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## Fediverse use case
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Our first focus while developing the #OGB is on the fediverse, where the OGB itself will be a citizen, though the principle and structure can and should be applied to any "producer" communities both on- and offline.
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The governance body's for the fediverse will be "native", building on the same technology - effectively themselves instances within the fediverse - streaming data, comments in from other instances, with all activity, process, decisions and publications being posts back out into the fediverse.
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The governance body's for the fediverse will be "native", building on the same technology - effectively themselves instances within the fediverse - streaming data/comments in from other instances, with all activity, process, decisions and publications being posts back out into the fediverse.
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Proposals come from anyone with an ActivityPub account, giving all interested users the opportunity to responsibly shape the direction of the fediverse. The consensus of Voices, minus one, is what turns a Agreement into "the voice of the instance", ensuring that the agreements reached by the Body are truly representative of the wider interests and agenda
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Proposals come from anyone with an ActivityPub account, giving all interested users the opportunity to responsibly shape the direction of the fediverse. The consensus of Voices, minus one, is what turns a Agreement into "the voice of the instance", ensuring that the agreements reached by the Body are truly representative of the wider interests and agenda.
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Based on the statistics of a population of over ten million accounts and more than 9,000 instances, it would be difficult for a Body of that size to make decisions efficiently. A smaller representative Body can be more focussed and better able to make decisions quickly and effectively. this is built into the codebase by both horizontally federating new instances or restricting the size of the body it self, both are good approaches.
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Based on the statistics of a population of over ten million accounts and more than nine thousand instances, it would be difficult for a Body of that size to make decisions efficiently. A smaller representative Body can be more focussed and better able to make decisions quickly and effectively. this is built into the codebase by both horizontally federating new instances or restricting the size of the body it self, both are good approaches.
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The goal is to mediate the shifting of power from the .01% to the 99.9% of the fediverse. This codebase and approach is designed to scale horizontally for use in other grassroots "producer" democratic structures both online and offline, such as local street markets, a protest camp, a producer Eqo villages
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The goal is to mediate the shifting of power from the .01% to the 99.9% of the fediverse. This codebase and approach is designed to scale horizontally for use in other grassroots "producer" democratic structures both online and offline, such as local street markets, a protest camp, eco villages.
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There can (and should) be multiple #OGB's within the fediverse, that may grow, shrink and divide/merge organically over time. We are describing one example to provide a seed from which to grow. The output from one OGB federates to feed into another and back, its a native project (this will be fully implement in V02)
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There can (and should) be multiple #OGB's within the fediverse, that may grow, shrink and divide/merge organically over time. We are describing one example to provide a seed from which to grow. The output from one OGB federates to feed into another and back. This will be fully implemented as the design and codebase is refined after initial roll out.
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### Process
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## Process
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The model allows for any User to submit a Proposal, with subject tags which will be visible on the activity streams of the governing body. The Body can then decide to take action on the Proposal by passing it to an existing Group or forming a new one to work on it. Prioritization of proposals will be handled by the Body and the Groups, with spam being dealt with by flagging and standard moderation tools.
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Additionally, the use of sortition and flagging mechanisms can help to ensure that the voices of the community are heard and that bad actors are held accountable. The use of sortition to select Voices, and the ability for other Body members to flag bad Voices, provides a way to detect and address any individuals or groups that may be acting against the best interests of the fediverse.
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Basic security checks to detect sock puppets and spammers, and the ability to “recall” flagged accounts, helps to ensure that the governance body is representative. If people start to game the system, the solution is to get more people involved, which will dilute the problem. Sortition will shift bad groups out when fresh people of goodwill join.
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Basic security checks to detect sock puppets and spammers, and the ability to “recall” flagged accounts, helps to ensure that the governance body is representative. If people start to game the system, the solution is to get more people involved, which will dilute the problem. Sortition will shift bad groups out when fresh people of goodwill join.
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to sum up, the system relies on a combination of automatic checks and human moderation to ensure accountability, while also recognizing the limitations of #tredtional formal non "native" processes and the importance of trust based collaboration. The emphasis is on keeping the system simple #KISS, flexible and adaptable to the needs and culture of the instance community. The use of human flagging is a core way to address potential abuse of the system, helping to ensure that larger and more influential instances do not dominate the decision-making process.
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### Why build a native approach?
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## Why build a native approach?
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The challenges of using formal processes - such as those used by #NGO‘s and cooperatives in #openweb and activism projects - are that they are rigid and not suited to the decentralized and dynamic nature of these communities, particularly the fediverse and activism. [LINK]
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The challenges of using formal processes - such as those used by #NGO's and cooperatives in #openweb and activism projects - are that they are rigid and not suited to the decentralized and dynamic nature of these communities, particularly the fediverse and activism. [LINK]()
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Existing projects and resources that may be relevant to governance such as Loomio, Decidim, and Sociocracy tend to be based on formal consensus, which as mentioned above, is a very bad fit for messy, unstructured groups.
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The #OGB project is meant to reflect the practical, on-the-ground reality of horizontal activism and the #openweb fediverse culture. It is not based on idealistic or theoretical models, but on the lived experience of the community.
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### Make reality
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## Make reality
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It should be noted implementation will be complex, while the resulting tools should themselves be simple.
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@ -110,16 +118,17 @@ We want to see if there are individuals within the fediverse who have the skills
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We also want to raise awareness and focues on understanding of the project, the issues it addresses, and to gather feedback and input from a diverse group of people.
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### Summary
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## Summary
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The proposed governance model is designed to be messy and non-hierarchical. It is meant to work with the fediverse’s decentralized structure, and it is built on a long history of grassroots activism.
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The proposed governance model is designed to be messy and non-hierarchical. It is meant to work with the fediverse's decentralized structure, and it is built on a long history of grassroots activism.
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It is not a traditional power structure, and it relies on consensus and recall processes rather than laws or statutes.
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It’s important to keep in mind that **this system is built on trust and collaboration**, and relies on the Stakeholders being engaged and willing to work together toward common goals.
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It's important to keep in mind that **this system is built on trust and collaboration**, and relies on the Stakeholders being engaged and willing to work together toward common goals.
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The goal is to work with, not against, this history and avoid the pitfalls of “process geeks” coming in and damaging the movement, which is the normal outcome. We need to recognize that the need for control is often a barrier to finding solutions, and instead focus on building structures and tools that allow us to navigate the mess and make good decisions collectively. This can be achieved by building bridges and fostering communication between different perspectives, rather than trying to control the outcome. The key is to find a balance between different approaches and allow for diversity of tactics.
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### Definitions
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## Definitions
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The choice of terminology is non-trivial. Here are our working definitions of what we mean by certain key terms. These will change based on response and feedback from the living community.
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All of them will also likely be variables within the code, such that they may better reflect their function in a given use case "template".
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[^affiliate]: An example of something other than Producer or Consumer but who is still a fundamental part of the OGB's community. Specific to the fediverse use case. People who "work" to build the infrastructure of the instance subject path, such as programmers, organisations and groups supporting the fediverse.
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[^role]: A nebulous but needed term we are yet to define clearly, a "mini voice" within a Group. Likely not in V1 of the codebase. [link]
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[^role]: A nebulous but needed term we are yet to define clearly, a "mini voice" within a Group. Likely not in v1 of the codebase. [link]()
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[^template]: is a way of defining work process and boler plate text, names for the underlighing codebse to dispay and use, to start with we will be focuesing on 3 templates spiky, which we know works, fluffy witch will need more testing and a balenced aproch which should work fine. the templating syteam can be used to define most democratic organising process when we have the code working well. The are also body wide desions, which will likely be rare and or trival, and partys can add propesals but these are advicey only.
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[^template]: A way of defining a work process; boiler plate text and names for the underlying codebase to display and use. To start with we will be focussing on 3 templates - spiky, which we know works, fluffy which will need more testing, and a balanced approach which should work fine. The template system can be used to define most democratic organising processes, once we have the code working well. There are also Body-wide decisions, which will likely be rare and or trivial, and the Party can add proposals but these would be advice only.
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[^agreement]: come from any part of the body that can use on of the voteing/consesus tools to agre to a text they have worked on togther, then implemention can be pushed by the voices, the best outcome, one voice withch is fine or a member of the group that created it, less usefull.
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[^agreement]: These come from any part of the Body that have use of the voting/consensus tools to agree to a text that they have worked on together. Then implementation can be pushed by voices, groups and the body it self.
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<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1340" src="http://hamishcampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20338.png" alt="" width="275" height="347" />
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![Rabbits in black - two bipedal rabbits in black suit, tie and sunglasses with large carrots for guns](http://hamishcampbell.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20338.png)
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