Distilled, Grassroots, Radical Governance
is a good fit for the fediverse
This working practice comes from 30 years of on the ground grassroots building from The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
Social change groups have worked in this way to challenge and change on the ground power structures. Some examples of social change groups: squats, protest camps and climate camps to indymedia, Reclaim the Streets and more recently to XR and even Occupy.
Rainbow Gatherings are a working example of this grassroots governance. They have been going for 50 years and the core is still based on the founding traditions which came from the Vietnam War - not the hippy dippy origins that people talk about.
From the perspective of a radical, grassroots, social technologist, this is distilled into a codebase, as a “permissionless” roll-out of frameworks for social groups to form, witness and govern themselves.
Based on sortition and the KISS principle.
OpenWeb Governance Body
The Body is made up of three different, balanced groups:
1. Stakeholders
One for each instance – if you want a say, you can run an instance and register it with an OGB.
This is clearly the voice of the #fediverse, as they are the people running it.
2. Users
The Stakeholders are then balanced dynamically by the same number of Users who are interested in the process.
They are chosen by Sortition from the registered accounts.
You have a choice whether or not to register your account as a possible Member of the Body.
3. The Affiliate Stakeholders
These have to be ratified through the Body to become members. A few examples below:
- Fediverse Codebases
(e.g. pixelfeed, mastodon, peertube) - Fediverse Events
(e.g. group meet-ups, conferences) - Fediverse Support Organizations
(e.g. ActivityPub Rocks, Fediverse Party) - ActivityPub Standards Crew
(e.g. wc3)
The Workflow
Sign up for the site, then don’t untick the box for “Role” if you become a “Stakeholder” .
If you are not picked by the lottery for a Role, there are still many things you can do as a Stakeholder within the groups. If you are not picked as a Stakeholder, you can still submit proposals for the Stakeholders to make into Group decisions.
The outcome is something much more representative of the #Fediverse as a whole than we can currently think about, let alone implement.
There is #nothingnew in this idea.
The Power of the Voice
User proposals are accepted from anyone who has an ActivityPub account. The Body gets an Activity Stream of notifications and if they reach a core consensus a group may be created around the issue.
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Groups – are a part of the process; these come from ideas getting a level of support from the members of the body
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Agreements - come from Groups; these can then be enacted by the Voices if they are interested
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Voices - have double power; they can start Groups to reach Agreements and can enact the Agreements of Groups
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Consensus of Voices (-1) makes Agreements THE "voice of the Fediverse"
The actual number of Voices change dynamically depending on the number of Stakeholders, but between 3-5 is likely a good number.
What are the risks
the best way for “humans trying to communicate” is by getting out of the way and letting the humans work it out. While the #OGB provides structure for the Groups, we don’t define the Groups.
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Groups could be captured by agendas – being open to all Body members mediates this, the rule of dilution.
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Bad Group of Voices - are flagged by other Body members. When the flagging reaches a criteria a Security Group can act to reach an aggreement on these flags. If the bad Voices sneak through these checks, we have an exeptional case, where the Body acts as an admin by flagging over a threshold by a set period.
Basic security and checks to see:
- if an Instance still exists and is real
- if a Member account is actively posting or a puppet
All of this can be done with Member flagging, some automated, others by people. Flagged accounts and posts get passed to the “Security Group”. It’s up to the Groups to influence an outcome, and as a last resort “recall” an account - sortition, if one goes, a new one is chosen again by sortition.
We mediate the problem of sock-puppets and spammers by basic checks such as:
- Was the account created within the last year?
- Are there active postings over this period?
- The normal ActivityPub moderation tools
Upon registration, you are automatically entered into the sortition to determine working Roles within the governance via Sortition. There is a box you can untick if you do NOT want to take an active working role (this is a valid use-case for opt-out, and important here).
Only people who want to be part of the Governing Body AND play an active role are enrolled in the sortition.
Users are just user accounts, Stakeholders are "moderators", Voices are admins, the code is the facilitator of management.
Every time a position opens the sortition picks a Stakeholder to fill it. If it is you and you would like to do the job – get to it.
If you do not want the job then resign and the lottery will pick a new person.
The Representative “Stakeholder” Body
Accepts proposals and makes decisions.
Some stats for the fediverse from 2021
- Population ~ 4.152.753 accounts
- Active users ~ 1.192.023 people
- Servers > 6.828 instances
Let’s say that a tenth of the instances signed up to the OGB. That would be over 600 Stakeholders (instances) and thus 600 User Accounts for a total of 1200 Members of the Body, along with a smaller number of Affiliate Stakeholders.
For easier decision making, this number is likely too high, so we can put a limit to e.g. 100, chosen by lottery from the Stakeholder instances. This is then matched by 100 from the User accounts making a total of 200 Members of the Body + a small number of Affiliates.
It’s up to the "Admin Group" to choose the right number to build a functional working community. If you don’t have enough good people to fill roles, open the pool up; if there is too much discussion, reduce the pool size.
It is essential to try different approaches.
A 3-way split of Stakeholders: instances/users/affiliates (builders & supporters). If the Affiliate Group becomes larger than the number of instances, they would be be chosen by sortition just like the others. [Ambiguous: "Stakeholder" is defined at the top as one per instance, but here is being used to define all "stakeholders".]
Further Reading
More info:
Outline images: