Earlier I talked about the idea of a direct democracy. I promised I would give a concrete example, and I will, very soon. First I wanted to discuss one method to govern such a democracy that Jeff sent me a little while ago.
It is called EfficaSync and if you have some time I recommend that you read about it directly from the source. The post, which covers our situation well, also led me to a number of related efforts, which I hope to touch on. See the bottom of the post for a list of links.
EfficaSync describes a fairly simple idea: a group with a structure that allows it to govern itself. The author presents a hierarchy of “elements”: ethics, arguments that follow from those agreed upon ethics, statutes that follow from those arguments, techniques that follow from arguments, and instances that follow from techniques. This is how I would draw it:
Ethics => Arguments => Statutes => Techniques
So if the ethics of the group change, their laws might change. If there is an unjustifiable law, that is, one that does not follow from their collective set of ethics, then that law should be changed or discarded.
Sort of reminiscent of a few guys back in the 1770s. Mostly east-coasters if I recall correctly.
But this time, of course, geography and birth circumstance have no part in your ability to vote. Only your internet connection (and tech-savvyness) affect that right. I admit that I am intrigued by this idea. Of course technology lets us do things that we have not been able to in the past, and it seems like it might actually work. It at least might work in some circumstances.
Luckily, I don’t have to describe the site to you. Jeff just did. Read about it: http://samsriti.blogspot.com/2008/10/proposal.html. Basically the idea is to have an open, user-generated repository for content creation. Think Wikipedia with better attribution I guess (interesting question that you should ask Jeff: how is it different from Wikipedia?). Anyway, I see some problems with the idea.
Internet communities have historically been plagued by some pretty nasty behavior. As it so happens, two pretty famous guys, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, have just started a community website, albeit aimed at a different audience. They have been open about their decisions and have handled some tough questions. They do a weekly podcast which I recommend you subscribe to. Episode 2 addresses some of the same problems Jeff L’s site would face.
These are all open questions, and need to be answered before any meaningful work can be done.
- “Religious” questions: He is of course talking about things like Mac vs. PC, but the same applies for any self-governing organization. Some people just disagree with each other. How do you stop a never ending spiral where participants fundamentally disagree?
- Content theft: if the proposed site generates legitimate content (and we should hope that it does), what stops me from copying and pasting that to my site, putting some ads of of it, and making money from everyone else’s hard work? Does this need to be stopped? Discouraged? Ignored?
- Long term relevancy: often, at least in tech forums, a site starts as pertinent and manageable, and then as Google ranking goes up, devolves into nonsense and spam. How can you prevent your helpful users from leaving you after content becomes, by and large, useless? Or can you prevent that from happening?Jeff calls this “the Youtube problem where you have 50 thousand comments and all of them are completely inane”, which I think we can all relate to. His response is that their site is very targeted and will therefore not allow for general discussion, unlike Jeff L’s proposed site.
Jeff and Joel address these issues in the context of their new site, and Jeff L will need to do the same thing.
Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to discuss my research. That will be next time.
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