Re: A body is not a society

[Richard Moore <rkm(at)quaylargo.com>]

> Doug Everingham wrote:
> > ...the bigger the social unit planning,
> > managing, coordinating its constituent individuals, specialties,
> > regions, projects, programs, levels of organization. the more
> > imperative it is to have nested networks, not just of randomly
> > empaneled citizens' think tanks or juries but incorporating liaison
> > between related funcions and adjoining levels of administration.
> > SimPol can help to the extent that it coordinates use of the most
> > clearly surviving remnant of democracy in the US system -- a citizen's
> > right to vote.

Hi Doug,

You seem to have misunderstood what I am proposing, thereby reducing it to something silly. The role of citizen dialog is not about management of operations. It is about setting direction, selecting basic priorities, and making strategic decisions. And citizen's juries, or whatever you want to call them, are intended to be contributions to community dialog, not the sole seat of dialog. The vision is that communities will be able to achieve an inclusive consensus and evolve it over time, through a variety of dialog modalities, which will evolve as we learn how to 'do democracy'.

When it comes time to 'do a project', or 'carry out operations', then teams will be assembled, responsibility assigned, etc. We will not have citizen's dialog to decide how each mile of track will be laid. I think a good analogy would be the relationship between the board of directors and a corporation. The community, through its dialog processes, is like the 'board of directors of community operations'. It sets direction, and it can intervene and change direction at any time if the need arises. But it doesn't try to micro manage on a day-to-day basis. That would be silly.

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Hierarchy is not the only way to coordinate large projects, and in fact it is not necessarily the most efficient way, nor does it necessarily produce the best results. Consider for example the open-source software movement, in comparison to a hierarchical model like Microsoft's. 'Open source' is an anarchistic approach -- everyone decides for themselves what they are going to work on on how they're going to go about doing it. It works because  there is a shared vision of direction, and everyone wants to see it succeed.

As regards coherence of outcomes, both systems work equally well. Microsoft can produce good software and so can the open-source folks. As regards coordination of activities, both systems also work equally effectively, except that the open-source approach involves a lot less overhead and bureaucracy. Where the open-source movement jumps way ahead of Microsoft is in the areas of creativity and productivity, and this arises from the maximization of parallelism. Centralization minimizes parallel creativity and initiative.

Let's consider a scenario. Suppose a society decides, by whatever means, that it wants to reform its education system. Let's say the basic premise is that there needs to be more parent involvement.

In a centralized approach, there would first be a long process in the legislature, part of it waiting for a turn in the centralized  queue. Then a single plan would be adopted, and all schools would try it out. After a while lessons would be learned an the plan could be revised. In a parallel approach, where each community decides how to facilitate parent involvement, many plans would be adopted and tried, all in parallel. Those that got better results could be adopted by other communities. The evolution of the 'parent involvement' initiative would proceed much faster, and with better results, due to parallel creativity and experimentation.

back to you,

richard