I don't see any of your principles as "silly". On the contrary.
In advocating use of coordinated citizens' voting to overcome
existing domination of governments by economic bullies I am
not abandoning support for local efforts, transparency,
answerability and experiment. The scenario you use as an
example is a good argument for decentralized initiatives.
However, you do not rejetc the need for eventual decisions at
wider (national, even international) levels, for example in
establishing education policy. I submit that this can only be
made quicker, easier and fairer by nested networks of all
stakeholders (teachers' groups; parents' groups, child
psychologists, students. local associations etc.) and often
only achieved in coordination with elected lawmakers.
Hence the critical usefulness of SimPol.
-- Doug
=========================
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.
---
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.
