At 06:01 AM 3/20/2007, Dave Ketchum wrote: >Thanks. > >While our thoughts on proxy are similar, I see what I am trying as >being far from Free Association.
Think about it a while, you might come around.... :-) I originally developed delegable proxy having governmental structure in mind. However, I also had significant organizational experience in what was the model for Free Associations. And I realized that the combination could be extremely powerful and effective. Free Associations are modelled after Alcoholics Anonymous, though much of the theory also resembles anarchist and libertarian thought. When Bill Wilson was putting together the Traditions of AA, which, with the Concepts for World Service, formed the structural concept for the organization, he had in mind a series of specific organizational failures from history, and he was trying to create a narrow-focus organization that would avoid these problems. He succeeded brilliantly. AA might have been successful, maybe even very successful, for a short time, without these limitations that he set for the organization. But it is quite likely that it would by now have been an obscure footnote in the history of alcoholism treatement. As it happened, AA, with very little funding (and the funding they had was almost irrelevant), rapidly expanded to become practically ubiquitous. There have been a few efforts to start competing organizations based on this or that alleged shortcoming of AA, but those efforts are tiny compared to AA, which is *everywhere*. I'm not an alcoholic, but if I were, I could walk out the door any evening and find a meeting, probably within a short walk. When I lived more out in the country, I might have had to select a particular evening to find a meeting in my very small town. These meetings are all autonomous, they are all self-supporting. The central office, AA World Services, Inc., doesn't fund meetings or local activities. Rather, they fund it, out of the excess contributions coming from passing the hat, almost entirely. AAWS won't accept large donations or bequests from *anyone*. Among people familiar with AA and the other programs that sprang up using the same principles, it has been common to think that there might be some wider application for the Traditions, but there has been little idea of how to scale the process, for AA really functions at the local meeting level, where it is direct democracy with a strong penchant for consensus. (I mentioned that I had organizational experience in this .... I was national conference chair for a different 12-step program, not AA. There are *many* such programs. This one had a delegate conference with maybe a hundred delegates, mostly from the U.S. but a few from elsewhere. It was large enough to have problems of scale, which were partly addressable through a committee system; I also learned a great deal about the "persistence of inequities" effect throught his experience. My work empowered the delegates in an organization that had largely depended upon the elected Board; from what I now know, I should not have been surprised to find a backlash.) ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
