At 10:42 AM 4/10/2010, Alex Rollin wrote:
I've been doing research for about 15 years now on any and every
governance system I've been a part of. I'm one of those people who
senses the deep problems with oligarchy, and I apply my insights
(often inappropriately) in experiments with capital, somewhat
outside the realm of 'just' discussion. Obviously aspects of FA
lead to the forming of groups that have specific, localized
interests, and those group/organizations have positions and inclinations.
When a group exists which has an organizational position not
supported by a general consensus of the members, there is a problem,
it's unstable. The group may survive if there is no reasonable
alternative for the members, but support for it will always be
weakened by the situation. Normally, such a situation isn't
particularly visible, because the oligarchy -- and oligarchy of a
kind is inevitable -- will not allow it to be seen, and may deny, to
others and to themselves, that the gap exists. After all, all their
friends think as they do! It's just a few trolls and malcontents who
think the other way.... And there is no way to actually find out,
unless the oligarchy decides that it really wants to know and starts
asking and is not content with shallow answers by its own members.
That's unusual.
One of the devices that would be used is exit interviews. I.e., the
organization would ask those who have left or who were active at one
time and no longer are, why they have left. Not as a challenge, as a
real question. In general, though, it is very difficult to convert an
existing organization to one that is FA/DP; but, fortunately, it is
not necessary. The alternative, though, is perceived as "too much
work," often, even though the work involved is practically trivial.
Money is not needed, nor need any individual put in insane amounts of
work. That insanity is only necessary, if it's necessary at all, when
there are only one or two people interested. Beyond that, if one
individual is working their tail off, it's a bad sign, and it should
be discouraged. When you work very hard for something, the tendency
is to imagine that one owns it.... and that is exactly how natural
oligarchies arise in supposedly free, progressive or libertarian organizations.
I'm doing my best at this point in time to not be totalizing and
monotonic in deciding that voting systems themselves are the core of
all organizational systems in a certain sense. Specifically it is
through this system that the will of participants is vocalized and
re-distributed across the FA polity (is that what you call the group
of individuals members in an FA?)
A key error is to centralize power, by collecting power that can be
exerted without true consensus. I tend to call the members of an FA,
"the members," or "the community," or, more fully, "the community of
interest." From the AA traditions, "the only requirement for
membership is a desire to stop drinking." I'm not an alcoholic, but
the child of one (perhaps) and with many in my paternal and maternal
families. Those who know the relationship between AA and Al-Anon may
appreciate that, when I was the speaker at an AA meeting (very
unusual, I've been to many (open) AA meetings, and I never saw it any
other time), I "qualified" myself by saying, "I'm a member because I
have a desire to stop drinking. Your drinking."
Membership in an FA is self-defined. That's with an "open" FA. There
can be closed FAs, with some more specific membership definition,
which requires someone to enforce the tighter standard. Membership,
however, does not necessarily convey all rights. An AA member cannot
just walk into a speaker meeting in AA and take the podium and speak.
They can go to the meeting, period. If there is a business meeting of
an ordinary meeting, they can attend and vote. I've never been to an
AA intergroup meeting, but I've been to Al-Anon intergroup meetings.
Theoretically, the meeting could restrict voting rights to
representatives of meetings, but I've never seen anyone challenged at
all. People go without having been officially designated. When
consensus is sought, exact voting rights and rules don't matter so much.
What I've more or less invented (i.e., found lying by the side of the
road and raised up for others to see) is a separation between
deliberation (which cannot be scaled directly to a large group
without some special process, some kind of representation or
filtering) and aggregation or voting, where the sense of a group is
measured. It is often assumed that direct democracy is impractical on
a large scale, and there are two sub-assumptions there.
1. The tediousness and inefficiency of a meeting group grows
exponentially with group size.
2. Direct voting will be uninformed voting, so voting in
representative democracy is properly limited to those who have
actually participated in deliberation.
The first assumption is accurate, though some meeting techniques
allow for larger meetings. Mailing lists can, for example, become
much larger and still remain functional for decision-making, than is
possible with face-to-face meetings, where every speech takes up
everyone's time, whether they are interested or not. Large meetings,
such as the U.S. House of Representatives (which is enormous) address
this problem by shoving most debate into much smaller committees,
with speeches on the main floor often used for grandstanding.
The second assumption is probably false, if there is a hybrid system
where representation is personal, by choice, but where the individual
(or an individual with certain special rights but not including the
right to directly participate in deliberation) can vote directly,
with the "weight" of the vote subtracted if an exact counting is
required. I.e., if there is an assembly of, say, fifty members, each
one chosen by Asset Voting to represent a million voters, and there
is an elector in that election holding a thousand votes, which have
been transferred to a person thereby elected to a seat (along with
votes from other electors), and the elector votes differently from
the seat, a vote value of 0.001 vote will be transferred from one
side on the question to the other.
My guess? Direct votes will be relatively rare and will only make a
difference with unusual votes where the result is close. Direct
votes, however, will provide a seat with information as to how the
seat is doing in terms of representing the body of electors. They
also will allow those with small-minority positions to cooperate in
choosing a seat, while still being able to assert their own minority
position on matters that count for them.
The point, to me, is to involve as much of the public or
organizational membership in decision-making in the organization,
without creating the massive inefficiency of large-scale debate, and
by making sure that those who *do* participate in deliberation and,
by default, voting, actually represent the entire membership.
In a Free Association, the techniques become less important, the FA
principles themselves are protective, and problems, in my experience,
only arise when those principles are violated. Usually for some "good
reason." As seen by those violating them!
Given that different rules govern different groups for the reasons
that support the mission of the group, the wide-body planet-wide FA
is a really important thing! And at the moment, we have a whole
bunch of groups forming things that look like FAs, and even espouse
principles that would be similar, but in fact the organizations
exist to produce position statements. You probably have a lot
better terminology and experience to examine and describe those
errors. I am struggling with that piece at the moment.
This is truly important. From the AA traditions: "AA as such ought
never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees
directly responsible to those they serve." Now, in many places, you
may find an Alcoholism Council that represents the interests of
alcoholics (and others) before governmental bodies. AA itself cannot
do this. But being a member of AA does not prevent one from
exercising independent freedoms. (It does not even prevent breaking
one's own anonymity, though that is certainly discouraged, and, as a
result, one can be pretty sure that anyone who is claiming to speak
for AA isn't!)
The Alcoholism Council is an independent organization. It is free to
recommend AA, to assist the legal system in handling the
controversial practice of requiring AA participation as a condition
of probation or parole, to collect money as a "war chest," to make
decisions through its own independent process. AA cannot, as an
organization, endorse it. But there is nothing preventing individual
members of AA from endorsing it and talking about it to each other,
especially privately. Doing it as a speaker at a meeting might be
disapproved by some or many, because of the possibility that someone
attending the meeting might think the view expressed was official in some way.
Now, consider a political FA. Its purpose is to form and measure
consensus among some group, defined by the membership criterion. You
want it to be, say, confined to "progressive Democrats" or whatever,
the founders can do that. And they will then face how to enforce the
membership definition as the organization grows, but that problem can
be solved. If the FA gets large enough, it could be said to represent
progressive democrats in some way. But it would not issue, itself, a
position statement, and the reason is that there may be progressive
democrats who would disagree with it, and who would then find their
own membership in the FA distasteful, and they would be alienated.
However, the members of the FA could decide, individually, or through
a "natural caucus," to form a political action committee or a
corporation designed for political action and the application of
financial power, and this is, then, a "service board or committee
directly responsible to those it serves." Those it serves are those
who contribute to it or work for it. They met each other through the
FA, the FA delegable proxy structure, if DP is used, forms "natural
caucuses," a natural caucus being a proxy together with all those
represented by the proxy, directly or indirectly. The proxy can and
will directly communicate with his or her own natural caucus. DP in a
very large FA will form a vast collection of caucuses, relatively
united within themselves, having a natural leader who is,
nevertheless, continually advised by his or her clients.
Thus you can get those position statements! They may have been
discussed in the full FA. From that discussion, it can be measured or
estimated what level of support they enjoy, and who supports them
will be visible. Someone who does not support one of them can contact
someone who does, and may be able to negotiate something with wider
consensus. Wider consensus means more power.
Sometimes it may be important to realize how voting works in a
consensus organization. Strict consensus organizations are somewhat
paralyzed, particularly as they become large. But if the organization
never has executive power, if *action* is back through the
individuals and what they choose to support, the problem is finessed.
Suppose it is proposed that members be advised to send $50, or
whatever they can afford, to an important political campaign. A
political FA cannot take a position on any political issue, but it
can discuss them! That discussion, though, is not aimed at deciding
if the FA will make the recommendation. It won't, period. It is aimed
at attempting to find consensus, and at measureing the degree of
consensus found. Now, suppose this is for a primary election, and two
progressives, A and B are declaring candidacies. Two progressives in
a dysfunctional voting system will disempower both of them. So which
one to support? (I'll neglect other options for simplicity.)
After discussion and some process votes, the main question is called,
to support A. (An attempt to amend this to B failed to gain a
majority. "Consensus" does not apply to procedure, because procedure
*must* be efficient; rather, for procedure, a majority is necessary
for any decision to be made.) The vote is 50% Yes, 50% No, after
considering delegable proxy representation. At this point, the caucus
supporting A has a decision to make. They can, being united in
preference for A, go ahead and recommend to their clients and
themselves that they support A. Nothing is stopping them except the
possible foolishness of this action. They could go ahead even if they
only got, say, 25%. But they will surely be opposed, unless. Unless
the faction preferring B has low preference strength and isn't going
to actually follow up. That's a political judgment that they will
have to make through experience.
But there is another option: they can continue to negotiate, and they
might be able to include A and B in the actual negotiations. Really,
the progressives should unite on a single candidate, or both factions
will lose. If they cannot find consensus, *they lose.* There are many
possibilities. I'd tend to toss the question to A and B! If you guys
can't agree, we want to know why, and your answer may determine
whether our members will support you or not. We could give up and put
our energy into other elections. If you both can settle on a single
candidate to support, we will almost certainly support that
candidate, with our full power, and we have X members, with a history
of contributing, on a question like this, $M dollars each.
I want to emphasize something: I'm not proposing a complicated set of
rules. I'm proposing basic principles, which I believe will lead to
"rules" and procedures like what I'm describing, but I'm not trying
to anticipate, in advance, what a large group of people, organized in
such a way as to bring out the best in them, will decide to do. I
couldn't possibly do that, I am nowhere near smart enough. Nobody is.
We may make some educated or intuitive guesses, though. I describe
activities like I just did to explain the possibilities, natural
consequences of a political organization, for an example, organized
on FA traditions and using delegable proxy.
So, these groups are not aware of some of the most important pieces
of FA, as you so eloquently described in your mail:
Anyone can join
Proxies are consent (and expectations) to communicate
Proxy limits may set themselves (how many a person may accept)
FA body has no position statements against or for anything
Small bodies may form to work on specific issues
Any group may form and create exclusive rules for membership
All groups that expect to be considered part of the polity should
arrange transparency for their meetings.
All very clearly stated, thanks. It's nice to know that someone is getting it.
Only the last I will quibble with, in this way, and only a little.
Any group can be considered part of the polity and can also meet
privately. Transparency is optional. However, it's important to
distinguish between the "public" group and the "private" one. The
private group is not bound *at all* by FA rules. The public group is
visible to the public (which would mean the entire membership, or it
could be completely open and visible to anyone, members and
nonmembers, depends). The public and private groups can be exactly
the same people. In the end, though, the private group is advising
(or directing!) the public proxy(s) for the entire group, being those
who actually vote in a poll. The proxies are responsible for their
own votes. As I hinted, they could be under coercion, that is
something that is completely between them and their clients. There is
a kind of coercion, indeed, that might be routine. Proxies could ask
a fee from their members. After all, the workman is worthy of his
meat. We tend to assume that people want to "serve," but this is
quite mixed up with hunger for power. If there were a large political
FA, and I represented a million members, damn straight I'd want to be
paid! But if I only represented two (myself and one other!), almost
surely not. However, note: if a high-level proxy represents a million
members, and needs to supplement his social security income, say,
with $2,000 per month, and needs another $2,000 per month for
expenses, we would be looking at $0.004 per month per represented
member. Suppose a proxy says, "I ask my clients to contribute $1 per
year to cover my own expenses and to cover contributions to
higher-level proxies. I will use this money as I see fit, just as I
will vote in any process according to my own best judgement." I think
most clients would pay it.
It's $1 per year because already, at that level, the collection and
processing expenses won't leave much left! People toss $1 in the
basket at AA meetings, or more, and it is considered necessary that
every meeting pay its own expenses, such as rent, the cost of
literature for free distribution, and, of course, coffee. (No
dependence on central support! That's essential for maintaining local
independence!) There would be no problem gathering what the upper
levels of a DP structure might need to allow the proxies to devote
full time to it. No proxy would be unduly burdened, nor would any
member. A proxy can choose to represent someone who can't pay, and
all that is necessary is that enough is gathered through voluntary
contributions to cover expenses. The experience in FAs is that
financial burden is only a problem in truly marginal FAs which are
nevertheless paying relatively high rent for meeting space. That
problem disappears entirely with on-line meetings, which can operate
with no necessary expenses. But, TANSTAAFL. A high-level proxy may
need to ask clients for support and, indeed, the clients should offer it.
Bill Wilson, founder of AA, ended up with an estate that was well
north of a million dollars, from the royalties on the so-called Big
Book. And yet that book was sold at way under normal publishing
prices, because it wasn't sold through normal distribution. (I was a
publisher, and standard retail price for a book was six or seven
times publishing costs (including royalties). In AA, books are sold
to local intergroups or meetings, at very low cost, sufficiently
above actual cost so that AA World Services, Inc., can be financially
stable. AAWS does not accumulate, by tradition, more than a "prudent
reserve," which, my interpretation, is enough so that if revenues
collapse, AA could be shut down with all debts paid. It's certainly
not a year's operating expenses, I don't think.
(There have been controversies in AA over this, I think AAWS bought
their own "fancy" office building in New York. No organization is
going to be perfect! But the AA structure did not allow them to truly
accumulate an "endowment," which is what disconnects many nonprofits
from being continually dependent upon voluntary contributions from members.)
Bill Wilson devoted most of his life, in fact, to developing the AA
organizational concepts and putting them into practice. What he did
was worth far, far more than he was paid. It has saved millions of
lives. And it may save more than that, if these concepts are put into
wider use. I've known many people familiar with the AA traditions who
have thought, "Wouldn't it be great if the rest of the world could
run like this?"
Well, it could. And, I strongly suspect, it will. It is way too good
an idea to stay unused, and the only thing stopping it is inertia.
But AA is a special case: AA actually exists only on the local level,
the national organization is a thin and actually dispensible
superstructure. The only major AA-wide consensus that was normally
needed was approval of literature for publication by AAWS. (That
literature can be seen as establishing organizational positions, but,
examined closely, it only represents consensus -- and they really do
seek consensus -- about AA itself, not about "outside issues." And no
member is bound to subscribe to the AA steps and traditions, people
are never expelled from AA for disagreement, and, in fact, there is
no such thing as 'excommunication' from AA. Meetings can control
themselves, and a meeting can decide to exclude someone, and I've
seen it happen *once* in thousands of meetings. To give you an idea
of what it took, a woman opened her purse and reached in, and a
highly experience therapist who was also a member of the meeting
half-expected a gun to be pulled out. Some very, very disturbed
people end up at 12-step meetings. But I've never heard of any actual
harm to anyone. That particular meeting decided to ask the woman not
to come back. But that did not exclude her from the program, it had
no effect on any other meeting. If someone made a fuss at a lot of
meetings, I imagine that an intergroup could make some local
decision. AA, in particular, deals with some very disruptive people,
drunks, in a word, and sometimes when they stop drinking, they get
even crankier....
How to expand something that works well on a local level to something
that functions efficiently and well on a much larger scale? This is
where delegable proxy comes in. AA uses a relatively informal system
that works well for them. It was advanced for the time, I won't
detail it here. Delegable proxy would work better, but when something
else works well enough, there is not much motivation to change it!
When the goal is clearly consensus, the actual decision-making
methods don't matter much, and methods that would be dysfunctional if
people were fighting with each other can still work fine.
At this point it seems that a lot of groups that desire to have high
throughput like a 'pristine' FA get sidetracked as they do their
best to figure out how to preserve what they see as the
one-in-a-million value of consensus that they might stumble
upon. So they lock down membership to protect their polity from
ideas. That's a best case example, of course. Most of the time
they form with those ideas and then limit membership from the start.
Sure. That's fine, by the way, if they recognize the value of then,
through cross-membership, participating in a more inclusive
organization. That more inclusive organization might function like a
"high-level meeting," in an FA that doesn't even have "local
meetings." But, at the highest level, it has open membership.
Functionally, though, its active members, with the right of direct
communication in "high-level meetings," could all be representatives
of other FAs with restricted membership.
In order to be fairly represented in a high-level FA like this,
restricted FAs would presumably advise their members to join the
high-level FA (no charge! No dues! And no implied endorsement of any
controversial position!) and then name someone of their choice as
proxy. Could be, of course, their proxy from the restricted FA. Why
make it complicated?)
There would be, however, no "election" of a single representative
from the restricted FA. No single person *ever* represents an FA,
which is, itself, never organized. An individual can represent a
"service board," as AA World Services Inc held the copyrights on the
literature (I think they ended up releasing them all to the public
domain, enforcement of copyright was creating divisive problems!) But
not the FA itself.
To put it in the older terms: except as to authority over its own
activities, an FA does not create any executive or legislative
function. It is purely judicial; the judicial function is rigorously
and totally separated from the instruments of power.
So, the issue is two-fold. People don't know about FA. Second,
people who do know the power of communicative assent and large scale
communication say they are doing FA but they aren't. Add on to that
the specific case that groups that are or would benefit from
something like FA to handle a single stream of their discussion are
completely disaggregated and separated from each other for reason 1 or 2.
Yes. That's the "state of nature" at this point.
I feel very strongly that writing down (more of the) FA rules would
be very useful so that the many organizations can see that they have
polity transparency with a much wider body. They can share their
issues and membership (privacy respected, of course).
Most people will need to see examples. However, starting with
discussion of the issues around organizational principles is the
place I chose to start. I've also proposed FA/DP in many small-scale
organizations. Even when the organization is new, it is very
difficult to get people to see the value, it runs against so many
common assumptions about what is possible.
But a few people can see it and start to work together to develop and
test the concepts. All it takes is forming FAs as needed for some
purpose, including the purpose of developing consensus on FA
traditions and operating procedures, and that's beyondpolitics.org,
though it certainly is not restricted to any one organization. If
there exists more than one, and for some reason it is not considered
ripe to merge them, they can still form a superstructure FA that is
all-inclusive. It costs nothing but very, very little time for
someone setting up a mailing list.
And there can be more than one of these "high-level" organizations.
But, obviously, it gets more efficient if there is only one, and that
should not be a problem if the single high-level FA with open members
actually functions according to the basic FA principles, with DP
making it all possible on a large scale.
You might be wondering why I care about this.
I don't wonder. What I wonder about is how rare it is that people
consider the basic structure of collaborative democracy. Most people
get caught up in "causes." The biggest distraction is to believe that
the problems of the world are due to the "bad guys," which leads to
an all-too-obvious solution: get rid of the bad guys!
The fact that it has never worked doesn't seem to be noticed. Sure,
there are bad guys. But they can only function as such because the
structures that would interdict the damage don't exist. In
small-scale, tribal society, being a "bad guy" would be so difficult
that I doubt that it was common. People who were not cooperative
didn't survive! Or would be treated as ill, to be confined so that
they could not harm others, if the society could afford that.
I see that many of the large organizations that take advantage of
large scale communication, which enables coordination, also have
this oligarchical tendency. In most cases, the tendencies don't
serve the people inside those systems or the people outside the
systems. In my opinion the only way to alter the status quo is to
out-communicate and out-coordinate these closed system.
Yes. But it will take time, I expect. Nevertheless, when an FA/DP
organization reaches a certain size, I don't know exactly what it is,
I expect a snowball effect, with exponential growth.
It's like the crystallization of a supersaturated solution. The
solution remains a liquid unless something causes the formation of a
seed crystal of a certain size, or it's added already being that
size. When the crystal is increases in size, the surface area, where
it grows, increases with the square of the diameter. What is the
necessary size of an FA/DP organization for accretion and increased
participation begins to outweigh the loss through all the common
reasons that cause loss of organizational momentum?
I think that three active members, reasonably dedicated, might do it!
There are many more than three people who have expressed interest,
but nowhere, at one time, have there been three who really start
working for it. That's not a criticism, they are all active in their
own ways in various venues. But I consider it inevitable that it
*will* happen, sooner or later. Sooner could save a lot of lives, in
fact, there is hardly a world problem that would not be ameliorated
by mechanisms of formation of large-scale consensus.
The issue is not so much education as delivering working models that
are flexible and not entirely dependent on old systems to function.
It's both. But you are correct, "working models" are very important.
But these models can be developed as part of an FA/DP organization
that uses them. They do not have to start with any kind of complex
software, and what I've seen is some efforts that built complex
software, based on all kinds of judgements about how proxy
representation was supposed to behave, creating entirely as castles
in the air. They got way ahead of themselves.
The essence of these concepts are the organizational traditions and
an understanding of the proxy-client relationship. If an organization
begins to grow, with these concepts at the core, it will develop
whatever tools are necessary, and I expect to see standard software
for FA/DP use arise. Some elements of it already exist.
You mentioned the software option that shut down the Demoex FA
(in whole or in part.)
It wasn't an FA, that was the basic problem there, and DP was tacked
on. So what was shut down was DP, which, in a non-FA context, may
have given too much power to the proxies. A single superproxy
(someone representing either all, or at least a majority, of members)
had direct political power, could, all one his or her own, instruct
the Demoex representative on the city council.
This is the kind of issue I see as a regular, recurring
problem. My current interest is in seeing a widely adopted open
standard that allows an FA to function in distributed form. This
allows organizations to open and close boundaries as they see fit,
but also to make the choice to do so.
That's right.
I am emphasizing this because I see this as a larger form of the
same useful exercise you mentioned giving to Professors in choosing
their student as a proxy. In fact, this is, perhaps, the single
most important exercise in civil society, and is trumped up to
become the patriotism of American when choosing their
representatives, though of course this is a whole different arena
and I understand that.
My strong suggestion is that we start small. Bigger will come when
smaller is working!
So, how do we make the FA form small? Modular?
Well, consider the Election Methods Interest Group. EMIG was designed
to create a way to measure consensus among those interested in voting
systems. It is an FA, and it has a proxy list, so it is FA/DP. Anyone
interested in voting systems can join. If the traffic grows to be a
problem, it's easy to go on Special Notice status, so one doesn't see
ordinary traffic, and if, for some reason, it still becomes a pain,
one can completely unsubscribe. But one can also, as I mentioned in
the professor/student example, leave behind a proxy, and this creates
something very important, for those who consider the overall issues.
An organization can quietly grow, even if it only seems to have a
couple of active members. And, when needed, an idea can spread to a
much larger group very rapidly. FA/DP is a technique for growing a
very large organization from a small seed. When it is only one person
who is really the force behind it, as I was initially with EMIG, it
will seem to stall for a while if that person becomes busy elsewhere.
But the seed is still there, it just needs some more people to
function as gardeners. One or two!
I'm currently the trustee for EMIG; that means that I own the list.
But I know how to allow an organization like EMIG to do what Bill
Wilson referred to in "AA Comes of Age," the title of one of his
books. I know how to allow EMIG to transcend me, even in that basic
protective function, even if my own role is challenged. I hope to see
it happen before I die, indeed, I'm pretty sure it will.
----
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