Distributed Democracy is a form of democracy designed to promote cognitively consistent community governance.
The Distributed Democracy process pust as much emphasis on what gets voted on as it does on a transparent and trustworthy voting process.
Its first intended use case is in the field of corporate governance, where it will drive the curation process of CitizenShareholders. CitizenShareholders provides a global platform that lets people use the power of the $50 trillion in listed company shares they own through their collective investments.
It uses advances in technology to combine the learning from thousands of years of democratic experiments, with a brutally honest assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of our species, to create an inclusive, scaleable, cognitively coherent, methodology for collective decision making.
Distributed Democracyhas three main objectives, to:
Maximise participation (active and passive)
Create a curated pipeline for meaning Community originated Resolutions (CoRes)
Prevent the obtaining of votes by deception (cognitive dissonance is a bigger problem than outright hypocrisy)
Distributed Democracy makes use of a number of existing forms of democracy
Deliberative
Representative
Direct
Populism
Distributed Democracy introduces a number of innovations, including:
The 'Trusted Third Party' (TTP) Role
The Massive Online Open Assembly (MOOA)
Rights and Responsibility 'Mirrors'/’Balances’
Informed Consensus Building Matrices (ICBMs)
Value Calculators
Glossary/Explainer:
The active or passsive partipation by individuals in both deciding what should be voted on and the voting process itself.
The active partipation by Trusted Third Parties, civil society
At the heart of DIstributed Democracy is the ability to detect and prevent TTPs obtaining votes by deception, intentionally (hypocrisy) or otherwise (cognitive dissonance).
To do this we have created a granular process that requires those wishing to gain the support of others to offer a consistent, reasoned, data driven 'pitch' rather than gas lit dog whistle rhetoric.
This allows not only for the identification of cognitive dissonance within an individual proposal development process, but also across all the proposal processes that a TTP is participating in.
Humans participating in these processes will not be held to the same level of accountability, may, if they wish, not 'show their workings' and only complete the ICBM element. The rationale for this difference is that cognitive dissonance is a human right balanced by the responsibility of living a finite life with the consequences of their decisions.
Our goal is to develop an automated, self learning process to detection method that will do for type 2 thinking what Natural Language Processing (NLP) is doing for Type 1 thinking.
At the core of Distributed Democracy is the belief that the process for deciding what propsals to vote on needs to be as transparent, rigorous and accountable as the process of voting on the proposals.
Our process involves three stages - establishing the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved, the ICBM process. and the value calculator.
Together with the requirement that we define proposals by behaviours rather than identities, the working hypothesis is this will create a practice that both recognizes and protects against the all too human desire for institutions to react based on emotion rather than reason.
The TTPs have a function in both the process for determining what should be voted on, and in the voting process itself.
Individual voters may choose to follow the voting patterns of their preferred TTPs by default, whilst retaining the power to change their TTPs, or the way they as an individual are voting on a given proposal, whenever they want.
The individual can rank them by priority so that there is clarity in the event that the chosen TTPs have conflicting positions.
In addition to offering positions that individual voters may follow, TTPs may participate in the curation process used to determine what proposals will be put forward to be voted on.
The right to act as a TTP comes with the responsibility of providing voters with cognitively coherent approach to decision making, including consistent:
definitions;
data interpretations;
data sets;
rights and responsibilities of parties;
value calculation;
Only incorporated organisations such as NGOs, political parties, foundations, that wish to advance their own cognitively consistent agendas through a democratic process, can be TTPs
The TTPs have a function in both the process for determining what should be voted on and in the voting process.
Individual voters may choose to follow the voting patterns of their preferred TTPs by default, whilst retaining the power to change their TTPs, or the way they as an individual are voting on a given proposal, whenever they want.
In addition to offering positions that individual voters may follow, TTPs may participate in the curation process used to determine what proposals will be put forward to be voted on.
The right to act as a TTP comes with the responsibility of providing voters with cognitively coherent approach to decision making, including consistent:
definitions,
data interpretations,
rights and responsibilities of parties
value calculation
Only incorporated organisations such as NGOs, political parties, foundations, that wish to advance their own cognitively consistent agendas through a democratic process, can be TTPs
Individual voters may choose to follow the voting patterns of their preferred TTPs by default, whilst retaining the poer to chnage their TTPs, or the way they as an individual are voting on a given proposal, whenever they want.
In addition to offering positions that individual voters may follow, TTPs may participate in the curation process used to determine what proposals will be put forward to be voted on.
The right to act as a TTP comes with the responsibility of providing voters with cognitively coherent approach to decsion making, including consistent:
definitions,
data interpretations,
rights and responsibilities of parties
value calculation
Only incorporated organisations such as NGOs, political parties, foundations, that wish to advance their own cognitivel consitent agendas through a democratic process, can be TTPs
(Back)
MOOAs are the goal we are working towards. They will allow for maximum participation in the process of determining what proposals should be put forward for a vote.
The three main parts of a MOOA are:
Defining the parties involved along wiht the rights and responsibilities of each party
the Informed Consensus Building Matrix - identifying the 5 most important factors and three positions for each factor, the ideal, the just acceptable, and the just unacceptable
The preference/value calculator - where a value is defined as a preference for which you are prepared to incur cost opportunity cost or risk, and a preference being something for which you are prepared to impose cost, opportunity cost, or risk on somebody else.
Our vision is that, by deploying self-learning technology trained to detect cognitive dissonance, multiple MOOAs can operate simultaneously whilst still ensuring cognitive consonance is maintained.
In the first instance they will operate as round table exercises. Once the process is validated it will be automated, with the final, and no doubt longest stage being the application of a machine learning process that will get better and better at detecting cognitive dissonance over time.
Rights and Responsibility mirrors, or balances, are visual representations based on the principle that every right should be mirrored, or balanced, by an equal and opposite responsibility, just as every responsibility should be balanced/mirrored by an equal and opposite right.
A right without a responsibility is a privilege; a responsibility without a right is an oppression.
Those with rights and responsibilities include autonomous humans, States, incorporated entities including NGOs, Foundations and Corporations.
In any given State, each autonomous human (?Citizen) ought to have the same basic rights and responsibilities relative to the State and incorporated entities (human created non-biological legal entities) subject to their behaviours, not their identities.
The rights and responsibilities of incorporated entities are the same for each entity that has the same governing rules.
A right may be unilaterally waived, a responsibility may not.
Different parties may have different, potentially very different, views of what these equal and opposite rights and responsibilities are, the only requirement in the distributed democratic process is that they are consistent in their approach, and defined by behaviour as opposed to identity.
A cognitively consistent worldview ought to be able to provide a model in which each and every party's rights and responsibilities in each and every scenario are balanced.
A goal is to develop the tech to construct a visual model that flags imbalances in a world view as well as contrasts the differences between different models.
Whilst this model will undoubtedly be criticised as deeming non-human animals as without rights, this would only be in an environment which is not inhabited, or impacted, by humans. In assuming a right over an animal or an environment the relevant entity, human or human incorporated, assumes an equal and opposite responsibility. What that equal and opposite responsibility is will vary from model to model, just as it will in terms of the relative rights and responsibilities of parents with regard to their children and the rights and responsibilities of the State if the required parental responsibilities are not met.
Informed Consensus Building Matrices are the process used to determine the scope of a proposal.
The process begins with asking participants to supply the 5 factors they see as core to the matter at hand.
Submissions are examined to determine on which factors there is consenus. If there are more than 5 then the top 5 are chosen.
Participants are then asked to present 3 positions on each factor:
The ideal
The just acceptable
The 'deal breaker'
These are examined to determine where there is consensus. In some circumstances it may be that opposing consensus is identified in which case two mutually exclusive proposals would be put forward to the next stage in the process, generating the wording.
Three versions of wording for the proposal, in the case of opposing consensus, three versions of each, would be put forward and participants would support whichever version they thought was most likely to get passed that aligned with their views (as expressed in their rights and responsibility mirrors and value calculations).
The approved wordings would be submitted for voting on. In the case of conflicting proposals, neither individual voters nor TTPs would be able to vote for both.
We define a value as a preference for which you are prepared to incur cost, opportunity cost, or risk, and a preference as an outcome for which you are prepared to impose cost, opportunity cost, or risk on somebody else.
As cost, opportunity cost and risk can all be reduced to a financial value, it is possible to determine a real, perhaps relative, value to different outcomes.
Requiring TTPs to complete this element enables voters to choose the TTPs that they are aligned with in the sense of 'velocity' as well as direction.
In distinguishing between preferences and voters it is further possible to ensure a cognitively consistent approach.
It may be desirable to allow TTPs to have three positions where the direction is constant, but the velocity differs, in order to provide the most nuanced choices to the voter.