Team:IMAR/Governing

Politics and Governance

Politics and governance are critical components of an ongoing project code-named RBE10K. This project is run by a community of volunteers who are currently planning an experimental minimalist eco-communalist Resource-Based Economic Model based city of 10,000 people aiming at settling in January 2015, with a budget of $100 million covered equitably by all the inhabitants of this city during the 2-year long experiment. The project already makes extensive use of governance strategies for its own planning, and these governance strategies must continue to evolve and refine as more information enters the plan. In terms of politics, the project is heavily invested in strategies to prevent all kinds of politics that could pollute the horizontality and voluntarism that make part of the basic premises and principles of the project.

Planning phase

Experimentation

One of the ways in which the project is avoiding politics, is by leaving any experimentation for the experimental phase, including as part of the plan, in any case, a number of hypotheses and their required materials and guides for experimentation. The project, however, will stick exclusively to well known and tested technologies and resources. Another way in which the project avoids politics is in avoiding decisions made by majority voting as much as practicable. Whilst consensus voting would be appropriate some times, the preferred decision making system would always be decisions arrived at by empirical evidence, in which the most effective decisions emerge naturally and automatically.

Governance strategies

The governance strategy during the planning aims at getting all decisions arrived at by way of computation, not human opinion. The planning of the project is currently being handled through an open wiki system in which anyone can collaborate with their knowledge. The project is currently developing its first governance system, a semi-automated strategy for computing what are the most efficient and appropriate options for implementation. This governance system will be applicable for the planning stage, and will later on be integrated in the intelligent management of available resources software. The project will commence the development of this software later this year, and will be open-source, hosted in SourceForge, released under GPL, allowing anyone to participate in its development, and be used by other people or projects for use in any way and for any purpose.

Human need

This strategy focuses on finding alternatives for each and all requirements, which are based primarily on providing for human needs. The governance system in development will allow establishing an "effectiveness" ratio for each option documented for a given purpose. For example, considering 10 different models of housing documented, the system intends to providing standardised procedures for: costing them (monetary cost of resources, and social and environmental costs in producing those resources); establishing their rate of efficiency for their particular purpose, for which the system requires that the purpose per category be very clear and well detailed and documented; durability; maintenance required (e.g. how often, how skilled a person has to be for maintaining it, how much cost per year in terms of resources and man hours for maintenance, etc); recyclability; and more. Once this information is calculated per each option, the system will be capable of calculating automatically the "effectiveness" ratio per option, allowing the decisions to emerge based on these criteria, with the highest effectiveness options to be the ones to consider for implementation.

Decision making

For any decisions to be made on non-measurable things, like personal preferences between available options, the project will make use of a variety of decision-making systems, based on typified scenarios for avoiding politics in the choice of decision-making systems to use on each case. There will be cases in which simple preference percentages will apply. An example for this, again with the case of housing, would be housing options. Lets say that the three housing options rating with the highest degrees of effectiveness are all implementable, as their effectiveness ratings are very similar to one another. This allows for volunteers who will inhabit this city to choose the housing type they prefer. Let's say that 20% chooses the model #1, 70% the model #2, and 10% the model #3. The budget and plan for purchasing materials required for housing then would simply consider those options.

Voting

Other methods of governance will include different styles of consensus decision-making, sometimes requiring full consensus, sometimes overwhelming majority, and sometimes will allow for a small minority. Majority voting might be appropriate for some cases, however as stated before this options would be left always as a last resort. In any case, voting will be open only to those directly interested in a particular subject, and never universal, unless the particular subject happens to be universal, which it is expected to seldom ever happen. All voting will occur through the client interface of the intelligent management of available resources software, which will likely have a web front-end. Results of voting will be considered by the system as resources themselves, and utilised as part of its decision-making process. Since the system will be open source, anyone with programming skills will be capable of auditing it and ensuring all decisions are made through available and openly documented sound strategies. Similarly, a team of software engineers and experts will ensure that the software is implemented safely and free from corruptions, hacks or exploits, so that all decisions made automatically or supported by voting methods will be trusted by the whole community.

Current governance status in RBE10K

The RBE10K Project is currently less than two months old, and the planning stage is expected to last between 18 and 24 months. The project is open for the participation or scrutiny of anyone interested or who wants to get involved. All decision making protocols and procedures will be thoroughly documented in the wiki, which is entirely open to the world, both to see and/or to contribute with ideas, criticism, fixing errors, or providing knowledge or information. The project derives its inspiration from the success of the Wikipedia and Open Source solutions, mainly through Hacker ethics. Governance has always been an issue in Open Source, since software quality and functionality must be maintained despite the number of contributors involved, many of which may be malicious and attempting to inject malicious code.

Open Source

The RBE10K Project will derive many notions from the current standard in governance system in open source, managed mostly through Git, a software for source versioning control created by Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. Git enables government systems based on a mix of its automated and semi-automated functions, and what Linus Torvalds calls the "Circle of Trust". Torvalds explains how this system works in its Tech Talk about Git, which is available on YouTube. The system consists of four key components: 1) rely on people one can trust; 2) ensure oneself is trustworthy; 3) being honest, even brutally if necessary; and 4) one must always be inclusive of what others have to say. The beautiful simplicity of the circle of trust is what has enabled to date the quality, reliability and trustworthiness of the Linux kernel code. A code that is being contributed by thousands of developers on a daily basis, and that if it had to be redeveloped by traditional proprietary software development systems would cost $1.3 billion. A software that is so trustworthy that is used and relied on by the great majority of servers in the world, including supercomputers like the one that recently found the Higgs boson in the Cern labs, most mobile phones, and even some of the planetary rovers built by NASA.

Wiki / Knowledgebase

The policies that regulate the quality and access to the different areas in the wiki will be the same ones, as much as practicable, as those documented in the Wikipedia, and abided by all Wikipedians. Any politics and arguments in the wiki are discouraged through rules of courtesy, quality standards, measures of trustworthiness based on participation and quality of previous collaboration, etc. All the rules that the Wikipedia currently implements have to date a very high degree of maturity and reliability, since the whole system is open, voluntary and horizontal, i.e. the same basic principles applicable to the RBE10K Project. And the Wikipedia excelled in terms of effectiveness through their governance for ensuring the maximum quality possible considering the degree of openness and malicious edits they have to deal with on a daily basis.

Meritocracy

Some of the governing rules of an RBE10K city will be meritocratic. These will have to do with access to scarce resources for a number of purposes. One of these can be mastery of an art, in which, for example, only the most accomplished violinists would have access to the the best available violins. Other can be health risks, in which, for example, some chemicals will only be available at the chemistry lab, and will be accessible only by accomplished chemists. Another example could be the production of technology, in which case the merit is not applicable to a person but to the social value of a given product or service; for example, gold might be available only for the production of certain high social value electronics. There could even be, hypothetically, areas that will be off limits to people who have not achieved a certain degree of merit in a given area, giving rise to guilds and specialised clubs.

Conclusion

The RBE10K Project is planning to enable all the promises of an Resource-Based Economic Model: no money, no law, no police, no governmental bodies, no employment, no authority (except for that mutually agreed for a specific purpose and duration), highest possible degree of sustainability, maximum possible self-reliance, highest priority for caring of health of inhabitants and the environment, and automation of all processes that can be automated. All of this enabled through the application of the scientific method for social concern, beginning with these governing processes, functions, agreements, and systems.