One method proposed by Metagovernment is the Streetwiki, where neighbors validate each other. It's a little complex, but pretty darn solid. Basically, it is neighbors validating each other in a physical trust network.
The reason why the rich can bully the poor is partly because the rich tend to be politically proactive as opposed to reactive. A consensus system might help us get that 100% involvement, and it might not, but this system probably has the advantage there.
I am not arguing for utopian perfection; I am arguing for a vastly improved system. Consensus democracy is not about 100% participation. A consensus includes consent of everyone who does not participate. But one of many key differences from the status quo is that any individual at any moment can become active. You may feel that you have no need to be involved in the decisions about road-building in your community. But when suddenly people want to build a road through your favorite park, you may become interested. In collaborative governance, you can immediately step in and try to break the consensus. Compare that to your options in the status quo: 1. whine to your representative so they can ignore you or 2. vote against your representative only to find that he/she wins anyway or that the road has already been built.
What happens when a decision must be made but a consensus cannot be reached?
There is no such situation. If everyone agrees that a decision must be reached, then they already have one consensus, and they are just arguing over details of implementation. If there is no consensus about the need for action, then there should not be action.
Also, I simply don't trust that the average man knows enough to make an intelligent decision regarding every issue.
And yet politicians are the average man too. What distinguishes them from others? Only their desire to win an election and their ability to raise funds. I fail to see how this makes them better equipped to handle any decision. In fact, it makes them much worse at it.
By contrast, collaborative governance systems are deliberately designed to allow the best ideas to bubble to the top. They don't simply ask everyone to vote once and then abide by the decision. Rather, because consensus must be reached, they require that people really think hard through an iterative process about building a solution that will work for everyone. It favors the best ideas, not the most popular nor the most politically expedient.
So if everybody but the idiot who wants to play loud music at 3AM, then there shouldn't be a law because there's no consensus? Draw the line somewhere at 50, 75, 90 or 99% but yes, almost every law has to be forced upon some minority. And I don't mean just libertarian lack of laws, but NAMBLA blocking laws against child sex. What you call tyranny is what most others call civilized society and the rule of law. Total lack of forced rule is either anarchy or a fairy tale.
You are right that consensus is not about 100% assent, at least not in large communities. But which is worse? The 90% forcing their will on the 10% or the 51% forcing their will on the 49%? You present no alternative except the status quo, and I am being generous in describing it as 51/49. Collaborative governance is not utopian perfection: it is simply a heck of a lot better than the tyranny we have now.
The formal representatives would go away, but you can bet the politics won't.
Of course not. But it would still be better than having the politicians be in charge of the system. Again, not perfect... just better. A lot better.
Collaborative governance is not simply internet voting, where you vote once for an elected official. It is a continuous process of deliberation and voting directly on the issues.
The solutions for the particular concerns you bring up are non-anonymous voting (if you see that someone changed your vote, you can cry foul) and/or webs of trust and/or Distributed Administration Networks.
The whole concept of consensus decision-making works against demagoguery and reactionism. As long as there are still enough reasonable people around, then they can prevent hysteria from ruling the day. That is nothing like the stupid forms of direct democracy we have today, such as the referendum system in California. Nothing. Here's the long form.
Now as for there being a right answer that 99% of the people can't see... let's just say for the sake of argument that you are right. How is the status quo not much, much worse? Does Barak Obama or George W Bush or your city mayor or the president of your school board know what that right thing is? Policitians are the least likely to know what is right: the only thing they care about is what keeps them in power. Period. So how can it possibly be worse to have a consensus system?
Now to take issue with the idea of there being a right answer: if nobody thinks it is right, then how do you know it is right? Hindsight? Well, that's all we have in the status quo.
I still don't see what you are saying is better than collaborative governance. Totalitarianism by Jesus? That's just not an option.
The debate about anonymous voting in collaborative governance systems has been long and hard. You can see some of the summary here.
In the end, the way it is likely to work out is that our tools will be agnostic: they will allow for the deployers to allow, not allow, or require anonymity, and the real world will decide which works best in any particular community.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
Your analysis assumes a static system, where you ask people a question and get an answer. Collaborative governance is a continuous process: consensus is never achieved at the outset: it is attained by debate, collaboration, and synthesis. All original proposals get rejected, and most subsequent ones do, until some genius comes up with something that actually works for everyone. That is something actually worthy of consensus.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner.
No, what you are describing is majority rule. It has nothing to do with consensus governance.
By comparison, I would describe our current system as three wolves charged with the safety of a thousand sheep. Guess what the wolves have for dinner every night??
First, your example is about national politics, while collaborative governance is intended to start at the very small level and scale up as people get used to it and as the software and systems mature.
Second, if people can't find a consensus, then they shouldn't have a law. Period. Are you saying it is better to force rule onto people? That's called authoritarianism and/or tyranny.
Third, consensus is much more possible when you take away the politicians and use a system which drives synthesis instead of conflict. See this earlier post, where this is discussed in more detail.
Fourth, you can't expect a Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist to "reach religious consensus" but you can get them to reach governance consensus by finding common ground. I'll bet you could get all four of them to agree that cold-blooded murder shouldn't be legal, for example.
To take your example, there are really good arguments against hate crime laws. As South Park put it, they say that it is much worse to commit a crime against someone who is different than someone who is like you. Why should the color of someone's skin make one murder worse than another?
What happens is you don't pass a law until you can come up with a new version that can get consensus. Instead of having some incredibly demagogic thing such as hate crime laws, maybe the minority could work with the majority to come up with a new kind of law that has to do with crimes of passion or something similar that isn't so racist. That removal of the race condition could then push it toward consensus and get a much, much better law passed in the end.
P.S. Now I will concede that consensus does not have to equal 100%. That may be unreasonable, since some people are truly deranged, etc. So as decisions scale to larger groups of people, the barrier for passage decreases. Metagovernment is still drafting what that formula would look like, but the latest iteration comes out to 100% for small groups and gradually declines to a flat 80% for extremely large groups. That 80% maybe should be upped to 90%, but that's a detail still in progress... the decision rule itself is still being debated. The current math is here: http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/User:ThomasvonderElbe/draft_rules
Supposing this is true (which I doubt is anything like universal), please explain how this is worse than the status quo.
In the status quo there isn't even anything like 80% consensus on anything. Rather there is usually 50% (or usually much less) which are imposing their will without even consulting the rest.
And in reality it is only the richest, most powerful, most influential, and most power-hungry who have nay (and thus complete) control.That's more like 1% imposing their will on the rest.
What about all the poor minorities who can't vote now because they're too busy working or too exhausted from work, or can't get to the polls, or get kept away from the polls by blockers (a real phenomenon practiced in the US currently), or get fooled into voting for the wrong candidate, or just don't give a damn about the election since their vote isn't going to make a real difference anyway, or just don't give a damn about the election because it's between two rich white guys who are completely owned by big business anyway, and so on....
First, the number of internet users is skyrocketing, especially now that tablets and smartphones are becoming so popular. Yes, that still excludes the poorest and most remote, but that margin is getting smaller all the time.
Second, the issue can be simply worked around by holding community meetings, with the direct purpose of enfranchising people. These meetings and related concepts are a core aspect of the movement for collaborative governance.
Third with delegation systems, people can delegate over longer periods, but still not be trapped with that delegate as they are with a "representative." Removing a delegation is as simple as traveling to the public library, logging in, and changing your settings.
What you have described is being developed and while it is still in alpha, it is at a high level of sophistication already. It is one of the key members of the Metagovernment project (mentioned in the OP), and it is called Votorola: http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.xht
However, there are a couple of differences. First, Votorola is not anonymous. It is completely open and public. That gives participants 100% validation of their voting: nobody can steal or corrupt or hack or usurp your vote, because you can actually check on it at any time.
Second, Metagovernment and Votorola aren't interested in political parties. That's the status quo and it is full of corruption and massive barriers to participation. Instead, we're just making a completely new system which can replace the systems of the status quo slowly and from the ground up. This is a real-world approach we are enacting as soon as we have software that is suitable for communities to implement. It requires no buy-in from any political system: only that people start using it to govern their organizations.
Whether or not you agree with Votorola's or Metagovernment's approach, the Metagovernment would love to have your input and to see your project join with the many others that are collaborating on our list. To join, just sign up on: http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org and introduce yourelf.
The Greeks did not have computers, an internet, nor collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and concepts. These change things, and Greek direct democracy cannot be compared to the new forms being developed today.
The principle behind Metagovernment is that decisions are only made when there is a consensus. This means that mob rule and tyranny of the majority is impossible. Just because 80% of the people want it at that moment doesn't mean it's right... wait until almost everyone is on board, and you know you have found something good.
Now consensus might sound like an impossible goal, but it really isn't. The reason it is so hard to achieve these days is because we have a two-party system where each side benefits from distinguishing themselves from the others: in other words, they abhor a consensus. They thrive on conflict, and play up stupid issues to keep us divided.
When we mature beyond political parties, a consensus system will not be that hard to deal with. This is because collaborative governance tools are designed to push people toward consensus by helping them to find common ground. Without the interruption of politicians, this is not only possible, but truly wonderful. Synthesis is a much, much better form of decision-making than compromise.
You may ask what do we do if we can't find consensus? The answer is obvious: nothing! There is no reason to make a law if society isn't in consensus on it. That is the road to tyranny, suppression, and everything else bad in government. Real government of, by, and for the people must be about all of the people. If something is so urgent that it must be dealt with, then people will find a way to come to consensus... or else they don't really even agree on the urgency, do they?
The projects in Metagovernment have put a lot of thought into their systems, and some of them are extremely sophisticated. As they mature and gain adoption, they will mature. The fact that there are many different projects means that the real-world marketplace of ideas will pick the best solution going forward, providing yet another check on their potential to fail.
Now I am sure you can find some imperfections in all of this, but compare it to the status quo before you judge. Can a collaborative governance system really be worse than the plutocratic, authoritarian, tyrannic demagoguery we have now?
True that. Those corporations pay their employees (sometimes cutely referred to as "politicians" and "government officials") good money to do as they are told.
No, I sincerely doubt this is some mysterious computer intelligence taking over our military.
BUT... this is clearly the path to skynet. What we are seeing is what pretty much all of us already understood: when you have increasingly autonomous killbots, disaster becomes a question of "when" not "if."
"with politicians already starting to choose to use tablets rather than bundles of papers in debates."
Research shows that when "debating" a political opponent, hitting them up side the head with an iPad is 55% more effective than hitting them up side the head with a bundle of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
One method proposed by Metagovernment is the Streetwiki, where neighbors validate each other. It's a little complex, but pretty darn solid. Basically, it is neighbors validating each other in a physical trust network.
The reason why the rich can bully the poor is partly because the rich tend to be politically proactive as opposed to reactive. A consensus system might help us get that 100% involvement, and it might not, but this system probably has the advantage there.
I am not arguing for utopian perfection; I am arguing for a vastly improved system. Consensus democracy is not about 100% participation. A consensus includes consent of everyone who does not participate. But one of many key differences from the status quo is that any individual at any moment can become active. You may feel that you have no need to be involved in the decisions about road-building in your community. But when suddenly people want to build a road through your favorite park, you may become interested. In collaborative governance, you can immediately step in and try to break the consensus. Compare that to your options in the status quo: 1. whine to your representative so they can ignore you or 2. vote against your representative only to find that he/she wins anyway or that the road has already been built.
What happens when a decision must be made but a consensus cannot be reached?
There is no such situation. If everyone agrees that a decision must be reached, then they already have one consensus, and they are just arguing over details of implementation. If there is no consensus about the need for action, then there should not be action.
Also, I simply don't trust that the average man knows enough to make an intelligent decision regarding every issue.
And yet politicians are the average man too. What distinguishes them from others? Only their desire to win an election and their ability to raise funds. I fail to see how this makes them better equipped to handle any decision. In fact, it makes them much worse at it.
By contrast, collaborative governance systems are deliberately designed to allow the best ideas to bubble to the top. They don't simply ask everyone to vote once and then abide by the decision. Rather, because consensus must be reached, they require that people really think hard through an iterative process about building a solution that will work for everyone. It favors the best ideas, not the most popular nor the most politically expedient.
So if everybody but the idiot who wants to play loud music at 3AM, then there shouldn't be a law because there's no consensus? Draw the line somewhere at 50, 75, 90 or 99% but yes, almost every law has to be forced upon some minority. And I don't mean just libertarian lack of laws, but NAMBLA blocking laws against child sex. What you call tyranny is what most others call civilized society and the rule of law. Total lack of forced rule is either anarchy or a fairy tale.
You are right that consensus is not about 100% assent, at least not in large communities. But which is worse? The 90% forcing their will on the 10% or the 51% forcing their will on the 49%? You present no alternative except the status quo, and I am being generous in describing it as 51/49. Collaborative governance is not utopian perfection: it is simply a heck of a lot better than the tyranny we have now.
The formal representatives would go away, but you can bet the politics won't.
Of course not. But it would still be better than having the politicians be in charge of the system. Again, not perfect... just better. A lot better.
Collaborative governance is not simply internet voting, where you vote once for an elected official. It is a continuous process of deliberation and voting directly on the issues.
The solutions for the particular concerns you bring up are non-anonymous voting (if you see that someone changed your vote, you can cry foul) and/or webs of trust and/or Distributed Administration Networks.
The whole concept of consensus decision-making works against demagoguery and reactionism. As long as there are still enough reasonable people around, then they can prevent hysteria from ruling the day. That is nothing like the stupid forms of direct democracy we have today, such as the referendum system in California. Nothing. Here's the long form.
Now as for there being a right answer that 99% of the people can't see... let's just say for the sake of argument that you are right. How is the status quo not much, much worse? Does Barak Obama or George W Bush or your city mayor or the president of your school board know what that right thing is? Policitians are the least likely to know what is right: the only thing they care about is what keeps them in power. Period. So how can it possibly be worse to have a consensus system?
Now to take issue with the idea of there being a right answer: if nobody thinks it is right, then how do you know it is right? Hindsight? Well, that's all we have in the status quo.
I still don't see what you are saying is better than collaborative governance. Totalitarianism by Jesus? That's just not an option.
The debate about anonymous voting in collaborative governance systems has been long and hard. You can see some of the summary here.
In the end, the way it is likely to work out is that our tools will be agnostic: they will allow for the deployers to allow, not allow, or require anonymity, and the real world will decide which works best in any particular community.
Go outside. Ask 1,000 people for directions to somewhere that they don't have a firm grasp exactly where is located. You'll get a bunch of answers. A few of them may be right, many of them will not be.
Your analysis assumes a static system, where you ask people a question and get an answer. Collaborative governance is a continuous process: consensus is never achieved at the outset: it is attained by debate, collaboration, and synthesis. All original proposals get rejected, and most subsequent ones do, until some genius comes up with something that actually works for everyone. That is something actually worthy of consensus.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner.
No, what you are describing is majority rule. It has nothing to do with consensus governance.
By comparison, I would describe our current system as three wolves charged with the safety of a thousand sheep. Guess what the wolves have for dinner every night??
First, your example is about national politics, while collaborative governance is intended to start at the very small level and scale up as people get used to it and as the software and systems mature.
Second, if people can't find a consensus, then they shouldn't have a law. Period. Are you saying it is better to force rule onto people? That's called authoritarianism and/or tyranny.
Third, consensus is much more possible when you take away the politicians and use a system which drives synthesis instead of conflict. See this earlier post, where this is discussed in more detail.
Fourth, you can't expect a Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist to "reach religious consensus" but you can get them to reach governance consensus by finding common ground. I'll bet you could get all four of them to agree that cold-blooded murder shouldn't be legal, for example.
Yes, we do nothing... yet.
To take your example, there are really good arguments against hate crime laws. As South Park put it, they say that it is much worse to commit a crime against someone who is different than someone who is like you. Why should the color of someone's skin make one murder worse than another?
What happens is you don't pass a law until you can come up with a new version that can get consensus. Instead of having some incredibly demagogic thing such as hate crime laws, maybe the minority could work with the majority to come up with a new kind of law that has to do with crimes of passion or something similar that isn't so racist. That removal of the race condition could then push it toward consensus and get a much, much better law passed in the end.
P.S. Now I will concede that consensus does not have to equal 100%. That may be unreasonable, since some people are truly deranged, etc. So as decisions scale to larger groups of people, the barrier for passage decreases. Metagovernment is still drafting what that formula would look like, but the latest iteration comes out to 100% for small groups and gradually declines to a flat 80% for extremely large groups. That 80% maybe should be upped to 90%, but that's a detail still in progress... the decision rule itself is still being debated. The current math is here: http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/User:ThomasvonderElbe/draft_rules
Supposing this is true (which I doubt is anything like universal), please explain how this is worse than the status quo.
In the status quo there isn't even anything like 80% consensus on anything. Rather there is usually 50% (or usually much less) which are imposing their will without even consulting the rest.
And in reality it is only the richest, most powerful, most influential, and most power-hungry who have nay (and thus complete) control.That's more like 1% imposing their will on the rest.
What about all the poor minorities who can't vote now because they're too busy working or too exhausted from work, or can't get to the polls, or get kept away from the polls by blockers (a real phenomenon practiced in the US currently), or get fooled into voting for the wrong candidate, or just don't give a damn about the election since their vote isn't going to make a real difference anyway, or just don't give a damn about the election because it's between two rich white guys who are completely owned by big business anyway, and so on....
Lack of direct access to a computer is not a real barrier to enfranchisement in collaborative governance:
It's a barrier but not a disenfranchisement.
First, the number of internet users is skyrocketing, especially now that tablets and smartphones are becoming so popular. Yes, that still excludes the poorest and most remote, but that margin is getting smaller all the time.
Second, the issue can be simply worked around by holding community meetings, with the direct purpose of enfranchising people. These meetings and related concepts are a core aspect of the movement for collaborative governance.
Third with delegation systems, people can delegate over longer periods, but still not be trapped with that delegate as they are with a "representative." Removing a delegation is as simple as traveling to the public library, logging in, and changing your settings.
What you have described is being developed and while it is still in alpha, it is at a high level of sophistication already. It is one of the key members of the Metagovernment project (mentioned in the OP), and it is called Votorola:
http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.xht
However, there are a couple of differences. First, Votorola is not anonymous. It is completely open and public. That gives participants 100% validation of their voting: nobody can steal or corrupt or hack or usurp your vote, because you can actually check on it at any time.
Second, Metagovernment and Votorola aren't interested in political parties. That's the status quo and it is full of corruption and massive barriers to participation. Instead, we're just making a completely new system which can replace the systems of the status quo slowly and from the ground up. This is a real-world approach we are enacting as soon as we have software that is suitable for communities to implement. It requires no buy-in from any political system: only that people start using it to govern their organizations.
Whether or not you agree with Votorola's or Metagovernment's approach, the Metagovernment would love to have your input and to see your project join with the many others that are collaborating on our list. To join, just sign up on:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org
and introduce yourelf.
The Greeks did not have computers, an internet, nor collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and concepts. These change things, and Greek direct democracy cannot be compared to the new forms being developed today.
The principle behind Metagovernment is that decisions are only made when there is a consensus. This means that mob rule and tyranny of the majority is impossible. Just because 80% of the people want it at that moment doesn't mean it's right... wait until almost everyone is on board, and you know you have found something good.
Now consensus might sound like an impossible goal, but it really isn't. The reason it is so hard to achieve these days is because we have a two-party system where each side benefits from distinguishing themselves from the others: in other words, they abhor a consensus. They thrive on conflict, and play up stupid issues to keep us divided.
When we mature beyond political parties, a consensus system will not be that hard to deal with. This is because collaborative governance tools are designed to push people toward consensus by helping them to find common ground. Without the interruption of politicians, this is not only possible, but truly wonderful. Synthesis is a much, much better form of decision-making than compromise.
You may ask what do we do if we can't find consensus? The answer is obvious: nothing! There is no reason to make a law if society isn't in consensus on it. That is the road to tyranny, suppression, and everything else bad in government. Real government of, by, and for the people must be about all of the people. If something is so urgent that it must be dealt with, then people will find a way to come to consensus... or else they don't really even agree on the urgency, do they?
The projects in Metagovernment have put a lot of thought into their systems, and some of them are extremely sophisticated. As they mature and gain adoption, they will mature. The fact that there are many different projects means that the real-world marketplace of ideas will pick the best solution going forward, providing yet another check on their potential to fail.
Now I am sure you can find some imperfections in all of this, but compare it to the status quo before you judge. Can a collaborative governance system really be worse than the plutocratic, authoritarian, tyrannic demagoguery we have now?
True that. Those corporations pay their employees (sometimes cutely referred to as "politicians" and "government officials") good money to do as they are told.
No, I sincerely doubt this is some mysterious computer intelligence taking over our military.
BUT... this is clearly the path to skynet. What we are seeing is what pretty much all of us already understood: when you have increasingly autonomous killbots, disaster becomes a question of "when" not "if."
If somebody buys IP space, then there is a money trail and other identifiers.
How could criminals purchase blocks outright?
This article is really making me question everything.
Perhaps all politicians should be "put to the test."
"with politicians already starting to choose to use tablets rather than bundles of papers in debates."
Research shows that when "debating" a political opponent, hitting them up side the head with an iPad is 55% more effective than hitting them up side the head with a bundle of paper.
A Saturn V that carries a Space Shuttle.
You might be on to something... perhaps all journalism should be expressed in D&D terms.
Weather: there is a 2d6 chance of rain today...
Traffic: looks like a car had an unfortunate random encounter with tractor trailer on the...
Sports: X clearly has an advantage in Strength, but Y has a full three points higher Dexterity, which...
The possibilities are limitless!
No, it's Amoral.
There's a difference, as noted above. Look it up.
Just FYI. :)
Somehow they have managed to elicit images of both "pizza face" and "crater face" at the same time. Niiice.