Shorttalks Metagov 20231213
Speaker 1: Hi. Hello, everybody. Welcome to, this week's MediGov seminar. Today is December 13, 02/2023, And this is the final, MediGov short talk seminar for the year. The short talk series is a monthly seminar that, features members of our community who are working on projects or are interested in a particular governance question or just wanna share an article that they're really interested...
Top Keywords
- essay 0.007
- bigotry 0.007
- prejudice 0.006
- fractal 0.006
- protected identities 0.006
- protected 0.005
- identities 0.005
- need 0.005
- nuno 0.004
- group 0.004
- diversity 0.004
- liaisons 0.004
Transcript
Hi. Hello, everybody. Welcome to, this week's MediGov seminar. Today is December 13, 02/2023, And this is the final, MediGov short talk seminar for the year. The short talk series is a monthly seminar that, features members of our community who are working on projects or are interested in a particular governance question or just wanna share an article that they're really interested in. Today, we are joined by Greg Cassell as well as Gaikato, also known as Nuno. Greg will be talking to us about a piece that they're working on called Beyond Bigotry, Inclusive Cultural Policy, and Nuno will be talking to us about fractal democracy. Nuno is currently unable to be here at the start of the seminar, but will hopefully be joining us a little later. So we'll be starting with Craig. The format is seven minutes of presentation and then fifteen minutes of discussion. I will, in the past, I've had a kind of nice, OBS background setup so that we could sort of see where we are in the time, but my current setup doesn't allow for that. So, I'm just gonna do the old, like, analog, but not really analog, posting of messages into the Slack chat, when we have, a two minute warning and one minute warning. So if you're presenting, please just keep an eye on that. And then I will also be moderating the discussions. So if you have questions, comments, things that you wanna discuss, please feel free to type those in the chat during the presentations and after. And if you would prefer to simply, voice your comment, or question, you can just type the word stack, s t a c k, in the chat, and I will add you to the list of speakers. If there are any questions about the format or anything else, feel free to message me in the Zoom chat as well, and I can, address those there. So, with that, I'll pass it over to Greg, who will give our first short talk presentation.
Thank you. Hi, everyone, and thanks for being here. I'm Greg Castle. My last name's pronounced like the historic building. I'll be discussing the essay, which I'm linking in the chat window now, and I will screen share that a little bit too. And for those who don't know me, I've been working in governance and community community management for about ten years now, and that was a big life change for me at a very intense new calling. And I've been in involved in lots of, related projects and community since then, and I'm currently a governance consultant for Commons Engine and for its recurve project. So I would like to screen share a bit, and let's get that started. For first, I wanna give just a little bit of good policy and governance context on this Beyond Dignity essay. So I've developed this large set of open source, governance resources called Inclusive Organizing, including a stack of recipes here. And one of these the key recipes here is called Inclusive cultural covenant, which I have open here. And this is meant to be a practical practical policy for governing all types of communities using any types of technologies, spoken, written, and or digital. And, one of the key components here is a pledge of community with a a fairly distinctive point. We focus on each other's actions instead of supposed character, motivations, and intentions, unless they invite us to discuss the latter. We've been using a principle like that in my communities for since 2013. And that gets pretty close to the heart of looking beyond bigotry, I I think. Looking at actions, focusing on actions that people take. Another key component here is prohibited actions, and the first two of these relate pretty closely to protected identities. Number one, of course, threatening, inciting, or performing violence. And number two, characterizing anyone's personality or behavior, positively or negatively, by the way, on the basis of protected identities such as their national origin, ethnicity, color, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or medical condition. And these are general protected identities and, many or most legal jurisdictions. Although I think that, by the way, that specific projects and communities can be a little more ambitious than this, but I consider this to be practically the least common denominator of protected identities. So the key point of the, Beyond Bigotry essay, which I will switch to now, is to establish such culture and policy very consistently. And so the Beyond Bigotry essay, the overview includes the the core premise. We urgently need to build inclusive culture by marginalizing all bigotry in our teams and communities. And towards the end of the overview, I've I pretty much define what I mean by marginalizing bigotry. Establish general policies against bigotry, but also develop dedicated channels and activities as needed to explore such difficult topics. Next, the essay has some technical definitions just to try to clear up any misunderstandings of the intentions here, and then a section called factional polarization. Now this section, this is so all social theory, and I think it all makes sense and is actually very useful, although it's not strictly necessary for developing a policy and its bigotry. So I'd be I'd be happy to discuss this social theory anytime. The key idea is that the far right and the far left, as I described them, have gotten increasingly polarized, causing, these key polarized problems that are key focal points of this essay because I think they're highly relevant to governance and community management. Number one, the tolerance of intolerance. The far right has come to openly tolerate and sometimes even celebrate lots of forms of intolerance, including sexism and racism. And I think this is a a relatively well known problem in the mainstream population, although it's an often overlooked issue. By contrast, punch up prejudice. This is a neologism. I coined this term based on this concept of punching upwards, which is fairly well known in comedy, and I think it's actually a super useful social principle in general. The idea that you criticize or you make fun of powerful people, groups, or the identities of people who tend to be powerful, you know, you you comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable. You show compassion and fairness towards those who have less power. I think that's a generally wise principle, but I argue that this desire to punch upwards becomes predictably toxic, punch up prejudice whenever it's seriously aimed at people well, at protected identities per se or at individuals because they hold those protected identities such as white male, cisgender, or whatever happens to be privileged in a specific context. I think this is a huge problem
that has been grossly overlooked outside of the far right, where I
think that problem is actually often used as an excuse for sexism, racism racism, and other well defined types of bigotry. So developing the main point of this essay is the idea that we must consistently marginalize all punch up prejudice as well as sexism, racism, and other well known types of bigotry. Next, the essay and I'll breeze through this because, of course, we need to leave time for discussion. Affirmations of injustice. Here are some cultural points that I think are overlooked or denied by many conservative people, especially the far right. And I think these points are crucially important to building inclusive cultural bridges for the future, the idea that there is a lot of identity related injustice in the world. Next, there's a section called exploring contra prejudice, which these points, by contrast, they're often, I think, overlooked by liberal people people and especially in the identity politics of the far left. And the idea that privilege is contextual, and, actually, there's a lot of conversation we need to have. And the key point of this section and one of the key points of this whole essay is is the idea that punch of prejudice feeds the new vicious cycle, that it actually feeds to the growth of the far right, and it's actually very deeply counterproductive because it feeds more of the the very behaviors that we dislike soon. So the final section of this essay is called breaking the cycle bridging divides with a few key points, trying to focus on actually getting things done positively. Number one, develop inclusive standards, and this references the tyranny of structurelessness, which, by the way, is my absolute number one reading recommendation as a governance specialist. It's an essay from 1971, I think. Joe Freeman. Not a super long read. Please read it if you haven't. Please reread it if you've already read it. Number two, marginalized wedge terms. And this has one of the longer footnotes endnotes of the document, because I think that wedge terms confuse deeply confuse and complicate a lot of online discussions where people are using the same word in a very different way, and it just makes a total mess. And for it it's very counterproductive for specific conversations and can even ruin relationships that aren't well grounded already. Number three, discuss discuss difficult topics responsibly. And this particularly particularly goes into this idea of dedicated channels and activities, although most of that's in in an end note. And it's key territory for me lately, the idea that we have to responsibly package these dedicated channels and activities, for issues which are important, but they're excessively noisy or risky or off topic for our general community channels. And the last point being focused on community positively, and collaboration is key, I think, for building all types of relationships and communities. So that's my whirlwind tour of the essay per se. There are some fairly extensive end notes, references, and links. I want to note, as I wrap up, that I hope to develop an inclusive team to publish new versions of this and to link multiple sources of commentary to it, you know, in addition to these end notes that I wrote, and to have more discussions like today because this is a crucially important topic to me. Thanks for listening.
Awesome.
Thank you, Greg. Really enjoyed the presentation, and now we can open it up for discussion. So I can maybe start. There's no comments yet in the chat if and then if people wanna, say something, just tip stack or, post a comment there. I'm curious to hear a little bit about kind of the motivations for, making this document, if there's anything that you can kind of point to as a kind of catalyst for this work.
A lot of things. Yeah. This is something I've just I've been developing the need, I think, to write this essay for a period of years, and I finally realized that I've gotta do it in the summer. I guess that most of it started in 2013 when I started moderating public Facebook groups that discussed very, very controversial, difficult political and social topics focused on The United States Of America. And I did that up to, like, the twenty sixteen election. So there were often a lot of very heated discussions, and we had a very hard time, moderating those discussions. But, you know, this was part of my development as a community management and governance person. And meanwhile, you know, I've been Buddhist for many years and I also studied nonviolent communication and compassionate communication as I was going through this community management and governance initiation over a period of years. So so in all of this I've seen, you know, obviously I've seen quite a lot of the the tolerance of intolerance and the racism, the sexism, etcetera, that I pull out in this essay. But I've also seen from the beginning for years and years what I've now, you know, coined the term punch out prejudice of, where, people sometimes I think act with extreme prejudice towards people who are, have the typically privileged identities such as white male and cisgender. And, it's important for me to note in this that it's always been really complicated because lots of times people are, I think, showing extreme and unfair prejudice towards those types of people mixed in with actually very valid criticisms of, horrible things that have happened involving people with those identities. People who have been rightfully called out in public or who have been convicted of crimes, etcetera, or maybe people who have incited insurrections at The US Capitol, etcetera, things like this. You know, I've I've seen, I think, all sides of this, like, at least all of the sides I can imagine, and I've always seen this idea this idea that it's intensely counterproductive to feed intolerance and prejudice and bigotry with the same thing. I think it's it's it adds fuel to the fire. It's very counterproductive and I feel more and more urgency. It's quite a lot of urgency where I felt like I need to write this now because I feel like, you know, the world is increasingly unstable and unpredictable with all the technological changes going on, with the unsustainability of our fossil fuel based economy, with the rise of AI, with all of the international turmoil, etcetera. There are a lot of risk factors for a systemic collapse. And I think, that building an inclusive culture is absolutely mandatory just as the starting point for us to build relationships and communities which cert not only survive all of this, but adapt very creatively and thrive.
Yeah. Great. Thanks, Greg. Daniel. Daniel on Zoom with only Daniel as their username?
Yeah. Yeah. Two thoughts. One, I I really appreciate that overview. It seems like a very high quality essay. I had two sort of thoughts. One, I think that to your earlier point, bell hooks actually makes a really good argument along these lines in the will to change about how many of the early feminists themselves of white women were looking at their husbands and fathers, generally very powerful people, and then extending their conclusions to all men, even men for whom that's not the reality. So Bell Hooks makes the same argument. If you're looking for a reference, that's a really strong one. The second thing in my question is, what do you think about protected classes as a construct? Right? They're clearly a legal category. They have been at their own history. Are they useful? Are they an impediment? Are they sort of useful? You mentioned they're a common denominator, which I think sounds about right. But I I kinda wanted you to expand more on on how you on on how you feel about that.
Yeah. Thank you for asking about that. That is a complicated subject. I actually and I've got three key definitions near the top of the essay, one of which is protected identity. And I tried to address some of the complexity of that here because they are constructs, certainly. The ones that I named directly and screen shared, these are the ones that are typically protected in quite a lot of legal jurisdictions, although as we know, not everywhere in the world. And I think these are pretty nearly the least common denominator of what we ought to be protecting to build inclusive and healthy communities. But just because they're legally protected in some places doesn't mean we can rely on those legal legal structures because I'm one of those people who thinks that we're ending the we're nearing the end of nation state politics actually of this idea that the world is governed by a coercive territorial governance over huge geographic regions. And, you know, I think we need to create society that looks beyond that towards more, consent based, voluntary relationships between people, in a distributed sense, certainly as long as digital technology holds out. We can build, relationships, between people all over the world like this. We can also do it in a very local way, in a way that's very specific to a family, to a neighborhood, to a farm, etcetera. But anyway, I think that we're ending the we're nearing the end of the nation state politics maybe, but whether we are or are in every project and every community, I think, needs to stand up for their own cultural values and enforce them. You know, like, for example, just because Facebook or Discord, etcetera, they've got policies that include these protected classes, doesn't mean that we can rely on them because they don't handle it effectively or appropriately. We have to do it in each team and each community and establish it directly and define the protected identities directly, and that's listed in the key definitions section. Yeah. Basically speak I don't wanna use up too much time on this, but the my gen generic idea is that you should define something as a protected identity if you can afford to and should protect that identity for the sake of the identity and the the mission of your community or your project. Okay? It's kind of like this litmus test of established, like, if you can afford to, like, and that that that become that gets really wonky. But, basically, it's about creating a sustainable governance policy here. Like, the people that actually moderate and administrate and enforce the rules you have that it's actually practical for them to to enforce that, which may or may not be possible with certain values that we would prefer to consistently embody throughout our community. Hopefully, I haven't muddied that subject too much, but I'd love to talk about it in greater depth.
Great. Thank you both. We have four people on the stack and about seven more minutes for discussion. So we'll turn to Aike and then Steve, Seth, and Daniel. Just in the interest of getting to everyone, if you can keep your question and responses brief, that would be appreciated, and there will also be a thread for continuing discussion afterwards on Slack. Okay?
Yeah. My question well, my question and comment as well would be in The US, I'm, you know, I'm outside The US and I travel a lot. But what I observe in The US, there's always an, people advocate for diversity. And the argument is that, you know, if you're diverse, then you have supposedly different thoughts. You can have people complementing, each other. But it seems to me that either diversity is not defined at all or if it would be defined, it would be defined solely on identity, meaning on gender, on race. And my argument would be, isn't diversity a good thing in case you have people from different schools, from different backgrounds, no matter if they're all white or they're all black or they're all male or they're all female? While I see in The US, to me, it seems like you have people that are all Ivy League school graduates. They're all of a similar background, but you want to make sure that they're black and they're white and they're Asian and they're female and you have some LGBTQ. And does that not directly go against another thing that you said at the beginning of your presentation, which is you shouldn't make any assumption based on gender or race? Yeah. So, you know, what's your point of view? Because because I see it a bit different from the Anglo American point of view that I guess most of you would share.
Yeah. That's another very deep and important subject. When we talk about diversity and policy and organizations, academic institutions and corporations, etcetera, in The United States in particular. There's been a history of thought on this subject. And some of the older history, which a lot of us definitely shunned from, I think rightfully criticized, is anything to do with the concept that we usually call quotas or, you know, mandatory percentages of people of different backgrounds, being, put into positions because, okay, this is how we supposedly ensure fairness or diversity is by making sure that there's a certain percentage of people of these different types of backgrounds or protected identities. Right? Well, a lot of us, including me, I think, think that quotas per se are a bad idea, that they it it's an algorithm or a formula that can cause a lot of problems. But but part of this essay does go into the subject of diversity. There's a point in the, in the, affirmations of injustice. We must develop diverse culture. And, I make the point of I think diversity is urgently important for developing teams and communities with shared intelligence and wisdom. Now, I think to do that you have to often work to try to center identities which have, whether intentionally or not, been marginalized by the historic development of teams and communities. You have to kind of overcome the de facto prejudice and de facto injustice that emerged in, over generations at times, I think. But you have to do that organically based on relationships and, where you put your conversational energy and and, focus instead of trying to impose a quota. And I'm afraid that's about all I can say about it concisely because it's such a complex subject, but does that, address some of your, curiosity?
Can I just ask a very, very quick follow-up question? Thank you. I have twin sons. Actually, it's a lesbian friend of mine. So I helped her. So I kind of have co parent relationship. You have twins. She's black. One of the sons looks almost exactly like me, white with blue eyes. The other one is black. Genetically the same. Mhmm. So under the diversity rules, would you say treated differently? Because one is black and maybe that's what what a team wants and the other one should be treated differently because it's he is white.
I think each one of us needs to make our own decisions about what's most important to us in each, relationship and each, strategy that we have to build a team or a community. But, you're rightfully noting that the genetics there are practically identical. I mean, one of the important things here to note is that the concept of race itself is is a social construct and it was scientifically invalidated a long time ago, you know, that genetics occur in a continuum. And that's one of the issues we deal with when we deal with real racism and real sexism and etcetera is people who don't get that fact that that race is actually a social construct. But, I wouldn't recommend people to treat those individuals differently, except that, you know, we have to understand every body because of the way that they look or they present in life, they're likely to face different cultural influences and pressures and challenges, etcetera. And it's important to recognize those issues, I think, as we build our relationships, And to include that in our thinking, and it's very deeply complex. But, yeah, I think it's important to build diversity. And just to clarify, I know we need to wrap up soon. I do need to point out I agree entirely with you. Diversity of thought, of ideas, etcetera, is super important regardless of everything else. So it's my my position would be that we need to develop diversity of protected identities plus diversity of thought and of creative ideas.
Great. Thank you, Greg. Just a reminder in the interest of getting to everyone, if there are follow-up questions, please post them in the Slack or, come back into the Slack queue. There are many more questions for Greg, which is great. It's always nice when people are interested in someone's presentation. I will share a link to the discussion thread, in the Slack while, we have our next presenter presenting. So next is, Nuno. In fact, Nuno, I've I've never actually said your name out loud. So if I'm mispronouncing it, please just correct me during your
intro No. No. No. No. It's okay. No. No. It's okay.
Okay. No. No. Super. Amazing. I'm gonna pass it over to you. I will as I mentioned earlier, I'll type in the chat when there's a two minute and one minute warning. So if you can keep your eye on the chat while you present, that would be really helpful. Great. I'm seeing it's Dinner.
First of all, can you guys hear me well and see me well?
Yes. Perfectly.
K. Because, unfortunately, I was not able to arrive home while I had my presentation, so I'm doing this from a park in the company of some ducks, which I can show you. I'm in the company of some friends. So yeah. I I guess this is how we are going to end the Meta Golf two thousand and twenty three sessions. So I'm going to talk about, fractal democracy. And, it it I don't know where where to start because this is such a simple concept. At the same time, I believe very disruptive. So the basic idea and I'm sorry. I don't have an well, there's an airplane now going on. I'm sorry. I don't have a slide to back up what I'm saying, but please bear with me. Imagine you have 10 friends, a group of 10 people, and sometimes you get together and you discuss your, your life. And from these sessions, someone takes notes of what you are discussing between the 10 of you. And after some time, let's say, a year of discussions and writing the problems that each one has, you have you have written a document, and you elect a a leader. You elect a rep a representative through voting between the 10 of you. And then what happens next is that another group of 10 people do the same thing. They discuss between themselves the problems they have. They write it down, and at the end of some time, they also elect a representative for them. And then these representatives that were elected, they form a new group of 10 people only from elect elected representatives. And if you do this and you iterate six times, you do six iterations, you can cover an entire nation. With just groups of 10 people discussing amongst themselves. That's why it's called fractal, because the basic unit is always a group of 10 people. While because this rotates and they elect a representative and this form new groups of 10 people, you can cover an entire population, an entire nation of millions of people with just groups of 10. And this is fractal democracy. And this has not been tried ever And let the exception is a group, Ed and it's called Ed and Oz. It's a DAO. They've been trying to do this for a couple of time already. They've been doing online they've been doing this online. They do online sessions. They do breakout rooms. They separate people in groups of 10. They make their discussions. They elect a leader between the group of 10, and this creates new groups of 10, so on, so on, so on. And this is called the fractal democracy. And I believe this is my belief. If we were able to do this, a lot of problems in our society would be gone because we would be discussing with each other our problems, our issues, and we would would be communicating between us. It's very hard to make this a meaningful discussion with millions of people. It's it's almost impossible. So we need to design new ways to make these discussions, and that's where fractal democracy comes in. I hope I was clear enough, and I'm sorry I don't have the slides. I will be posting some pictures when I arrive home from the concept. It's very simple concept. But if you have any questions, please come forward, and I'll try to clarify as much as I can.
Great. Thank you, Nuno.
Yeah.
Great. Yeah. So we have plenty of time for discussion. It's a very nice short presentation. There are some requests for links to information about the factorial democracy and the specific DAO that you mentioned. So feel free to check the chat for that. And I'm curious, maybe I can kind of start with a question while other people are formulating their thoughts and typing, them in the chat. But I'm curious how I guess two things. One, I mean, why 10, in in terms of, I mean, I know groups that are eight people and they they they still struggle to get quorum or to get enough people in the same room to make a decision. 10 seems like a large number. And I'm also curious how you would distinguish the kind of fractal structure that you're describing from something like sociocracy where there are circles and link delegations between those circles.
Yeah. For sure there for sure, I believe this is social sociocracy you've been talking about the circles. It could be something very similar. I mean, no one is inventing the wheel here, so maybe other people, they have already thought of this and given a different name. Yes. As to why 10 and not 12 and not eight, I don't think there is any specific and good reason. I always like to come back to the Dunbar number, and the Dunbar number says that our close friends are always 15 in number. So more than 15 members, I don't think it's good for a for a circle, for a fractal. And then, yeah, I always use the I always like to come back to the Dunbar theory to for this kind of questions. Why 10? Why not some other number?
Okay. Thank you. Seth?
Hi there. Thank you, Amir. Yeah. So this idea has been invented lots of times. It's been proposed in many ways. I agree with the the appeal, and and it's exciting to hear that there's a group that's invested in implementing it. The the kind of big design problems it introduces in my mind that I'm really eager to learn more about from the people experiencing it are, you know, when you especially if you're choosing a small number, like, 10 rather than 100, which you can see in in other designs, you get a lot of layers if you're serving, you know, say, a population of million people. What is that? That's six levels. So that's a lot of levels of filtering where you're gonna introduce a lot of time delays and a lot of information loss. If the entire group of of of 1,000,000 I don't know. How many groups is that? Gosh. Well, it's order
You you you need you need six
a thousand groups. You you need six levels?
Log at something. Exactly.
You need more or less six levels to reach a nation nation.
Sure. Sure. Sure. So so, yeah, that's that's
a lot of overhead, a lot
of decision overhead, a huge amount of decision overhead, and a lot of time and a lot of loss. And so I'd be so what you need is, I presumably, a use of technology to streamline decision making and other stuff. Problem one. Problem two is response to shocks. We know that federal federalisms, multilevel governance systems, have a problem in response to shocks of either fracturing or centralizing. And those middle levels are very fragile in these kinds of multilevel designs. So what are the sort of approach or thought or extra like, I mean, I like what you introduced. You kind of introduced, like, slide one of this issue in my mind, and I'm I'm I'm sort of asking the slide 10 questions, which is this doesn't solve this brings up more problems than it solves. And and what are you seeing right now and experiencing in terms of problems and in terms of potential solutions? Thank you.
Thank you for posing the questions. Unfortunately, I don't think I have the answers to your questions other than my personal view. So my personal view is we are talking about the highly experimental social game. This has never really been tried, so I'm not sure how this overhead because we are talking about six six iterations to reach nation state, six iterations. I think it's and, you as a member of a base layer group of 10, you you will always keep track of your upper level representative, because it's just six people above you on the fractal. So there will always be this connection to the people who are above you, unlike traditional politics where you have absolutely no idea where these guys are coming from. So what I'm saying is this is highly experimental, and maybe this overhead you're talking, maybe it it wouldn't happen. Anyhow, anyhow, even if it does, my personal approach is to mix different solutions. So for example, I also advocate for the sortition, a citizen assemblies, random sortitions. I think we can combine citizen assemblies, random sortition, with fractal democracy and have both systems running in parallel. And if one has a problem, such as the fracture, the the sudden decision that we need to make, and we need to reach consensus quickly, how are you going to do this with the fractal system? Maybe the citizen assemblies step in, and they provide a quick fix. And when citizen assemblies, their randomness is not enough to represent the people because it's by sortition, then the fractal aspects can come to to to play and and give more meaningful answers. So I don't know if this is a a good answer to your questions. I appreciate them, and they are interesting. It's my perspective.
Yes. Great. Thank you. Yes. I see you, Steve. And, in fact, you're next up on the stack. So go ahead.
Excellent. Because I'm about to explode. So first of all, with regards to Seth, do you call this
a
a affinity groups and, like, a spokes council system? That's how I would that's the most common way I know of it.
Interesting. No. Those aren't the names that that I've stumbled on.
I'm interested I'm interested in finding out what your other names are because I have thought about these systems quite extensively myself.
Eric Eric Fromm, I think, has a articulation of it. I gotta
dig it up. Dig it up. Yeah. Please. Please. I would call this I think you might be conceiving it as the wrong way. It's not for making decisions moment to moment. It's more about finding other people that you agree with about certain things and then getting one person who represents you so that you can essentially be a voting block who then can come together with voting blocks to, elect a representative for them and so on and so forth. So it's more like, rather than decision making, it's about power. It's about being able to exert much like lobbyists in congress can exert their power. This is a way that citizens can exert their power through this hierarchy up to whatever level. So in other words, you could, for example, do things like, let's get to the sortation thing. Combining the two systems through sortation, you have to have to any 10 people get together in order to sort of give up their power to participate in the sortation to one person. That way, you already have a single level of filtering of quality before you get to the sortition process. So that's one way to combine them. Let's see. The other ways you could do it, like, let's say you needed a you wanted to do a local council. You could say, take all the people who assemble each other in groups of 10 within a community. Those would be then the level one liaisons. The level one liaisons, let's say there's 10,000 people at community, there would then be, say, 1,000 level one liaisons, but then there would be two level 10 liaisons, and maybe the three level 10 liaisons would be the city council who could then share power by swapping it around. So at the same time, you could have different level three liaisons, which then go on to represent at the state level. So you could essentially still have this one liaison that comes together for 10 people be connected not to just one six pathway of six going up, but multiple pathways of, you know, two or three in this direction for the local direct government or four or five up to the state government or the provincial government. See what I'm saying? So, yeah, I thought about this, and, I mean, I don't even know what I've written on it lately, but, yeah, I we could definitely talk because I've thought of all sorts of applications.
Great. Nuno, did you wanna respond to this, or should we move on to Garrett?
I I will think, I must just say, other than we can exchange contacts in Slack and keep up with each other's work, as I said, my personal belief again is that we need to experiment. If we don't experiment, we are never going to know if this works, if it this doesn't work, if it has some overhead, which you cannot
The point
is there's
just a lot of parameters that we can tweak in those experiments. That's all.
It's it's more simple than you may imagine. It's it's just 10 people getting together, discussing things, and then saying, okay. You are going to represent the 10 of us. Mhmm. See you soon. And then this guy goes to another group of 10 and and and and repeats the same process. And you can cover an entire population with six iterations. This this scales exponentially. You don't need to to repeat this process, I believe, if you need them to cover everybody. You need six six iterations. And because you start with a group of 10 close by, you know who you are talking to. You know who these 10 people are. And and when you say you represent us, this you is someone who probably is your friend. Okay? And there is a proximity level to this, which you don't we don't have in politics today. Today, it comes some guy, he drops in a parachute from an airplane and he's going to be the next president, and who who is this guy? It's a whole different game. This is my opinion. But let's keep in touch and exchange our findings through Slack and and learn from each other. Because this is some we we are creating together as we move forward.
Great. Thank you both. Okay. Right now, I have to Garrett and then Craig. Mhmm.
Okay. Cool. Unmute button worked. Yeah. So it's just for for the project I'm working on, we have a a slightly different model of it. And I guess the the focus that we have is more about not the power sharing who a a person is giving the power to, but how those different agenda items even come up for discussion, you know, which which questions get to take space and precedent in the room. So for an example, if I'm, you know, set amongst a group of my 10 peers, if I don't know what question or what decision is going to be made, I don't know whom I would give that power to. And having a way to know what the topic is, what what the parameters are beforehand seems crucial to being able to do something like that. And and so the the where the idea of sortition, like, yes, please, and thank you, because then we're hopefully focusing more on, like, a group feel as opposed to just, you know, the cult of personality. And and while I hear the part about the Dunbar's number, which is that, you know, you do need to have an intimate acquaintance with a person for the sake of of personal choices and relationships, I do wonder if when we're talking about policy and administrative sort of stuff, if you wouldn't maybe rather have anonymity and to a certain extent as opposed to, you know, close personal relationships if you're looking to do something at the scale of, say, you know, counties, I mean, let alone nation states?
That that's an interesting question. I can imagine very easily a group of 10 people, they find any animosity between themselves. I forgot to mention one aspect, which is the leader is supposed to rotate every after a certain time, let's say, in year. So everybody of the group of 10, at some point, has the chance to be the representative of the group. So everybody has that opportunity. But, yeah, to to answer you the specific question you pointed, I don't know. Maybe you can quit your group and join another one. I don't know. But my my point, guys, and I'll end my my presentation with Metagoth today here by saying this, we need to experiment. We need to try new things. The whole system is not working, and it's not going to get better. And why not try to get group of of 10 friends, close friends, family maybe, discuss our lives, our problems, write it down, and say, you you represent us. Go go go preach our problems to to some to some other group, and then come back to us and tell us what you found. And you're not alone in this. Next year, it's me who's going to take your place. But, yeah, maybe I'm dreaming too much. Maybe I'm too much of a dream into believing this is possible. And, yeah, thank you anyhow, guys, for listening to me. It has been a pleasure, and, yeah, go meta gov.
Niro, there's there's interest in, one more question from Craig if you have time.
I don't
know if you had to go right now.
I'm listening. I'm listening.
Ah, okay. Super. Nice. Okay. Great. One minute. Go ahead.
Not really a question, but, of course, I would encourage feedback from Nuna. I think this idea of multiple levels of representation can potentially work for some issues at least, but there are definitely lots of challenges and risks, and we've identified some of them here. For example, I think sortition per se is good and it's actually very tried and true in my opinion. And for example, creating criminal trial juries, we could make unanimous decisions amongst themselves, among peers who are usually strangers. I think it works very well generally compared to the alternatives. However, one of my key beliefs is that power tends to corrupt, especially over time. So I think it when we're appointing people to be representatives on any issue, it's generally better for it to be single issue and short term term representation, and there's still always a risk of mediated or filtered relationships. And I think the longer someone remains appointed as the representative, the riskier it gets. The the power will corrupt. And not necessarily that they're turning into that person, that they get numb to the to the the privilege that they have in that social context. So another issue is decision standards. I wanna know I believe strongly in consent based social process as much as possible. We're super majority voting, just to be very clear about it. I think majoritarian decision making in general outside of extreme emergencies is very toxic, actually, that it deeply favors competitive factionalism, and I think we've got plenty of evidence of that. So that's my critical concerns, but I do appreciate, you know, the desire to experiment, especially at least on the level of 10, acquaintances or friends.
I wouldn't have much to add other than, for example, I also use online voting. I'm I'm I'm part of a startup that works on online voting. So when I said sortition, I meant I didn't I meant as in citizen assemblies, which is a mini public thing. It's more about it's a different it's a different governance thing. What I meant is this what I'm proposing here is just a tool. It's not a solution to our problems. It's just some it's just another way to these things, which can fix some of the problems we have, not everything. I just want to be clear on this.
Great. Thank you, Daniel. Neil and, everyone who participated in the discussion today. I am sharing a link as in to our Slack where you can continue discussions with our presenters today. Yeah. Thank you all very much. As is our tradition, I invite you all to turn off your turn on your camera and turn on your microphone. And on the count of three, give our presenters a round of applause. So in three, two, one. Amazing. Yes. Thank you all. And, again, very nice to hear from everyone in the community. Hope to see more discussion next week or sorry, in the Slack. And then next week will be our final seminar of the year. And then we'll have a two week break before we resume seminars in January. So hope to see as many of you as possible next week. Until then, I'll see you in the Slack. Bye, everybody.