Democracy is always advertised as a political tool to be used within jurisdictions; largest being federal and smallest being municipality.
Why stop there?
This project imagines what it would be like to implement different versions of democracies (representative, direct, weighted) within small scale communities.
We know how voting works; we are given a question and we submit our answers. But who decides on the questions?
To achieve direct democracy without any representatives or leaders, we must find a protocol through which the questions are decided on.
In the proposed model, the first stage of voting involves people submitting questions, or issues. People must first vote on, and help organize the submissions. This phase will help merge duplicates & provoke discussion among people until consensus is reached.
Example:
+9 votes: "Which equipment should we share in the studio?"
-3 votes: "How dank is my skank"
The threshold values for deciding on consensus can be a function of time (deadline), participation (if all members have voted), and any other metric.
The top few submissions make it to the second stage of voting, where people submit & vote on what the multiple choice options for this question should be.
Example:
[keep] [drop] Amps 9 votes
[keep] [drop] Guitars 5 votes
[keep] [drop] Cables 7 votes
[keep] [drop] Pedals 7 votes
[keep] [drop] Lighters -3 votes
[ submit new option ]
Each option is submitted by a user.
At this stage, when a user votes on an option, they are NOT voting FOR the option -- they are voting to say this option should be one of the listed options in the final ballot.
The threshold values for deciding on consensus can be a function of time (deadline), participation (if all members have voted), and any other metric.
Once consensus is reached, the third stage is the actual voting round.
Which equipment should we share in the studio?
Select all you prefer sharing:
[ ] Amps [ ] Guitars [ ] Cables [ ] Pedals
The voting results are live-reported as people submit their answers.
People are free to change their answers at any point.
The winning choices don't need to be declared winner; users are free to look at the history of how consensus has changed over time as new votes came in or old voters changed their answers.
Most likely, I would expect consensus to change over time, so I would advise declaring consensus only after the final voter choice stays stable for a certain period of time.
There are many opportunities to view the voting results as different projections.
Filters can be applied for the votes to gain insight; e.g. showing results only from your immediate trust circle.
In weighted democracies, the idea would be to give more voting power to people trusted in the community.
Trust can be given community-wide, or per topic. For example, users might show their trust in someone with expertise in recording equipment by rewarding them the #recording tag, which can be attached to questions or issues; giving them more say in recording matters.
There can be different methods for accepting new members into the community.
A community can be closed to new members, be invite only, or be fully open to the public.
Ultimately, users of the community could even vote on whether or not they want a new member to gain voting powers, stay as a spectator, or be denied access.
There are many opportunities for determining the trustworthiness of users by looking at their track-record of helping curate content, and also by collecting feedback from other users -- especially the more trusted ones.
Furthermore, alternate flavors of democracy could easily be adopted by slow evolution.
The members of a community, putting high trust in one specific member, could elect them as a "representative". Then the community could vote on giving the representative absolute power in certain matters, which would be a graceful transition into a more authoritative mode of governance, which can be beneficial in some situations. If a leader was to abuse their power, it would be trivial for unsatisfied members to either vote their power away, or split off and form a new democratic (or not) community.
Each community would be given the chance to explore different methods for managing user reputations, voting power, and consensus mechanisms. All this can change over time; via voting.
Let's assume the small-scale democracy model, which involves the above described models for voting & reputation, proves itself useful for helping communities reach consensus with written rules. This would ultimately make it much easier for new members to join, by making the social contract clear for other strangers who may find it fitting for themselves.
The goal would be to do the difficult task only culture is good at doing: allow a bunch of strangers to invent their own behavior habits & have a good time.
Let's imagine a yoga meetup that lacks an instructor. Assuming most attendees would have some experience, it's not too far-fetched to imagine a yoga session where people casually show each other their routines & learn from each other.
For such leaderless community to form and thrive, it's likely that some stranger interaction would be required. It's unlikely for a single group of friends to always bring enough attendance. Well-defined & democratically reached agreements would make it trivial to welcome newcomers, and quickly identify if someone is not a good fit.
The community's identity survives when the culture outlives the presence of all the individual members who helped create it.
If several communities were to succeed with finding good rulesets that allow for peaceful and fruitful interaction, it's safe to assume that similar rules would yield good results elsewhere too.
By allowing communities to make their voted rules public, it is possible to clone or fork rulesets, adopt them into another community, and continue voting. For example, someone who wants to open up a similar yoga co-op in a different city could inherit every conclusion the prior yoga community arrived to, as a starting point.
Widely-adopted rulesets could further signal the trustworthiness of both communities and users who helped curate them. Ultimately it can form a whole network of inter-connected communities, constantly cross-contaminating their own local innovations for how to coexist better.
The main difference of this model from most other online communities is that the creator of a community wouldn't "own" it. All moderation and decision-making would be decentralized to the members.
The voting & reputation protocols would aim to mimic how groups of people achieve consensus in real-life communal behavior, which is often how culture is created.
Culture is created without leaders.
How can protocols help create culture in previously impossible ways?
The best communities are not made forcefully, they are created organically.