Paul Brinkkemper: Have you ever tried to explain to someone how money is created as a loan by banks? Then you most likely came across misunderstanding, disbelief and apathy. If the movement for monetary reform is to gain influence among the general public, we have to educate many people. To be effective we must find persuasive ways around the common psychological defensive reactions. To do this, we have created a board game called Money Maker to make it fun and easy to understand the banking system. In Money Maker every player becomes a bank that can create money, similar to how a modern fractional reserve bank works. While playing, players subconsciously create a credit boom and watch it fall apart in a big bust. In the end, only the richest player wins, but all players walk away with a fundamental understanding of our broken banking system, and if they pay attention, some pointers on how the system can possibly be improved.

What are the common reactions to hearing how banking works?

If you happen to have a conversation with friends or family on the workings of the monetary system, you may recognise one of three common reactions:

1. Many people simply do not care. “All that banking is very complicated, and abstract. I have better things to do with my time. Why bother? I don’t understand how it works, and I am not able to change it anyway.” An apathetic public is unlikely to catalyse any improvements in the money system.
2. Misunderstanding is also a very common reaction when talking about how the banking system works, especially when talking with trained professionals. When speaking about the money system with a banker or an economist, there is almost a Babylonian confusion where people use the same words but attach different meanings to them. Especially when using the word money. M0; M1; M2; M3; TMS, are a few of the many different definitions of money. It is very difficult for people to work together if they do not have a shared vocabulary of the tools at hand.
3. Disbelief is very common among people who have a certain degree of education or training on the subject. It can be very difficult to let go of a worldview that you have held onto for a very long time. “Why would this person talking about money creation now here tell me the truth? Surely, if it was that important, I would have learned about it in high school. Or otherwise I would have read it in the newspaper or heard it on television” is a typical reaction. We even met one journalist who was not allowed to write about money creation in his newspaper because “money creation is the topic of conspiracy theories.” When you cannot talk about something, it becomes nearly impossible to solve any issue related to it.

Why should we focus on changing the minds of people who don’t agree with us?

These reactions are what one might consider part of the cognitive dissonance that people employ to keep their worldview intact. Psychologically, we need to keep our worldview intact to function in the world: doubting the existence of gravity every five minutes can be troublesome. But if our attachment to our current worldview is too rigid, it can prevent us from learning new things and evolving.

From the perspective of the monetary reformers, this cognitive dissonance lies as a great psychological defensive barrier between our group and the public at large. If we are to influence the greater public, we will need to find a way around this psychological defensive barrier. This is exactly why we have created the board game Money Maker.

How do you play Money Maker?

You play an investment banker in a city during the renaissance. All players start out with some money and an infinite amount of credit that they can create. There is a market for production and consumption goods, commonly referred to as ‘work’ and ‘food’. Every turn the players can bid on investments, the highest bidder wins the investment. Investments cost a certain number and type of goods to build and produce a certain good every turn. Players can pay for goods and investments with money or credit. At the end of a players turn, a roll of the dice determines the influence of credit on the economy and whether there is inflation or a credit repayment event is nearing. During a credit repayment event, all players must repay their outstanding credit with gold coins. Players that repay their credit successfully, increase in credit rating and can employ a higher leverage. Insolvent players that cannot repay their credit must borrow from solvable players. In the end, the richest player wins.

How does Money Maker explain complex economic concepts?

Money Maker is a microcosm of the Fractional Reserve Banking System, so very early on players figure out that they can spend more credit than they have money to buy the best investments. This leads to great increases in the price of investments and goods: the psychology of credit causes a credit-fueled boom. Without realising it, players learn about the credit-fueled boom and bust cycle.

Eventually, the credit must be repaid. Players who have spent too much credit need a bail out from their more careful competitors. These competitors can exploit the need of these indebted players to demand interest or the properties of indebted players in exchange. In this way, players learn about the importance of solvability and liquidity.

Without focusing on the exact terminology, Money Maker highlights the importance of the concepts behind solvability and liquidity.

When players repay their credit successfully, their credit rating improves. A higher credit rating means that they can spread out their credit over more places. This reduces the chance that they need to repay all of their credit at once. A higher credit rating means that players can create more credit and that the credit boom enlarges. This helps players learn about the workings of leverage.

In the game box, there is also an easier version of the game where players play without being able to create credit. To play Money Maker without credit is similar to a full reserve / sovereign money banking system. Players then see that there is no more boom and bust cycle, and experience the stability that comes with this. There is also a possibility of a debt jubilee in the game, which allows the players to experiment with how a mass cancellation of all debts would affect the economy. This shows players how the money system can be reformed to work differently.

And what do people think of it?

Playing Money Maker is a great way to introduce people to the workings of the banking system because it is an engaging way of learning. Rather than learning from a book, players are experiencing it in a game. Since the parallels to the real world are obvious, you can hear players say things like “You are a total Greece, so deep in debt” or “you are a real Goldman Sachs, profiting of others misfortune.”

Most importantly, playing Money Maker is a great way to get around the common psychological reactions against hearing how the banking system works. Any misunderstanding amongst players is quickly resolved by consulting the rulebook. For the duration of the game there is a suspension of disbelief. This suspension then carries over into the real world at the end of the game. Since players have seen the fractional reserve banking work in miniature, they can easily imagine it working similarly in the real world. Instead of exhibiting apathy, players are engaged in the game and trying to win. They experience that their actions can have a positive impact on the outcome. And most importantly: they experience that the money system is a system that exists by consent, and that if they play by different rules, the money system can work much simpler and be more stable for all players.

To learn more about money maker, you can find out more at www.moneymaker.games, or get in touch via [email protected].

For IMMR members, we have special deals to resell Money Maker to your fans in your country, as an tool for fundraising, education and community building. You can find out more about this online at partner.moneymaker.games

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Hashgraph has been getting some press and many are excited about the speeds they promise and some of the videos and demonstrations they’ve shared. It is one of the closest innovations to Holochain that I’ve seen come out by people starting from a blockchain mindset. However, from my completely biased perspective, there are still a few gaps.

Hybrid of Data & Agent Centrism

Notice that all Hashgraph’s examples show the agents (labeled as A B C D E) and who is committing, sending, and receiving what transactions. Normally in blockchain explanations, they only focus on the chain of blocks, and maybe some info about the nonces needed from miners or stakers, but the data is never presented showing how every node actually receives transactions in a different order. This might cast doubt on the use of the word “consensus” when really blockchain just takes one node’s sequence as reality and drops all the others.

However, in Hashgraph, you can see how different agents are each building a different “reality.” Then they use some metadata about each agent’s state to enable them to build consensus based on gossip about gossip. Their algorithm looks at things from the perspective of EACH AGENT and then they somewhat arbitrarily say: “the median timestamp for a data element across agents shall be its official time.”

In the shift from data-centric blockchain toward agent-centric holochain, they are hybridizing.

The creators of Hashgraph made a partial mindshift from data-centric to agent-centric. And you can see how on Holochain, an app could also use exposed data about gossip and DHT timestamps to do its own variant of hashgraph consensus (except beware their patent).

A Fixation on Consensus

If you hear blockchain people talk about distributed computing, it is all about consensus. In fact the Hashgraph folks even claim Byzantine Fault Tolerance is about consensus (and not the ability to tolerate a Byzantine Fault — actions from corrupt or malicious nodes). Why such a fixation on consensus?

Why should you have just one algorithm for manufacturing that consensus for ALL dApps on a platform? Aren’t there many contexts where no consensus is needed? Or where it would be valuable to engage in different social processes around disagreement? In fact, why limit yourself to only one reality when in some cases information about differences of timing could be valuable data?

In Holochain, you have implicit or soft consensus when a data element saturates a majority of the DHT neighborhood where that data element resides. A later attempt to PUT that data to the DHT will produce a collision. But what if it is okay to have the collision, and just say “Okay, two people have now invented the Calculus.” or whatever. So now you have two authors, with different timestamps, and histories, and so what?

Well the “so what” comes into play when the data is a rival resource — like a Twitter handle, a domain name, or a cryptocoin. In this case, you want to handle a collision differently and block the later addition telling them the name is taken or the coin is spent. For general computing on distributed apps, this covers 99.9% of use cases. And on Holochain, the way we recommend implementing currencies using agent-centric crypto-accounting instead of data-centric coins means you don’t use rival coins at all.

So the only remaining case not handled by the soft consensus of the DHT, is when the collision happens before the DHT neighborhood can get saturated by an entry from one author. So if two people try to register the same name at the same time, how do you resolve it?

Paths to Many Consensi

We could pretend there’s just one absolute answer like what the Hashgraph algorithm produces using median time of gossip signatures. Or we could recognize the importance of choice and let the app builder decide.

• Maybe you start an auction and it goes to the highest bidder.
• Maybe you look at their reputation for community contribution and let the greatest contributor have it.
• Maybe you send them each a message to resolve the conflict with each other.
• Maybe you vote on it.

The point is, that for the very small percentage of times you could even have this kind of collision for most distributed computing apps, why would you want to swallow that computational overhead for ALL OTHER non-colliding bits of data? Why rule out the possibility of context-appropriate consensus solutions by hard-coding in only one arbitrary approach?

If 99.9% of data in distributed apps is non-rival, or non-conflicting, shouldn’t we just trigger special consensus resolution on that .1% of the cases and bear the (computational or social) cost of that overhead only on those cases?

However, since Blockchain grew up with its ONE APP being about managing rival coins, everyone thinks consensus is at the heart of the matter of distributed computing. Maybe this is also why blockchains don’t scale for doing generalized computation for dApps. If blockchains can’t even scale coin transactions, which are kind of a ridiculously simple app (Basically: Do you have the key? Okay, then you can write new coins up to the total value of the old coin. Repeat.), how do they ever expect to run things at true Internet scales like Facebook with 520k likes per second?

My answer: Holochain — for lightweight, scalable, P2P dApps which actually get more efficient as more users join.

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Aaron Fernando: Education can take many forms, including the form of play itself. The TESA Collective is a co-op that creates games for various social justice organizations. It has worked directly with number groups, including unions and nonprofits, and its games now facilitate workshops and trainings that result in real-world social change — in addition to being used during casual get-togethers.

By using board games, groups are able to work through strategies and practice collaboration and organization in a low-risk environment. While this happens, the campaigns and projects that these groups are working on in their daily lives are kept in mind and used as context. Playing these games then becomes self-directed training around how to organize — training which plays out when people actually organize around issues like water management or workers’ rights.

For instance, TESA recently worked with The Nature Conservancy, one of the largest conservation nonprofits, to create a game specifically focused on dialogue and mobilization around water resource management. The resulting game, called “Water for Tomorrow” was built out by TESA hand-in-hand with The Nature Conservancy for its New York water management campaign with the same name as the game.

Organizations can choose to work with TESA and build games related to their causes and missions with varying levels of involvement. The Nature Conservancy took a highly involved approach over eight months and designed a game that would be fun to play, yet serious and complex enough to serve as a real educational material around water management.

“We use it as an engagement tool,” says George Schuler, director of conservation science and practice at The Nature Conservancy about “Water for Tomorrow.” “Instead of going into a community and showing them PowerPoints, we use the game as a way to get people talking about what are the challenges they face in their communities or in their own lives. … It’s almost a community engagement tool — instead of having a public hearing or a town hall meeting, we have game night.”

Photo courtesy of TESA Collective

Schuler and his team have noted that gameplay generates far more engagement and conversation than simply giving a presentation or lecture. “The game is targeted at what we call casual experts all the people that have a stake in water decisions or are affected by water decisions of others,” says Schuler. Each player acts as a stakeholder — farmers, local politicians, business owners, and so on — and often take on a different role than the one they play in reality. This approach helps people bring in their own experiences and collaboratively discuss water management in a much more open and relaxed setting than if they were listening to a lecture.

Although “Water for Tomorrow” is currently only used by The Nature Conservancy, one of TESA’s other games titled “Rise Up: The Game of People & Power” was created with sponsorship from a labor union Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is publically available.

SEIU,which has approximately 2 million members in the U.S. and Canada, distributes “Rise Up” to its board and local chapters, but also uses the game during its Social Justice Leadership Academy. During this annual meeting of union member leaders, playing this game is one of the activities that gets members to think about strategizing and organizing in a hostile political environment.

Photo courtesy of TESA Collective

In Rise Up’s gameplay, people must cooperate to challenge “The System” in ten areas — internet, environment, government, and campuses. The game is difficult to win because the odds are stacked in favor of The System. “Our members work very hard every day and see that the economy is stacked against them,” says Ragini Kapadia, former Education Coordinator at SEIU who used the game during the trainings. “And through their lived lives, have experienced a rigged system.” Yet that’s the point of the game: for people to learn how to organize and bring about meaningful social change in reality. “We used a lot of real-life scenarios,” says Jeremy Wilson of SEIU about using Rise Up in the Social Justice Leadership Academy. “The game takes place in the context of the specific campaign you’re talking about — so maybe it’s the Fight for $15 (minimum wage) in a specific place. It’s a more accessible, fun way to do some of the hard thinking and hard teamwork before you actually get in the field and have to do it.”

TESA may be best known for its first game “Co-opoly,” which was launched in 2011. In “Co-opoly,” players play characters with different incomes and family sizes and like most games created by TESA, the game is cooperative so all players either win or lose together, depending on the success of their co-op.

In fact, when founding member Brian Van Slyke and a friend started TESA during the recession in 2008, the “intention wasn’t initially to get into games for social change,” says Van Slyke, adding that building games was just one part of the educational programming and development that they had been doing for various nonprofits. “But because of the initial success of ‘Co-opoly,’ that just naturally and organically took us down that road.”

In a piece on Truthout Van Slyke delves into the history of using games for educational and political purposes. Among many, these include a board game titled “Suffragetto” which was created by a women’s suffrage organization over a century ago and a critically-acclaimed computer game called “Papers Please” in which one plays an immigration officer in a corrupt dystopia.

“Rise Up” is TESA’s most recent game, but after the 2016 election, the TESA team observed that perhaps the game was a little too real, with so many social battles being fought against “The System” in reality. “People were playing the game, and they just looked tired,” says Van Slyke. “People just seemed like the world was crushing them.” So TESA decided take a somewhat lighthearted approach to their next game for battle-weary social justice organizers. Its title? “Space Cats Fight Fascism.”

Header image of members playing Rise Up during their trainings courtesy of SEIU

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In the lead up to the Open Coop 2018 conference, Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum) will join me in hosting an action-oriented workshop on Commonspoly at Newspeak House, London.

Commonspoly is a hacked version and critique of the game Monopoly, where the goals are to first re-municipalize private goods and then turn them into Commons. Rather than compete against each other, players must overcome ingrained training and ‘rational’, self-interest maximizing behaviours and instead learn how to cooperate to create a commons-oriented locality. It’s also great fun to play and a good challenge.

We’ll be playing with several boards simultaneously, which will make for a lively game. Apart from enjoying a fun and thought-provoking board game, we’ll also be chatting about commoning, radical politics, collaboration and much more in the context of the game.

The workshop is free but places are limited!

Please sign up by simply commenting on this post or writing to contactATp2pfoundation.net.

It will be held on Sunday the 22nd of July at 1:30 PM at:

Newspeak House, 133 Bethnal Green Rd, London E2 7DG, UK.

Also at Newspeak house: Join Richard and Natalia the previous day (Saturday July 21st) for a Masterclass on Decentralized Organizing.

Want to learn more? Watch the video or read the text below, reposted from Commonpoly’s website:

About Commonspoly

Hi there, we hope you had a safe journey, welcome to Commonspoly’s utopia!

Commonspoly is a free licensed board game that was created to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the commons as a critical discourse towards relevant changes in society, but to do it playfully. This game is an ideal device to introduce commons theories to groups in a pedagogical and enjoyable way. But it’s also great for boring, rainy afternoons!

And another thing, Commonspoly is an attempt to repair a misunderstanding that has lasted for more than a century. Back in 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a board game to warn about, and hopefully prevent, the dangerous effects of monopolism. Years later she sold the patent to Parker Brothers, who turned the game into the Monopoly we know today: a game that celebrates huge economic accumulation and the bankruptcy of anyone but you.

Commonspoly turns the basic features of the traditional game upside down in an effort to imagine a possible world based on cooperation instead of competition. But is it possible to play a board game where the players have to find ways to work together, not beat each other? Well, the cycles between financial crises are shortening, global unemployment rates are skyrocketing, ice caps are melting, and we all have that hard-to-explain, creepy feeling… In this game, it’s a race against time and every player’s help is more than welcome! It’s not all bad news – we have some powerful, community-based tools to use in this struggle against the apocalypse. Let’s get down to business: we have urban, environmental, health and knowledge-based common goods to preserve!

We are working on a new version, which is going to be available this summer. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions: [email protected]

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On Loomio we are trying to make decisions about issues which a large number of different people care deeply about. Online. With asynchronous text.

I’m sure people from the future (or their emissaries) will laugh at us from their virtual reality playgrounds. Or they won’t even laugh, they will just smile and wonder at our naive fumbling as we try and evolve better ways of working together.

Either way, most of the conflict I’ve seen at Enspiral has surfaced on Loomio threads. It arises in other forums as well but I’ve found that Loomio can act like a magnet or a sieve which attracts and surfaces bad feelings in the community.

Over the years I’ve developed some informal practices for dealing with conflict on Loomio which might be useful for others.

ESCALATE THE BANDWIDTH

If you do only one thing do this. It’s my workhorse for resolving conflict.

Whenever misunderstanding or conflict arise escalate the bandwidth of the channel. If you’re on Loomio (asynchronous text) move to chat (synchronous text), chat to a voice call, voice call to video call, video call to in person meeting.

I first heard of this from an open source contributor dealing with disagreements online (@searls I think) and if I had to pick just one tool it would be this one.

SUPPORT INDIVIDUALS

The thing about conflict on Loomio is that it is a symptom not a cause. When conflict emerges it is because individuals have needs which aren’t being met. Maybe they aren’t feeling trusted or trusting, maybe they have been triggered by something, maybe they feel like their belonging or livelihood is threatened.

One thing I have seen Enspiral do reasonably well is swarm individuals with support when they are involved in conflict online. It’s more of an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff strategy and the cost of the distributed emotional labour on the community is high (and disproportionately distributed).

Sometimes ambulances are really useful, especially when you’ve fallen off a cliff and this is why community size matters. People in small high trust groups can care for each other much better than large loose ones.

In an effort to provide more support to individuals we have recently expanded the peer to peer stewarding system that the Loomio team use to the core Enspiral membership of ~40 people.

STRONG TEAMS

In the catalyst team Rich has been observing that the people who do the best in Enspiral are usually in one or more ‘affinity groups’ which have a name, a purpose, a consistent membership and a regular rhythm. This could be a venture like Loomio or a working group like the board. I agree and this is one reason the catalysts are investing our energy in helping to form working groups in the network.

Image Credit – Vaibhav Sharan

STRONG COMMUNITIES

The root causes of conflict will never be resolved through an online forum. The right tools are human methods like one on one conversations, retreats, circles, listening and sharing stories together.

A robust rhythm of “support and grow the humans and the community” is essential to use Loomio in a high trust community in my opinion. Enspiral was born of the deep intersection between human methods and digital tools – we are here today due to the facilitators just as much as the programmers.

COLLABORATION IS A SKILL

People often have strong opinions that differ from each other but it takes skill and practice to navigate those differences in an online forum.

We aren’t born knowing how to ride a bike, tie our shoes or make complex decisions in decentralised groups online. Using Loomio well as either a participant or facilitator is a skill and should be treated as such.

We need to learn to listen, to approach difference with curiosity, to express ourselves authentically and leave room for disagreement. We need to practice starting from a position of kindness and care for ourselves, for others and for the community as a whole. It doesn’t just happen, but when it does it is magic.

One strategy for acquiring skill is to just jump in and learn by doing which is what we’ve had to do. Find practices that work in related contexts and adapt them, try them out and see what works. It’s expensive and you’ll get a few bumps and bruises on the way, the trick is to approach Loomio as a skill and intentionally try to get better at using it.

Another strategy is to find people who have the skill and learn from them. The stories and guides on the Loomio blog are a great place to start. You can contact the Loomio team if you want to engage the growing pool of Loomio facilitators and consultants.

Neither strategy will work by itself and as an old martial arts teacher said to me the way to learn the fastest is to have someone you are teaching, someone you are learning along side, and someone you are learning from.

Cross-posted from Joshua Vial’s blog

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Adding to the body of existing tools and training material on cooperative development, ILO now launches Think.Coop, a new training tool for those interested in cooperation and its benefits for improving businesses of potential members.

A great new initiative from ILO to encourage new cooperators!

Think.Coop  is an orientation tool that helps participants understand how mutualism and cooperation can improve livelihoods opportunities. It provides the basics around the cooperative business model, and helps participants understand whether joining or forming a cooperative would be a feasible option. This one-day training tool uses a peer-to-peer, activity-based learning methodology, without an external facilitator or expert to guide the process. Instead, the participants work together as a team, following the simple step-by-step instructions for activities provided in the manual.

Think.Coop was tested in Cambodia among workers in the informal economy , and in Myanmar with farmers and rural workers . The manual is easily adaptable to different contexts, and it can be used as a first step in learning about the cooperative business model. Following the sessions on the importance of relationships, benefits of collective action, types of business structures and types and advantages of a cooperative, the participants are expected to have sufficient information to decide whether the cooperative business model suitable to them.

The manual is copyrighted under the Creative Commons licence. Hence it is free to use for non-commercial purposes, as long as the ILO is clearly attributed as the original source. For more information about Think.Coop, please contact [email protected] .

Further information

Publication

Think.COOP – an orientation on the cooperative business model  [pdf 5542KB] 

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We know, for instance, that we are more age diverse than we previously thought. While a third of our users are young (i.e., below 40 years old), nearly a quarter of us are 60 and above. Pew research has shown that messaging and decision-making apps are not popular amongst senior groups, so it is fantastic to see how well we are doing with senior demographics. We have also confirmed, as we suspected, that we are an (over)educated bunch of people; a full 75% of us have undergraduate degrees, and 40% of us have postgraduate degrees!

We also now know that Loomio is an important part of our decision-making media matrix. Over a third of us have reported that 50% or more of our group interaction takes place on Loomio, and about half of us report that Loomio is very important or absolutely essential compared to other digital platforms we use for group interaction.

The top three tools other than Loomio that we use to communicate are Email, Facebook and Texts or iMessages, with Whatsapp, Twitter, Skype, Telegram and Slack also being important complements.

Finally, we are beginning to get a detailed sense of what we use Loomio for. We asked you to tell us what sorts of issues your work connected with, and over 37% of all users so far have identified democracy and justice as central issues. Other critical issues for us include environmental issues, human rights, economic inequality, feminist and gender issues, sustainability, technology, and labour.

Over the next few months we expect to produce more fine-grained pictures of how we use Loomio and for what purposes, the organizing archetypes that drive this use, and how we feel about Loomio and its effectiveness.

There is still an opportunity to participate. If you would like to take the survey, please click here for the English version, and here for the Spanish version.

Photo by Kevin Doncaster

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Kevin Stark: The word Decidim translated from Catalan means we decide, and it’s the name of Barcelona’s digital infrastructure for participatory democracy. One part functional database and one part political statement, organizers say Decidim is key to a broad digital transformation that is taking place in Barcelona — its institutions, markets, and economy. Organized by the Barcelona City Council, Barcelona’s citizens participate in a new digital commons, and its organizers hope that technology can improve democratic participation and foster good government. The open-source platform allows the public to participate directly in government as they would a form of social media, and they have had early success. The city council hosted several organizing events to decide on a strategic plan, and nearly 40,000 people and 1,500 organizations contributed 10,000 suggestions.

Decidim was born when a young protest movement in Spain swept into power, according to Xabier Barandiaran, a project leader, who compares the fledgling political party to the Occupy movement in the U.S. Its leadership’s first goal was to create a platform for open strategic planning for the city. “People were in the streets and saying let’s participate in democracy, let’s write a strategic plan,” Barandiaran said.

What developed was an open-source software that embodied the group’s transformation plan, a digital common where citizens can have a say in government — the code is available on Github. “We decided how we would decide,” he said. The leadership is still hosting public meetings once a month as well as large conferences — the next one is on October 26-28. I spoke with Barandiaran about Decidim and its origins. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

Kevin Stark: What was the context in which Decidim was born?

Xabier Barandiaran: It started in Barcelona and Madrid because there was a change of government that resulted from the indignados movement [sometimes called the 15-M Movement or anti-austerity movement], which was connected to the Occupy movement in the U.S. — for your American readers to make a connection. The political movement became a political party and then institutionalized. There was a change in politics that was motivated by a change in society and its mindset, and on the demands of the people.

It was really targeted towards politicians. And among these demands, perhaps, the most important one was to open-up democracy. Not to let it in the hands of the political parties and the establishment. So, once these new political parties or movements went into power in different cities in Spain — particularly Barcelona and Madrid — one of the earliest projects was to enhance all the means for participatory democracy, including the potential of technology to speed up and make possible a more complex participation.

I live in the city of Chicago. In my neighborhood, we have participatory budgeting — once a year my neighbors gather to decide what roads will be paved, street lights installed, or where we want to paint a mural. What is the Decidim vision of participatory democracy? What sort of change is made possible through the digital platform?

Budgeting is one part of participatory democracy but there are many others. Decidim makes possible almost all of them. It is only limited right now because we are still developing the software and new features are coming out every week. We have learned a lot. We have gathered collective intelligence from different expert citizens. All hackers, public servants, academics, people interested in their government. We run workshops and open citizen meetings. We came out with a wider spectrum of possibilities for participatory democracy, other than participatory budgeting. There are budgeting pilots in Barcelona. But we did not put all our eggs in that basket. We felt it was more important to identify the problems, to bring people together to speak about public services.

Everybody understands the potential of social networks. Often for silly things. Mostly for kittens and fancy photos and things. The potential for open knowledge like Wikipedia, or information spreading like Twitter, or intense relationships like Facebook, also applies to politics. But it does so with high controversy (post-truth, lack of privacy, democratic deficit, no-transparency, etc.). With Decidim we talk about a new generation of political networks that are oriented to decision making, commitment, and accountability. This new generation of social or political networks has to be open source, guarantee personal privacy and public transparency, sovereignty of the infrastructures, independence from private corporations and they have to enforce, by design, digital rights and equity. This is what Decidim provides.

Decidim is open-source software. But that’s not the only way the software is democratic. Decisions about the software are made democratically — it was built democratically. But there must be barriers for people who don’t have access or technological experience. How do you address that?

This is a very common worry. But the digital divide is no bigger than other barriers or gaps. Like the precariousness gap — people don’t have time to show up to a meeting, or they are have to combine different low paid jobs and are too busy to participate. The cultural gap, people need sufficient information and knowledge so that people can think of better policies. Or the gender gap — women are excluded from public participation. There are many gaps and the digital gap is the smallest of all the gaps.

It turns out that, with Decidim platform, we can close or reduce the impact of some of the other gaps (improve available information, flexible participation, gender imbalances, etc.). This being said, we take the digital divide very seriously and we have two programs that are important to us. One is the digital mediation program that we are launching soon so that citizens can get direct help at any library or civic centers to access the platform. We also have a training program. We have run some pilots, and we will have training workshops throughout the city next year to train and empower people of the potential of digital technologies for self-organization, democratic participation, data privacy protection, and digital rights.

There’s a video circulating online of you discussing Decidim in which you say that representative democracy is in crisis and “the political system that hasn’t changed in 200 years. Youth were living in a precarious situation and change had to happen.” What was the experience of being a young person in Barcelona and how Decidim is addressing issues?

We suffered (and we are still suffering) an economic crisis, but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a political crisis. It was easy to see that it was coming. There was a lot of speculation of housing, and a very suspicious collaboration between political parties and the banks. Many of us could see it coming. It was going to explode. There was a big gap between the rich and the poor and that could only be filled with debt, but debt has a limit. There are physical limits in terms of time (you can’t pay a mortgage for more than 50 years) and the kind of jobs that were created where far from sustainable. It is regular people who paid for the foreseeable catastrophe and the existing democracy did not protect their basic rights. It was a failure of democracy altogether.

Hundreds of thousands of people joined the 15M protests all across the country, we had very specific demands and proposals to change politics, economy and society but the government failed to listen and to open the doors to public participation against the crisis. There was a generational change challenging the establishment and no means to channel the transition. There is a serious structural problem behind. Voting every four years is clearly not enough.

Democracy needs an update 200 years after its original design during the French Revolution. Moreover, while socio-technical innovations are disrupting our societies continuously (AirBnB rising the housing prices even higher, Google delivering free-of-charge services in exchange of our privacy, etc.), public institutions and political democracy was being left behind, creating an even greater democratic deficit on our societies. This is the situation that Decidim is progressively changing. This is what is new in Barcelona (and other cities like Madrid, Zaragoza, a Corunha): People can channel their collective intelligence into public administration, policy making and politics, We can propose, decide and monitor public policies with flexibility, with a fluid online-offline interaction, from our mobiles or from our neighborhood meeting.

But there is more to this story on the global landscape. We inherited the legacy of the Smart City. Barcelona hosts the Smart City Expo and it is ranked among the three smartest cities in different international rankings. We found a profound weakness of democracy and public institutions on this project: big tech corporations are taking city data and shaping our city life with private algorithms. This is a form of algorithmic governance that was progressively capturing the public sphere. There are two fundamental problems with this.

First, people, not machines, know much better how to solve their daily life problems, the only unsolved problem is to coordinate the potential of the collective intelligence of 1.5 million people. Second, a smart device can optimize a solution, but cannot define what is a problem to be solved, or fix the goal. The vision of our city is not something a machine or a corporation can do, it is something we need to build democratically. Decidim, as a platform for collective intelligence, is here to challenge this legacy and solve these problems, to show that democracy is smart. And we are doing so with the people, designing, testing and programming the software in an open and collaborative manner. We use Decidim to design Decidim. We call this community process MetaDecidim, and everybody is welcome to join and share.

This Q&A was updated on Sept. 6, 2017, with clarifications from Xabier Barandiaran.

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Instead of staking Ether, the consensus system PANARCHY “stakes people”, and uses “betting pools” which are “powered” by people, using pseudo-anonymous Proofs-of-Personhood (PoPs) from the Virtual Pseudonym Parties system.

Betting pools are operated by anonymous entities, and compete for “power” from people. A pool powered by 10000 PoPs would be similar to a staker in Casper with 10000 ETH, while a pool powered by 1000 PoPs is 1000 ETH in Casper. The pools then perform consensus-by-bet games on what block gets authority, similar to Ethereums’ Casper.

The pools then compete for “power” from a global population with global suffrage, and people can opt-in and opt-out of pools, re-arranging how power of authority is distributed.

In “representative consensus-by-bet” and proof-of-suffrage, each cycle of authority is a few seconds (a block) compared to 4 years of authority with the current suffrage system with representative government.

Since consensus is powered by people, there could be very broad consensus, and proof-of-suffrage also has instant feedback between people and the “virtual state”, building on the legacy system of representative democracy which also used direct feedback.

Whitepaper draft

from Steemit/Ethereum.

Photo by btckeychain

Photo by calm a llama down

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Xnet, an activist project which has been working on and for networked democracy and digital rights since 2008, launches in the Barcelona City Hall the first public Anti-Corruption Complaint Box using anonymity protection technology like TOR and GlobaLeaks (“Bústia Ètica” in Catalan).

With this pioneering project, the Barcelona City Hall is the first municipal government to invite citizens to use tools which enable them to send information in a way that is secure, that guarantees privacy and gives citizens the option to be totally anonymous.

Xnet, as part of the Citizens’ Advisory Council of the Barcelona City Office for Transparency and Best Practices, launches this Anti-Corruption Complaint Box highlighting the following features:

• What this digital device is, and how to use the new facility managed by the Barcelona City Hall, inspired by similar mechanisms already operating in civil society (for example, the XnetLeaks mailbox), and implemented with advice from members of Xnet who have also set up a working relationship with the GlobaLeaks platform.
• The debate on what anonymity entails is one of the most up-to-date and relevant themes of the digital age, especially in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations and, accordingly, we explain why Xnet has insisted on the need to guarantee true anonymity in a project like the Barcelona City Anti-Corruption Complaint Box which combats corruption and other damaging practices that threaten good governance in the city of Barcelona.

• Xnet provides for journalists and citizens a FAQ service regarding the Box, explaining how it works, describing tools (for example TOR) which guarantee anonymity, and all the details relative to the first project of this type whose use is recommended by public institutions, and explains how this can be done.

Xnet has always espoused the idea that democracy can only exist if institutions work together in equal conditions with aware, well-organised citizens. The Box aims to provide a way to make this kind of teamwork possible. Corruption can’t be eliminated by institutions scrutinising themselves. Civil society must play a central, continuous role.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Index
What is the Barcelona City Anti-Corruption Complaint Box?
What are the reasons for the anonymity option? 1–2–3–4–5
How does the Box work?
What is Tor?
Who uses Tor? 1–2

What is the Good Governance Box?

The Anti-Corruption Complaint Box is a means of which citizens can denounce corruption and other practices that are damaging for good governance in the city of Barcelona.

This is a digital device managed by the Barcelona City Hall, inspired by similar civil society mechanisms (like the XnetLeaks mailbox) and put into effect with advice from members of Xnet working from the Citizens’ Advisory Council of the Barcelona City Hall Office for Transparency and Best Practice.

By means of the Box, citizens can send —and in a way that secure and permits total anonymity— complaints, suspicions and evidence of cases which they believe the City Hall should investigate.

Once the complaints have been received, the City Hall must respond to every single one and inquire into those that are deemed plausible, or send them on to the appropriate institution. The person submitting the complaint reserves the right whether or not to reveal his or her identity, and will receive evidence of the follow-up carried out in response to the complaint, which means he or she may check the process.

What are the reasons for the anonymity option?

Xnet, whose members are the initiators and advisors in launching this project, has insisted on the need for citizens who make a complaint to have the option of doing so anonymously. This is why:

The debate on what anonymity entails is one of the most up-to-date and relevant themes of the digital age and especially in the wake of Snowden’s revelations.

1 – First of all, it should be made clear that the anonymity of sources in an investigation is nothing new. Evidently, if the information sent by a citizen ends up in a lawsuit, then it can no longer be anonymous.

The public administration will then make the official complaint and anonymous communications will have served simply to discover proof which would never have been found without this mechanism.

This is no different from the way in which the press has always worked: information comes from sources that remain anonymous because they are vulnerable.

It is the responsibility of the person who receives the information, the person who has the relevant means—the journalist or, in this case, the administration—to work and carry out the investigation in order to construct a solid case or discard the information.

This structure enables us to correct one of today’s greatest inequalities: the position of the citizen before the administration and big companies. Administrations and corporations have the power to monitor and pursue us, while we, the ordinary citizens, cannot do the same. This creates the asymmetry which is the source of all abuses.

Only by providing 100% protection for the privacy of ordinary people will we be able to defend ourselves and protect the commons from powerful organisations which can hide information that concerns us, and also take retaliatory measures.

But let’s be clear about this. In no way are we proposing that the institutions should foster anonymous complaints or denunciations among equal ordinary citizens since this destroys solidarity and encourages people to inform against each other in the service of institutional power, thus worsening asymmetry. We believe that there is no such thing as a nanny state but only a civil society which has its own channels for becoming mature.

2 – Corruption and bad governance can only be remedied by means of scrutiny of citizens and never only “from within”.

Moreover, this is definitely not a time when the institutions can engage in “consciousness raising” or teach civil society anything about the struggle against corruption. On the contrary, it is civil society which is now helping to get the institutions back on the right track.

This is yet another reason why the Box should permit anonymous communications. Although we have also activated self-control mechanisms for the Box (where access to information is managed by more than one specialist employee so that the controller is also controlled) proper use of the Box also depends on users having control over what they have sent, and the use made of this information, without any danger of being coerced.

Hence, users that remain anonymous, will have at their disposition a code by means of which they can, if they wish, demonstrate that they have made the complaint.

3 – On no account do we recommend that the institutions should replace the civil society channels by which citizens can make their complaints, for example the XnetLeaks mailbox.

We are therefore withdrawing from the Citizens’ Advisory Council of the Barcelona City Hall Office for Transparency and Best Practice after having very successfully contributed our knowledge in order to create the Box. The exchange of knowledge has been extremely fruitful and is a good example of what we believe collaboration between institutions and civil society should be: a process of learning together.

But the time has now come for us to go back to being external elements so that we can do our job as watchdogs.

It is important that most of the work should be done from the institutions because this is where the resources are. Citizen mechanisms should only supplant institutions when the latter fail to do their job.

Therefore, the recommended methodology advises the whistleblower on how to send the information to the Barcelona City Anti-Corruption Complaint Box, the branch of the administration that has the means to take action. However, once the time indicated by the administration for doing so has elapsed, the citizen who considers that the action taken has not been effective can make a complaint in this respect by means of citizen self-organisation mechanisms such as the XnetLeaks mailbox.

If the information ends up revealing a case of corruption, then the administration’s management of the matter will be exposed.

4 – As we have noted, the difference between anonymity and confidentiality is that anonymity allows the source to control the use that is made of its idendity and information..

Trusting in confidentiality “guaranteed” by the institutions—simply taking them at their word—amounts to no more than an act of faith.

Experiences of anti-corruption whistleblowing around the world in recent years clearly show that the “guaranteed” confidentiality offered by the institutions is a non-starter when compared with the anonymity offered by instruments like TOR, which offer greater control to the person who decides to make a denunciation.

The mechanisms that we propose and use with the anonymous boxes for leaked information allow a source to become visible, independently of the institutions, should the information be used to the detriment of this person or society. This is a way of preventing the concentration of all the power (information) in the hands of a few people—bosses, administrative officers—who can become all-powerful and a threat to everyone.

5 – Some sceptics say that there is a risk that people will start making complaints without due thought. The fact of remaining anonymous would seem to give users more freedom to say things without proof that they are true, or with destructive intentions. There is indeed a danger that improper use will be made of the Box, for example for reasons of personal revenge, and there is always the possibility that an avalanche of information will overload and collapse the Box, which is precisely the option that the right-wing party, Partido Popular (PP), and others who oppose its creation have been considering.

On the basis of our own experience we should say that it is true that some people tend to use this mechanism to settle personal accounts, or so that other people can sort out their legal problems, which may be legitimate, but these are strictly private matters and pursued for personal benefit.

There is no question that the risk exists (and we, with XnetLeaks, and journalists see it day after day), yet we believe that it is a risk worth running since the compensation is that use of the Box manages to break the chain of fear and omertà, the code of silence favouring the formation of networks which misappropriate resources, or make it impossible for everyone to prosper in the same conditions and without favouritism.

For all these reasons, and the need to be rigorous about protecting sources, we have also created stringent mechanisms to ensure that people who use the Box frivolously or with illegitimate or harmful intentions will be swiftly prevented from causing further damage.

Similarly, and in contrast with what is presently occurring, emphasis is given to the possibility of defence for those people mentioned in complaints so that they may defend themselves against slander, defamation and actions that might aim to obstruct their work. This is presently not the case.

The recently exposed bad practices from the previous responsible of the Catalan Anti-Fraud Office, who frequently used complaints in order to attack political opponents, rivals or personal enemies and thereby, thwarting any chances of finding legal solutions to problems, has taught us that such practices should be denounced from the moment they first appear.

Any use of the Box for media purposes will be denounced and terminated.

FUNCTIONING

How does the Box work?

The Box works by means of the GlobaLeaks platform which allows the user to accede to it through the Tor network, a system that anonymises communications so effectively that not even the City Hall itself can learn the identity of the person sending information.

What is Tor?

Source: https://www.torproject.org/

The Tor network is a tool that improves privacy and security for Internet users. Browsing with Tor, users make a connection through a series of virtual tunnels instead of making a direct connection, which makes it difficult to trace the source of information and therefore protects the identity of the person sending it.

The email interface used is GlobaLeaks, a free software project produced by the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights. Besides being used in Spain for citizen initiatives like the Xnet Box, it has become a valuable resource all around the world for dozens of activist and institutional initiatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobaLeaks#Implementations

GlobaLeaks has worked directly in the installation of the Box making a very valuable contribution and helping the Municipal Institute for Technology (IMI) team in the transition to new paradigms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWII85UlzKw

Who uses Tor? (1)

The propaganda of an obsolete regime spreads the idea that Tor is a “hotbed for criminals”. This is the typical kind of attempt to criminalise the “Internet” whenever the chance arises. According to this propaganda, anything new is bad because it endangers the status quo. The reality is that these innovations offer more justice and more democracy.

Users should be aware, for example, that sending an unencrypted email is like sending a postcard without putting it in an envelope. Anyone along the way between sender and destination can read it. In a few years from now, encryption will be as normal as sealing envelopes and not leaving them open because the regime says so.

Below are links to some texts by specialists or relevant institutions such as the United Nations or the European Parliament which endorse our position:

• The UN declares that data encoding is a human right: “… encryption and anonymity provide individuals and groups with a zone of privacy online to hold opinions and exercise freedom of expression without arbitrary and unlawful interference or attacks”
  https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/600
• European Parliament Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) on Mass Surveillance says that strong crypto systems are one of the few things that the public can rely on as a defence against mass surveillance.
  http://www.europarl.europa.eu/stoa/webdav/site/cms/shared/0_home/STOA%20Study%20Mass%20Surveillance%20Part%201.pdf
• Decalogue for the Protection of Whistleblowers
  https://xnet-x.net/en/decalogue-protection-whistleblowers/
• Activists from all over the world join the global campaign for encryption
  https://www.securetheinternet.org/
• Transparency and privacy
  https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/simona-levi/transparency-for-state-privacy-for-rest-of-us
• “Whistleblowing is not just leaking – It’s an act of political resistance”. (Snowden)
  https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/edward-snowden-whistleblowing-is-not-just-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/
• The anonymous fallacy, or why it is not valid to say, “I won’t accept your argument because you don’t use your real name”
  http://www.iusmentis.com/technology/remailers/fallacy.html
• A message from George Orwell about the Internet today
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4EEa0HAqzQ
• Anonymity as a political value
  https://motherboard.vice.com/read/anonymous-has-changed-the-way-we-think-about-anonymity

Who uses Tor? (2)

Source: https://www.torproject.org/

People who use Tor do so in order to defend their privacy, and to protect their personal data and communications.

It is especially in those parts of the world where the Internet is widely controlled, censored and monitored that journalists and citizens use Tor in order to investigate state propaganda or to express opinions opposing it.

In any part of the world, whistle-blowers who work for government transparency and accountability of multinationals can use Tor to denounce misdeeds without fear of reprisal or persecution.

Tor’s aim is to provide protection for ordinary people.
At present, ill-intentioned criminals who know how to enter other people’s computers are the only ones who enjoy protection.

These criminals have good reason to learn how to achieve a high level of anonymity and many are able to pay well in order to achieve this. Being able to steal and reuse the identities of innocent victims (identity theft) makes it even easier for them. Ordinary people, however, have neither time nor money to find a way of achieving online privacy. Tor seeks to be the solution to this problem.

[Remember: Tor is a tool. Keeping your anonymity safe and making good use of the tool which keeps you out of danger depends only on you. Tor can’t check to ensure that you don’t make errors. So be careful.]

Support GlobaLeaks ? / Support the TOR project ?

Photo by svennevenn

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