Michel

I’d be happy to help with that!

Michel

Hi Jon,

thanks for intervening here, why not make a selection of your wirearchy posts on the subject, a kind of best of that gets to the gist of your insights .. I’d be happy to (re)publish them!

Apologies for taking my time to reply to your kind offer. I’d like to take you up on the offer, but have a concern that generally my posts are not carefully enough constructed for your audience / readers. That’s what I meant by “thousands-and-thousands of too many words” 😉

Therefore, if you don’t mind I will take a stab at condensing some of the posts / words into something that might be meaningful for people who read here (such as putting them into a clear P2P context. In fact, maybe you could help me with a bit of coaching / guidance, via email (I think you have my email address above) ?

thanks for intervening here, why not make a selection of your wirearchy posts on the subject, a kind of best of that gets to the gist of your insights .. I’d be happy to (re)publish them!

– however, when we step from decision-making in the field of abundance, i.e. the immaterial work itself, to the field of the infrastructure of cooperation, which is a costly economic good, the community may decide to create a formal democratic structure. This is in fact what happens empirically with free software communities, who created formal NGO’s, democratically governed, to manage that infrastructure.

I think I’d argue that this is what we are seeing emerge out of the participative and interactive environment the Web now offers, with start-ups and fledgling movements “practicing” how to use sociality and peer-to-peer negotiations, surveillance and more general dynamics. I also think I might be able to condense my thousands-and-thousands of too many words in old blog posts on “wirearchical” characteristics and dynamics into the nice succinct points you make.

I cannot help but think of the last 300 years or so of my country of birth – India. From being a loose collection of princely states, where absolute monarchy/ feudalism ruled until the British came along and made Indians pay through taxes for all the infrastructure and procedural improvements that historians now widely attribute to the British Raj, it is now a _functioning_ democracy. The emphasis on _functioning_ must not be missed because on more than one occasion, the voting base has demonstrated to the politicians that not delivering on promises could be an electorally expensive mistake.

As for consensus – not consent because if the variations in literacy and economic might are as much as in India, consent will probably become a game of might rather than the ‘right’ in the debate – a look at the current ruling coalition may interest some. It is a 13, yes you read right, 13 party coalition at the centre. Many are regional parties who negotiate a hard bargain on many issues. Consensus therefore is slow to come by but just like in much else in life, once the wheels move forward, it is hard for politicians to roll them back. Which is why the juggernaut of change in India moves only forward.

The good thing about consensus is that the citizenry does not sabotage the change. Consensus is slow but steady and irreversible, because it takes into account inequities and realities rather than pure idealism or ideology.

It can work very well as a general method for a smallish body of people who know and trust one another, or for a small body of people who have experienced it so often that they can immediately create the necessary affective milieu. Consensus in these situations becomes more than a decision-making tool, it creates an almost spiritual kinship with your fellows.