Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the inescapable artifacts of human communication. Paraphrasing some of the salient points:

• Knowledge problems: language is a lossy codec for communicating our internal experiences to other agents, leaving an immense gap between words and meanings.
• Computation problems: tools like wikis and markets are subject to the massive efficiency gains of concurrency as they decentralize communication both in time and space. But most radical organizations prefer consensus meetings, which are severely constrained by the extremely low bandwidth channel of sequential one-at-a-time utterances.
• Tribalism: in organizations, the cognitive biases and psychological needs of most humans act as a constant pressure to prioritise the self-preservation of our collective identities ahead of measurable progress towards shared aims.

However, while the critique is illuminating, I found myself unsatisfied, wishing that they had offered more light at the end of the tunnel. Frankly, I don’t care for critique without reconstruction.

Through my work at Loomio I’m connected with social movements around the world, as they use our collective decision-making software. These international connections give me great optimism, as I see new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology overcoming the limitations outlined in Gillis’ talk. Optimism is more fun when you share it, so I wanted to document two cases that I think are worth emulating.

The movements I’m most inspired by are inspiring precisely because of their combined competencies in organizational and technological development. Namely, they’re:

1. The international municipalists informally headquartered in Spain.
2. The conservative anarchists building new democratic forms in Taiwan.

Organized citizens in Spain have made an extraordinary demonstration of the necessity of making uncomfortable coalitions (they talk about “complicated majorities”). You see this when distinct organisations temporarily coordinate in service of one shared issue, disbanding after victory. Radical leftists are working shoulder-to-shoulder with organised labour, with immigrant groups, with progressive politicians and social entrepreneurs. Stacco Troncoso credits this practice of coalition-building as the primary factor in keeping the far right mostly out of action in Spain. It’s hard to fuel the hate-fires between tribes when they are being continuously reminded of their shared interests, and continuously invited into acts of mutual aid (e.g. the old unemployed factory worker loses some of his xenophobia when the immigrants show up to prevent his home eviction).

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus as a means of redirecting civil unrest it into channels that support the status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals, an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extituion: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy.

Similarly, you see elements of the same “organizational + technological innovation” recipe at play in Taiwan. In 2014 their occupy movement won. Since then they’ve been dramatically reformatting the government, moving beyond political parties, and deploying technology for mass citizen participation in law-making. This 4-minute video from queer open source hacker turned movement spokesperson turned digital minister Audrey Tang is a great introduction.

In Taiwan as in Spain, the credibility of the new political actors is rooted in the streets. Second, those actors have deployed a rigorous political strategy, systematically making allies throughout the public & private sectors, and civil society. The folks from vTaiwan told me how they interviewed every state official they could find and used the results to map out which government departments were most ready to concede decision-making power to citizens. Then they used those early engagements as leverage, playing departments off each other in a competition for who could be the most participatory. That is the kind of strategic genius that could be repeated the world over.

On the tech front, you see a dual strategy: comprehensive research of existing tools, plus regular hackathons for developing new tools. Perhaps the best-documented example of this approach is the vTaiwan Uber case, where Uber drivers, taxi drivers, citizens, and officials efficiently found the region of their agreement using a combination of face-to-face deliberation and digital sentiment mapping using .

Perhaps most importantly, these processes are being hosted by people who appreciate the immense skill required to facilitate multi-stakeholder deliberation, who are up-to-speed with the palette of tools available, and who are pre-emptively mitigating the risks of “open-washing”.

In 4 years of hobby-horsing, I’ve met exactly 2 other westerners who were familiar with the Taiwan story before I told them about it. I realise I sound like a stuck record. I feel like I’m in a little bubble where nobody seems to care much about these stories. I don’t know who else is capturing the lessons, building the transnational networks, and remixing strategies into their local context. So I’m confused, like, am I an early adopter way ahead of the curve, or am I making a mountain of a molehill, or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Photo by speedbug

The post Organizing Beyond Organizations: Good News Stories from Spain and Taiwan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

How can democracies use technologies to strengthen themselves? Answers are emerging around the world, with the central theme being that technology can make politics more engaging, successful and legitimate by enabling people to become active producers of political outcomes instead of passive consumers. 

Devin Balkind writes about how technology can advance participatory democracy practices while citing policy-led examples in Taiwan and Madrid. Originally published in Education Update Online.

Devin Balkind: Democracy in the United States was established nearly 250 years ago when news travelled at the speed of a horse and real-time collaboration required sharing a physical location. Today, ubiquitous internet access, smartphones, social media, and online collaboration tools have transformed how we work, play and consume, but the basic structure of our politics remains the same.

The result is that during an era of massive innovation, our static politics have disempowered the public and made our representative democracy feel more like a “consumer” one. Parties are brands; politicians are products; and our job as consumer-citizens is to purchase “our” politician with our votes. U.S. media and education systems strengthen the notion of “consumer democracy” by obsessing over the theatrics that motivate people to vote instead of educating people about the issues, policies and processes that impact all our lives. The public is not pleased. Congress and the President’s approval ratings are at record lows, as are voter participation rates.

How can democracies use technologies to strengthen themselves? Answers are emerging around the world, with the central theme being that technology can make politics more engaging, successful and legitimate by enabling people to become active producers of political outcomes instead of passive consumers. 

Two examples of “participatory democracy” are taking place in Taiwan and Madrid. In Taiwan, the “vTaiwan” project encourages the public to participate in a multi-month, multi-phase “consultation process” where citizens give issue-specific feedback offline and online. They use that feedback to create their own legislative and administrative proposals, and the most popular proposal are ratified and implemented by the government. Over the last three years, tens of thousands of people have participated, resulting in more than a dozen new laws and administrative actions. In Madrid, city government built a platform that enables citizens to debate issues and propose legislation. If that legislation meets a popularity threshold, it automatically becomes law.

Surprisingly, there are few if any truly participatory political projects in the United States. While New York City has “participatory budgeting,” its many restrictions and limited scope makes it fundamentally different than the open-ended participatory processes practiced overseas.

New York City’s Public Advocate is supposed to be the voice of all New Yorkers. As such, it’s the perfect position to bring a technology-enabled collective decision-making process to our City. Since it’s democratically elected, the Public Advocate can give “participatory democracy” real legitimacy. And since it has consultative status with the City Council and many city agencies, the Public Advocate can bring the public’s will directly to the people who run our city.

I’m running for Public Advocate to put “participatory democracy” on the ballot in November. With your help, we can put the Public exactly where it should be — directly in charge of the Public Advocate.#

Devin works at the intersection of the nonprofit sector, the open-source movement, and grassroots community organizing to share and initiate best practices. He currently serves as president of the Sahana Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization that produces open source information management system for disaster relief and humanitarian aid. He is running for NYC 2017 Public Advocate.

Photo by transnationalinstitute

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I had no clue.

But Google queries for supercompetent, super-competent and super competent returned quite a few entries for cell vendors.  Google scholar returned entries on cell research.

Of course, Google returned other entries.  But after a bit of investigation, it seems that cell super-competence captures the essence of super-competent democracy more accurately than business supercompetence  (e.g. 6 Keys To Perform At Your Productive Best).

According to Wikipedia’ Natural Competence entry,

In microbiology, genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology, competence is the ability of a cell to take up extracellular (“naked”) DNA from its environment in the process called transformation.[i]

Transformants are cells that have taken up DNA (foreign, artificial or modified) and which can express genes on the introduced DNA.[ii]

As a government worker who promulgates administrative rules, the chief complaint I receive from the regulated public is that their concerns are not addressed.

To be sure, government entities hold listening sessions and public meetings. But the public believes their government does not incorporate public suggestions into its administrative rules.

Some cells are able to take up extracellular DNA and actually use it to express genes. This is competence. The regulated public believes the government is not competent. While the government may listen, it does not take up ideas from its public and actually use them to make rules or laws.

Using the microbiology metaphor, competent democracy would be able to absord public ideas and implement them.

What would super-competent democracy look like?

From Wikipedia’s Transformation Efficiency entry,

Transformation efficiency is the efficiency by which cells can take up extracellular DNA and express genes encoded by it. This is based on the competence of the cells.

Non-commercial preparations should normally give 10⁶ to 10⁷ transformants per microgram of plasmid; a poor preparation will be about 10⁴/?g or less, but a good preparation of competent cells can give up to ~10⁸ colonies per microgram of plasmid.^[54]

Protocols, however, exist for making supercompetent cells that may yield a transformation efficiency of over 10⁹.^[

Using the microbiology metaphor of cell competence, supercompetent democracy include a high concentration of nodes or pathways for taking up and implementing public ideas.

Now, cell competence does not mean that a cell takes up every DNA fragment in its environment.  In fact, some cells give preference to DNA which is already part of its make up.  Cellular noise can influence cell competence.

As we will learn from the Taiwan example below, the competence of democracy can also be influenced by noise.  Supercompetent democracy sets parameters for incorporating public ideas. From the example below,  Taiwan focuses on “rational discussion.”

Extracted from:http://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/

Taiwanese g0v activists such as Audrey Tang, who grew up among Tiananmen exiles in Germany, view governance failures as a “noisy signal” problem. she expresses how in Taiwan, “internet and democracy evolved together, spread together, and integrated with each other.” She continues:

The year 1988 brought freedom of the press and personal computers.
The year 1996 brought the first presidential election and dot-com websites.
There are so many civic hackers in Taiwan volunteering to work on democracy […] because our generation is the first to speak out freely—free speech was banned for 40 years during Martial Law under the Chiang dictatorship.

At a December 2014 g0v.tw hackathon, Minister Tsai upped the ante with a big ask: “Could g0v.tw create a platform for rational discussion and deliberation of policy issues that the entire nation could participate in?” In return, she offered binding consultation—that government decisions on issues discussed on the platform would be bound by the popular will expressed there. Dozens of volunteers at the hackathon accepted the challenge, and vTaiwan was born.

Minister Tsai reflects on vTaiwan on this interview on Talk to Taiwan: (translation by Audrey Tang):

We should say, vTaiwan is something of an experiment. Because at the time—if you remember the post-Sunflower days—the entire society was very chaotic.

When I worked on cyberspace regulations, often I heard people saying “Minister, this is impossible, you need at least 3 years or 5 years to make progress.” But in the business world, because I’ve been in the technology industry, technology moves much faster. We are in a world of rapid change. How is it possible that each policy always takes 3 to 5 years? That’s just not workable. When we think about today’s Taiwan, we are a pluralistic society; it’s almost certain that there will be different voices for any policy issue. So when there are so many different voices, how can we efficiently reach all the stakeholders, so that we can quickly draw a consensus? We need to have a mechanism.

So I went to the g0v  hackathon and proposed this project. I said I’m working on these bills and I think we need to have a platform to allow the entire society to engage in rational discussion. Luckily, Audrey Tang and many volunteers felt this idea was worthwhile, so the platform was set up in just a few weeks.

Minister Tsai continues with details on the government process:

So how do we make a platform for rational discussions? Our consensus is that all discussion procedures are to be determined and maintained by g0v volunteers; they have their own rules of the game, all of this is developed in g0v.

On behalf of the government side, I make sure that whenever anyone raises a question, the relevant ministries must respond within 7 days.

The consultation meeting invites various related ministries and commissions, government representatives, academics, all stakeholder representatives from industries, and participants from the online community. The entire meeting is live online. Everyone voices their opinions, but they are all recorded, open and transparent. Friends in g0v set up a transcription infrastructure, so 2–3 hours later, a stenographic transcript is available to everyone online.

We worked with this platform on closely-held company law, equity-based crowdfunding, selling medical material over internet . . . . All these things were deliberated on the platform, with different views recorded at the same time.

To us policymakers, what are the benefits? For each policy, I post all background material I have online. So if you want to delve into this issue, you can see the same data as I do. When everyone is on the same page, we can have a real discussion. Otherwise, the dialogue would be out of focus.

So if we can all take the time to understand the problem, read the data, while also listening to the views of the people—and enter a discussion, we are much more likely to reach a consensus.

Here’s a mic drop quote from Audrey Tang: “vTaiwan and pol.is mean a rethink of the political system at the constitutional level.”

Sadly, that road is littered with failures. Most efforts at collaborative legislation drafting have failed either because the power-holding body wasn’t involved, or because it decided to reject the recommendations of the people—see for example Iceland’s experience with its crowdsourced Constitution. Only occasionally have legislators embraced crowdsourcing of legislative commenting (see Utah’s experiment in Politicopia  or US Senator Durbin’s Legislation 2.0).

The fact that these methods are working at a national scale in Taiwan suggests that, in an age of mass digital participation, we can reclaim the democratic process for including the people’s voice in creating laws. Any permanent change in the way that laws get made—who has responsibility and the power for making decisions—would refer to the constitution. The ambiguous space that opens when consultation begins to function more efficiently and politicians voluntarily agree to abide by the will of the public is where new patterns can emerge.

On June 19, 2016, Audrey Tang sent this update: “The use of pol.is at the national level is sufficiently convincing that an MP just asked the current premier and minister of economy whether substantial rulemaking—like the reworking of the joint-stock company law—should be deliberated on vTaiwan.”

image: https://twitter.com/hashtag/g0vsummit?

https://twitter.com/hashtag/g0vsummit?src=hash

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