<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">This sounds quite interesting, Abd ul-Rahman. Where can I learn about your FA/DP idea? Your discussion here is helpful, but I feel like I am missing out the important prerequisite pieces in order to make sense of it. (I know about delegable proxy, but haven't heard about FA/DP specifically).<div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Duane Johnson</div><div><br></div><div><div>On Apr 21, 2010, at 9:57 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>At 04:42 PM 4/19/2010, Duane Johnson wrote:<br><blockquote type="cite">Hi Everyone,<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I am new to this forum, thanks to James Green-Armytage who sent me the address. I am a software engineer in Chicago who also happens to be interested in voting methods.<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I'd like to propose a voting method that may be of interest here. It has also been cross-posted to the ideas group at forums.e-democracy.org. This system seems almost too simple when you understand it, but the implications are deep and, I believe, profound. I am interested in your feedback.<br></blockquote><br>I'm glad to see more people thinking about process and voting as involving communication. Which leads to considering communication as the foundation of democracy, not voting per se. Functional democracy is deliberative democracy; democracy without communication is easily manipulated and if power is directly exercised, there is a tendency to mob rule, where the intelligence of crowds is dumbed down instead of amplified. Wikipedia, for those who study it, is a great example of how not to do it.<br><br>However, I strongly urge people who attempt to analyze the situation and to propose reforms to:<br><br>1. Keep it simple. An extraordinarily powerful system for fully proportional representation consisting of a seemingly-simple tweak on Single Transferable Vote was proposed in 1883 or so by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). If a simple system that is *obviously* far more democratic doesn't attract notice for more than a hundred years, what chance does something more complicated and dodgier (i.e., involving lots of unknowns) have?<br><br>2. Don't propose chickens without eggs or vice versa. Imagine that there is some ideal political system, that allows good ideas to be efficiently considered, with the necessary depth. If such a system existed, it would be easy to suggest and propose and agree upon it, and if people agree on just about anything, they can do it, as long as the actual already-existing system is reasonably democratic. I invented FA/DP (Free Associations with Delegable Proxy) as a method for considering and forming consensus on ideas like FA/DP.<br><br>3. FA/DP is terminally simple, but, in reality, it's like pulling teeth to even get people to consider it. Sure, lots of people will say, "What a great idea," if they don't get stuck in the knee-jerk objections, like, "*They* will corrupt anything." or, more sophisticated, "Iron law of oligarchy (see the Wikipedia article)," etc.<br><br>4. Notice: the method by which one would develop consensus and implement better political systems is a political system. Revolutions tend to empower the revolutionaries, or those who inherit power from them. If we want a true democratic revolution, we must want something different from the norm of revolution, which tends to follow the same traditional power structures, thus, in effect, simply changing faces. Traditional power structures boil down to two kinds: oligarchical and distributed. Oligarchical power developed and prospered because it was more efficient when the scale became large -- even though it is, from an ideal perspective, very inefficient -- due to the involvement in process normally required for distributed power to function, which expands exponentially with the number of active participants.<br><br>5. FA principles are natural for humans, most peer organizations, in their infancy, are roughly FAs. But if the FA principles aren't understood and solidly maintained, and as organizations grow, they naturally develop oligarchical structure, it is what people know how to do, and they are not aware that there are alternatives. When the organization is small, implementing something like DP seems too complicated. Can't we just discuss things like we always have? When the scale becomes large enough that DP is truly needed, it's too late. De-facto oligarchies have already developed, and the Iron Law of Oligarchy begins to function and resist change back to distributed power. The oligarchy believes that it knows best, and, indeed, it often does. It's the exceptions that are killers, that reduce long-term efficiency and support, that allow originally wonderful nonprofit organizations, for example, to become divided and weakened, to be co-opted by corruption, to become no longer truly representative of the aspirations of their members, but because the organization has been "successful," and comes to dominate its field, it is very difficult to start anew and such efforts will be considered "divisive" and "disruptive."<br><br>6. So: consider delegable proxy, how simple it can be when applied within a Free Association, which does not concentrate power *at all*. In the Montesqueuian sense, it is pure judgment, which I think of as advice. In theory, if the executive and judicial power are fully separated, the judicial system has no direct power, it only advises but cannot coerce the executive system. A wise executive, though, wants good advice! In an FA/DP system, the system functions solely to advise its members as well as anyone else interested. The only coercive power it might have is the distributed power of the members, if they act in a coordinated manner, and it cannot, without blatant abandonment of FA principles, coerce them. The FA itself does not collect power except for the power to communicate, and it cannot control that, for the communication structure is easily replicable, if a central structure is corrupted in some way, the delegable proxy structure can re-establish it, network by network, reconnecting outside the original structure, because most of the communication in an FA/DP structure is not through the central structure, it's under the control of the proxies themselves, who cannot compel any client to participate, who do not "own" their clients, nor do the clients own them.<br><br>7. Often overlooked, because of the habits of thinking only in terms of hierarchies that concentrate power or representation, is that, if everyone names a proxy, all paths in the directed graph produce form loops. There is nobody at the "top," or, more accurately, there must be at least two. I.e., if there is what I call a superproxy, someone who, if nobody else participates in some "discussion," would represent every member, there must be at least two, because the proxy named by this superproxy would have the same representative power.<br><br>8. Lots of people, thinking about this stuff, try to eliminate loops, because a loop can mean that some are not represented in some high-level process. However, when that "defect" happens, it's visible. It's easy to notify those who are "absent," and to do so efficiently, through identification of unrepresented loops and the "proxy rank" of those involved. ("Proxy rank" looks at each member and considers how many clients are represented if the member participates and nobody else does, it's a bit complicated because it involves recursion to avoid the appearance of equal representation due to a superproxy of some natural caucus naming a proxy within the caucus.) Loops represent natural caucuses, and they only cause loss of representation if no member of the caucus, in the loop, participates in a process. Attempting to avoid loops involves restricting the rights of members to name people in their own trusted group, forcing the naming of someone outside that group. That's coercive, in the name of "more democratic." Bad idea. Instead, let people decide if they want to be represented or not. If they do, and if it is not practical for them to be represented directly through a loop member, all it takes is one member of a loop naming a proxy outside the loop to break it.<br><br>9. Alternate proxies are another solution to the loop issue. An "alternate proxy" is a backup proxy, considered to represent a member if the primary proxy is not present or represented. But, remember, every complication represents risk. Single-proxy DP encourages members to think about whom they most trust, from among those who are available to them. A single proxy has a clear (and accepted, I encourage not recognizing, or deprecating, unaccepted proxy designations) responsibility to communicate information coming from the "center" to the client (or to *not* communicate information that the proxy deems to be "noise" for the client). Does an alternate proxy have this responsibility? The core of DP, to me, is the proxy-client relationship and how it will function.<br><br>10. FA/DP is necessarily informal, it creates organizational structure only in the loosest sense. The relevant Alcoholics Anonymous tradition (AA is the model FA) says, "AA as such ought never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve." Notice: a "service board" is a corporation, and it is, in this "exception," not creating a board -- which will own property as a corporation and thus develop centralized power -- that is AA or controls any part of AA, and that is "responsible" to those it serves, which means, in practice, those who actually form it. They do not obtain the endorsement of AA itself, they are only quasi-AA, perhaps broadly supported, or perhaps not. Local Alcoholism Councils are often formed by AA members to represent the interests of alcoholics and alcoholism treatment before local governments. These Councils are often created and dominated by AA members and other interested persons, but they do not speak for AA, they speak for their members.<br><br>11. In the same way, the natural caucuses formed by proxies and their clients, cooperating, can form, say, Political Action Committees that exercise real power, collecting donations, or, because of campaign finance laws, they can easily recommend individual donations to their members. FA/DP doesn't collect power, in itself, these PACs are outside the FA itself, it does not endorse them, though they are free to endorse it. FAs do not take positions on controversial issues, and this is crucial, if FAs are to be able to form broad consensus, for to do this, every side on an issue should ideally be represented. FAs will certainly form with "initial bias," a bias created solely by the natural bias of its members, and the power exercised initially through PACs may reflect this bias. If, as I expect, FA/DP social technology is as efficient as I expect, these PACs will be successful, and will attract imitation. If the FA is open to participation by "the other side," it then becomes a mechanism whereby broader consensus might be found. Each caucus remains free, if it chooses, to organize its own PACs, but two PACs opposing each other in the sphere of real power weaken each other. That's good, when consensus hasn't been found! But cooperation and consensus are powerful. If agreement can be found, it will prevail. In order for this to work, joining the FA must not have any appearance of supporting one side of a controversy. FAs can report the results of polls of its members, those are just facts. However, these polls do not establish an "organizational position," except in one very narrow sphere, the organization of the FA itself. Strictly speaking, the non-endorsement of controversial position practice of FAs is with regard to "outside issues." Within the FA, there are traditions which maintain the autonomy of all "meetings" and which prevent coercive power from arising. There is still the Iron Law of Oligarchy, it is not cancelled by FA/DP, but the leaders that develop are as they are in AA. "Our leaders are but trusted servants, they do not govern." Strictly speaking, these "leaders" do govern, but they only govern their own "meetings," i.e., they govern their own communication group, their own natural caucus, and because they cannot compel participation, the collected power is highly restricted. In AA, the saying is, "The only requirement to start a meeting is a resentment and a coffee pot." AA turns natural division and disagreement into fuel for expansion, for the more meetings there are, the more options there are for members, the more communication power exists.<br><br>12. I imagine FA/DP using all forms of communication technology, but, it is important to remember, it doesn't depend on any form of communication in particular, beyond the central idea of two people communicating directly. DP is established if there is a member list and a list of assigned proxies (preferably with acceptances, that's often overlooked by those who are trying to set up a "voting system.") For voting applications, I recommend, instead of DP, Asset Voting, with DP as a voluntary and optional method for electors holding votes to cooperate and coordinate to create representation. Asset Voting is compatible with existing traditions regarding deliberative assemblies, creating a default assembly where every member has the same voting power as every other member. That can be modified to reduce the voting power of a member whenever an elector who has transferred votes to that member votes directly, but that is a tweak, an improvement, I believe, and would establish true and complete representation in all decisions of an Assembly, which is important, but it is also possible that such "outside voting" would be only advisory. Early implementations of Asset Voting should keep it simple, establishing the principle of full representation by chosen representative, instead of representatives being chosen in "contests," for such contests represent not only winners and losers among candidates, but winners and losers among voters. Are the losers represented? How can we say that a voter is represented in a legislature when the voter opposed the choice of a majority, not to mention the mere plurality that is often the real case? This is the elephant in the living room of "representative democracy." It isn't. The people, the "demos" are not represented, jurisdictions are, districts.<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>