Also, for steering toward goals or away from dangers.” In the information age, and in a more human-specific sense, governance is a means by which multiple stakeholders can maintain synergy and cohesiveness with each other. It relates to the processes of interaction and decision-making among those stakeholders. Governance is a deep and complex subject that touches on psychology, sociology, and cult
ural anthropology. As it relates to digitizing governance, software engineering and other sciences also play a role. Whether we like it or not. All living beings govern each other with every interaction they have. And since it is not possible or practical for any individual human, in our modern world, to have the capacity to make every decision about everything that affects them, what we present in this document is proposed means of doing the best we can to offer as much transparency and opportunity for individual humans to have a voice in many (or even most) of the things that affect them. It additionally proposes how an individual gets to choose to specialize in certain areas where they are more passionate or expert, and perhaps ultimately become more of a decision maker for others in those areas. Everything proposed in this document is about organizing humans at scale in way that offers the maximum transparency and opportunity for their voice to be heard in the things that affect them. And in the spirit of biomimicry, everything proposed in this document attempts to simply identify, highlight, and enumerate the things that are actually already happening in natural systems- both on the human, and non-human levels. These insights then form a feedback mechanism from which we can better design systems and iterate those designs in ways that mimic the natural, healthy patterns inherent in the evolution of creation.
1.1. The Big Question
How do we create a governance system that obeys the guiding principles of fairness, equal opportunity, consent, privacy, transparency, and integrity, and yet still manages to be agile, flexible and effective? Great question. And we will NOT try to answer it with this document. What we will do is present an ecosystem that enhances the expressive capacity of humans to such an extent that in reasonably short order, we can actually start answering that question. Perhaps we will find there is no one answer. Perhaps every group of humans that come together will have unique approaches to how to answer this question. We think that is likely, and have prepared this document to propose how we can create an ecosystem where exploration can happen with optimal transparency and interoperability between the various groups using various approaches, and where “business” can be conducted by and between these groups most effectively, and most immediately.
1.2. The Future of Governance
This document presents the idea that “The Future of Governance is not Governments". It will make the strong case that it is well-past time for humans on planet Earth to accept the truth that we can no longer offset our responsibility for the stewardship of our lives and our shared resources to something which is perceived or believed to be disconnected from ourselves. Perhaps Bela Banathy said it best: “I have become increasingly convinced that even if people fully develop their potential, they cannot give direction to their lives, they cannot forge their destiny, they cannot take charge of their future—unless they also develop competence to take part directly and authentically in the design of the systems in which they live and work, and reclaim their right to do so. This is what true empowerment is about.”
Based on that idea, this document presents an overview of the general concepts involved in digital governance required to produce that outcome. It proposes a set of the minimum concepts, technologies and metrics that are required, and it further proposes a new global standard, called CoGov, by which individuals and organizations of all sizes can interact with each other cooperatively, dynamically, and synergistically—especially at scale.
1.3. CoGov: What Is It? CoGov facilitates the creation of interfaces that can effectively operate a government, a business, a community, or an NGO. It creates a standard basis from which any form of governance process can be built and maintain integrability with any other. At the time of this writing, we anticipate that we will enable interfaces to be built that support to the following, known governance approaches: consensus, consent, voting, dynamic governance, holacracy, sociocracy, and liquid democracy. CoGov forms the basis by which legislative operations can be digitized; setting precedents for a form of “law” by enabling parties to enter into voluntary agreements with each other, and specifying accountabilities to those agreements. It forms the basis from which an organization can act as a judicial body—where sovereign virtual courthouses can be built; maintaining appropriate transparency and access to public and private records and/or even handling dispute resolution. It will also form the basis from which organizations can enable executive governance through discoursive group decision-making, employing best practices to ensure the emergence of collective intelligence, and transparency of activities. The first phase of the implementation of CoGov will revolve around these executive functions. In short, CoGov is a framework/app/platform that users can set preferences and create their own models for governance and agreements that will be immutably stored in “the cloud” (something akin to blockchain), while at the same time allowing a particular organization to use any number of models, and/or transition between them, while removing or minimizing the difficulties of the transition.
