RFC re A democracy of groups

Beth Noveck's article http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_11/noveck/ explores some issues that touch on her experience in SL.

Beth's proposals are of interest for two reasons. First, the Democracy Island project, funded by the New York Law School, gives residents a model for sim development based on exploring serious issues of law and governance, with an ongoing attempt to make the sim contribute to experimental projects with FL consequences such as park design.

Secondly, the particular article I've referenced ventures into territory with significant FL implications. Beth argues that 'collective' action by groups such as web based affiliation groups should be aided by formation of legal structures, and by steps to give 'good' groups real power.

The structures she discusses would enable groups to be incorporated in a manner analogous to commercial corporations. This would allow groups to have more tools. For example, a group could have a bank account. She proposes this sort of group as having a say in the legislative process. Her examples include groups from across the country having a consultative role as legislation is developed, and even a possible veto over legislation.

I'm not clear who picks these lucky groups. Reference is made to jury selection, as if that process would be used. But jury selection is a means of choosing individuals from the pool of elegible individuals. Choosing a group from a pool of groups is problemmatic; it's easy to think up speculative scenarios in which a system like this can be gamed.

Traxx, you referenced a particular article by Prof. Noveck, but I'm uncertain from your posting which it was. I looked at the Democracy Island website, where there is a transcript of her appearance on Democracy Island (http://nyls.blogs.com/demoisland/2006/01/beth_noveck_on_.html), but wasn't confident that is the piece you mentioned. Of course, Prof. Noveck has numerous publications (http://www.nyls.edu/pages/591.asp). Have you a link to the particular item you meant?

Frank, that link is in your main thread: Some Readings Suggested by Law Society Observers. I should have included it in this thread too, and will do that now by editing the initial post.

Btw, adding a post to your original thread was intended to extend that list so that your original thread could function as a general index to the various RFC threads, which sometimes scroll off the screen. You might have other ideas though. I'll add the link to my RFC post, and you can delete/ shuffle posts to get the organization that makes sense. I don't attach any sentimental value to my own posts. : )

I still have much to read into Beth's article, and the interpretation some people make of it. So far, I have read it under two different viewpoints, but not read it enough. It's a difficult text with lots of cross-references to anedoctal evidence, some of which often encourage the "group thinking" that Beth proposes, others are somewhat misleading. The overall feeling I have is that Beth describes the way she would like groups to be, and not exactly the way they are. In many places this raised some doubts in my mind as what exactly she was saying.

A good example is that I got the overall feeling that Beth seems to convey is that groups can exist by themselves, without the support of a legal structure behind it. This has also been what some in-world supporters of Beth's have been promoting (but, alas, they — like myself — may have interpreted her wrongly on this). Putting it on another words, groups become self-sufficient, self-empowered structures, requiring no law, and no Government. They handle everything inside the group; there is no appeal beyond the group; no need for balances, checks, appeals. The group is autonomous, self-sufficient, closed in itself, and deals with all matters internally.

Now, to be fair to Beth and her followers, I must admit that I come from a completely cultural and social environment, one that doesn't demand a limelight focused on individuality and self-expression. Throughout Europe, fluctuating here and there, the notion of citizens forming associations — "groups" — to exert power over governments is a long-established practice; some countries (certainly the case of mine) even go to the point to legally requiring the government to meet with representatives of citizen's associations when passing out the budget or dealing with tax raising/cut or salary negotiation. If they don't talk with those spontaneously-created associations, they're violating the law — and their equivalent of the Supreme Court is able to cancel their decisions. As said, citizens are "empowered" not only to advise or petition their cause to the goverment; in some degrees, they are part of the decision-making process, in the sense that the government(s) cannot set a legally valid procedure without their agreement. The terms on which these interactions between freely associated citizens and their respective governments work is set in law and has been worked out over several generations.

According to what I've learned, the situation in the US is, from a certain point of view, not so different. "Associations", in the European term, are worded slightly differently under US law, but you can apply to become a "legally-established pressure lobby" with a special registration when you set your association up. The details elude me completely, but the idea that citizens of the US are freely able to join forces to lobby for their ideas is certainly present in the US as well. The only difference seems to be in the way the public at large views those "pressure groups". In most of Europe, these are part of the decision process and work with the government; in the US, they are seen as "elites" that wield power in a closed group (remember, this silly vision is applied to social institutions, ecological associations, and all sorts of civic groups with a voice to be heard).

Beth is thus proposing something which is more appealing to the individualistic mind of the average US citizen — a way to create much more dynamic groups, without the need of supervision, empowering them to make their own decisions to their own groups, but also, in the process, getting rid of the "need" of governmental overseeing or even a complex system of laws, since groups are self-sufficient and don't need to "draw power" from the government or the State. They are "self-empowered" by merely existing. And she tends to fundament her arguments by showing so many anedoctal evidence on groups spontaneously forming on the online communities — which don't require neither bureaucracy, nor a formal structure, nor physical presence, and certainly no government control. The end scenario, for Beth's followers, is an utopian society where groups decide on the best for their own members, and disregard any outside influences (mind you, this assumption is based on the idea that new groups can form dynamically all the time and that people, according to their interests, will naturally be part of several groups at the same time).

Naturally, SL seems to be a good "test base" to see if this theory is workable. After all, there are only two entity types in SL: the individual, and the (SL) group. But we SL residents know how flawed the "one-size-fits-all" theory of groups is, to the point it's absolutely unworkable. I'm not going into that discussion; trillions of words have been written on the subject here; LL has even started a new thread just for group discussion. I'll refer you to that to see what exactly people need in the group structure to have it working. What I find amusing is that after three years of the "one-size-fits-all" type of group, the residents are tired of social experiments, and demand a better system.

Beth is more intelligent, she actually proposes two types of groups. One that is formed dynamically and has no legal existence; and the "corporate group", sort of an institutionalised variant of the dynamic, spontaneous group, that happens to have a legal existence, with their own bank accounts, and so forth. These, eventually, will replace corporations (or will be corporations themselves), and the dynamics of dealing with people not agreeing with the group, or wishing the group to do more, are pretty well described in A democracy of groups — groups will split and join, according to necessity, and people will join this or that group as they wish.

Now, as being rather biased to my own cultural heritage, and having a profound lack of knowledge of the US legal system, what Beth describes, at this level, is something there has always been existent in my own society, for nearly 200 years. The only difference is that right now you can set up a "corporate group" (that's what we call an "association" in about 1 1/2 hours due to technology, while it took weeks or months in the not so distant past; and you can legally close that "corporate group" in a hour or so as well. Almost all requirements regarding to legal aspects — eligibility for non-profit status, accounting, online banking, etc. — are currently possible through the Internet (and even mandatory in some cases), and the ones that aren't will soon be. So this is not "news". As a matter of fact, I'm President of one of those "corporate groups" which is in existence for about 10 years. Almost all decisions have always been made through the Internet (on a mailing list server — not yet in SL ), and except for a few regular meetings in "physical space", most of the work is conducted online anyway, and already did back in 1996. So this is hardly "a new idea" to me. The only difference I can read in Beth's words is that she urges groups to use more technology and rely less on the paper-and-physical method of decision making. I can't agree more with her — but there is no need to "urge" for that. Another anecdotal example: I'm currently providing some support to a group of former students of a local high school. The youngest of them, I think, is in the early 60s; the President is well into the late 70s. They meet through the Internet with half the members, decide things over the Internet, learn to work with content management systems, and do their information spreading through email. They did not ask for anything. Like people in the 1930s started to do business over the phone, nowadays people use the Internet — new tool for communication available, let's use it. The time for "urging" people to use the Internet was 1994/5 — not 2006!

Nothing really revolutionary here. Groups are not "spontaneously" forming all of a sudden and getting involved in governmental issues. This has been around for around 200 years — only the means differ. Instead of writing letters, using the phone, faxing petitions, now people use the Internet. But associations of people living physically separated from each other always existed; they just used snail mail instead of e-mail. What I can agree with is that nowadays we can make decisions faster. That's the only real difference.

So, what are the real differences that Beth is actualy proposing? Well, I may have missed a few — again due to cultural bias — but it seems that the innovation is really in the way the "empowered groups" deal with their government. She proposed the concept of "Citizen juries" — "groups to which political power could be held accountable". While this has to be taken as a possible suggestion, and certainly, in due fairness, more as a brainstorming idea to elicit comment, the point is, some issues are plainly not addressed. Beth suggests systems where interested people join a group voluntarily that oversees the bill-making procedure, and that, as a result of their work, they are able to veto bills. The details on how this should be done are explained in a detailed framework.

As much interesting this concept is, it relies on several assumptions, mostly based on parochial evidence, not universal data. First, it assumes that all citizens are equally proficient in all fields of knowledge, and that by pooling together this knowledge in a "citizen jury", this group actually understands the issue well enough to be able to not only make a fundamented argument on a certain bill, but that they can even go a step further and veto the bill.

Now this assumption is flawed. Group membership on the "citizen jury" seems to be mostly "volunteer-based". This means that it's a certain class of citizens — what usually the media calls "concerned citizens" — that will always join these groups, since that's what they like to do (Beth even suggests that the time working for the group should be paid for). But it means that this group does not really represent the "average citizen": they are well educated (familiar with the Internet), probably with high living standards (they own their own computers — try to do this on public terminals in a Library, and you understand what I mean; also, if this work is voluntary, not paid, it means you can afford to spend your spare time contributing to the group system, instead of concentrating in working to get money for your family to survive), good at rhetorics (or they won't be able to stand a chance in an online world), and with a fair amount of leadership and organising skills (since they will to get the "citizen jury" to actually deliberate on something).

Put into other words — they will be politicians.

This is not employed in the bad sense. "Politics", as someone once defined, is what happens when two people decide upon the fate of a third one. So this means that these "citizen juries" — remember, they are neither "elected", nor "appointed", they just volunteer for their work — will be a layer of elitist politicians, with a very specific profile, which certainly doesn't exactly represent the "average" citizen in any respect. They will, of course, represent themselves and the group they're in.

Contrast this to the current situation, at least in some western countries. Associations, freely organised among people with a common interest (say, car owner's associations... they're not "politicians", although their elected leader probably is), petition the government for a change, or try to influence the decision process regarding a certain bill. As said, some governments are required to consult and compromise with these associations; others are not required to do so, but will have at least to hear what they have to say. These associations are not "citizen juries". They exist only to protect their own interests, and loudly voice their opinion when the government is not listening hard enough. They don't require "special skills" or training or education — they just congregate around a common cause. And they are exactly what we have right now.

What is also seriously lacking in Beth's article is the structure of a group-based society. The first time I read the article I was puzzled: how do groups interact? How are they empowered? How do they relate to each other?

Beth's words tend to give us some clues. "Empowerment" comes essentially from "above": the government has to set up laws to "empower" groups (meaning that at least in Beth's cultural background groups currently have no power at all; as said, my own bias tells me that this isn't true for a considerable part of the western world). So it seems that the "democracy of the group" comes not from the "people", but first and foremost, by a government, with a legal system, that admits groups a certain legal status (again, my cultural bias shows in these words, and my apologies for that). Thus, groups get the "empowerment" from above, and then allows people to join the existing structure.

Groups apparently do not "interact" — in the form of "group corporations", they are separate entities, always dynamically splitting and joining, eventually having groups forming their own metagroups. But the "interactions" are non-existent. For instance, Beth tends to indicate that the "citizen juries", as an example, work independently of each other on different aspects of the bill-making. So, when a law is discussed on health care in rural areas, one citizen jury analyses it; when on the same day a tax raise is proposed to cover the costs of research in genetical medicines, another citizen jury has the task to study that. But both issues are inter-related; eventually, genetical medicines are introduced in rural areas. What is the solution? Get a new citizen jury to discuss it! But that way, all the work of the previous two groups are "lost" (which is not entirely true — if everything is recorded on the Internet, you can look at the logs).

Due to the voluntary and spontaneous nature of group forming, this also means that one very good decision made by a citizen jury, due to an astonishing number of very intelligent people that gathered together for that decision, is also "lost" on subsequent, similarly-related issues. The same people may not volunteer again. They might be ill, dead, or simply uninterested. So, the quality of the decision-making process is not guaranteed. That's what always happens when you have well-meaning, amateur volunteers participating in decision processes: sometimes, you get good results; most often, the results are below average. A common law of thumb, based on anedoctal evidence, is that the ratio is 1:1000 (a "magic number" that also describes, for instance, how many low-quality artists you need to get an astonishingly good one; or how many atheletes you need to train until you get an Olympic-class winner). Our society, however, tends to encourage specialization, profissionalization, and a "merits-based" system that puts people with above-average skills in a position they can participate closer to the decision process. This is what "equal opportunities" mean: a way to "filter" out the best people for the best place in society, no matter from where they originally started from.

So, what Beth seems to be proposing is a system where any citizen can start a group, isolates itself from others, and participate directly in the decision process that will affect others — not only the ones from their own group, of course, but the whole society overall. Again, the assumption relies on the "wisdom of the crowds": the common man/woman has common sense enough to know what is best for him/her, and they should be able to decide that for themselves.

Sadly, the "wisdom of the crowds" is of course a fallacy. Given a free run on the groups system, what would be the most influential groups (ie. the ones with more volunteers; the ones where, due to the 1:1000 rule, would attract the best speakers, the more cleverer arguers, the ones able to afford to spend more time online meeting and discussing things)?

If "size" would be the only thing that mattered — in the sense that the bigger the group, the more it should wield power, since the more people it represents — then the largest group would be the one desiring reality shows on TV and football/soccer games for free, 7 days a week. That is about 99% of the population. These would be the people that would have the strongest voice when discussing things like a budget, for instance. Forget about science, education, culture, welfare. This "wise crowd" will only approve budgets for one thing: entertainment of the masses.

If "quality of persuasion" would be the only thing that mattered — in the sense that the rhetorically-minded ones would be the ones to wield more power — well then, it would be just an elite of well-educated people, good speakers, mostly with high standards of living. As a matter of fact — the ones currently "in charge". That comes to no surprise to me

At this point in my reasoning, my own lack of political expertise failed me, and I had to resort to my RL friends who are much more knowledgeable than me. As many SL residents know — as I have been so often criticized — I tend to get along with the whole range of political spectrum, from the conservative extreme right, to the intellectual left-wing. As I use to say, as long as I don't discuss politics and religion with my friends, I'm able to keep them So, I gave Beth's article to read to both extremes — the nationalists and the communists — and awaited some comments...

From the right-wing side, the "group" structure is viewed as "corporativism" with another nice name, set in a modern environment. The nationalists, of course, advocate meritocracies; people earn the right to be part of the group, contribute to it, and the notion of "government by groups" is appealing to them — as long as one knows who's in charge, which they find disturbingly lacking in Beth's article. They also couldn't see a measure of "quality" in the group structure: how does the public know what groups are "better" at making decisions? Successfully vetoing bills ("hey, we have vetoed our thousandth bill this year!" is not a measure of "quality", but just abuse of power. Then of course there is the question of accountability — if a group does something wrong (ie. failing to properly discuss a certain aspect of the law-making process, and thus reaching the wrong conclusion), who is responsible? The elected members of Congress or Senate? Or the volunteers that join up for citizen jury duty and disband as soon as an issue has been decided?

That gave me something to ponder about. In the mean while, the left-wingers also came back to me, with radiant smiles on "group democracy" and "wisdom of crowds". Remember that the left-wingers in my country are often Marxist — a swearword in the US, but simply a philosophical ideology elsewhere — and thus they have to "fit in" the new trends in ideologies according to a certain setting. Marxists will also agree that groups are "necessary" and can replace government ultimately. The way they set it up is, alas, completely different from Beth's suggestion: base democracy at the local level, with representatives elected to serve on the hierarchically superior level, and so on, until you reach the "government" level (ie. a group that has no other group above itself). At all levels, there are responsabilities to the level below, and the delegation of a representative to the level above; at the bottom level, all citizens participate at the decisions; at the top level, you have all responsabilities. So what lacks on Beth's model is the lack of hierarchy. Groups exist in a "vacuum", they don't necessarily represent everyone, they don't coordinate with each other, and their influence on government does not come exactly from a delegation of powers from the groups below, but from their own self-appointment ("volunteering" for group duty.

Of course, my moderate friends, somewhere in the centre, look at Beth's proposal and say she's describing the 200-year-old association model that exists in most European countries that gets a fancy new clothing (ie. meeting through the Internet and not by postal mail or physical presence). The difference are in the speed of decision and the procedures for setting up groups (ie. a few hours in RL; microseconds online). The rest is already in place, sure, under different names, and perhaps not so "bright and shiny" as Beth present the Utopian future. But it's all there.

So, how can these theories affect SL?

First and foremost, the adequate set of tools has to be provided for groups. Two types of groups — the "ad hoc group" and the "corporate group" — are an oversimplification. We need a much wider range of tools — and if we can watch that need emerging in SL, with only a tiny population of 123,000, how much more do we need in RL...? From simple partners — a 2-person group — which need to share land and a bank account; to Anshe's Dreamland, with hundreds of sims, several dozens of employees, and thousands of customers, there is a wide range of tools necessary to deal with each and every one of the situation. A 2-person group does not need contracts, shares, and rules to elect a CEO; the Dreamland Corporation needs not only that, but multiple bank accounts, a fully-blown accounting system, a way to contact and receive feedback from customers and shareholders, and a way to compartimentalize internally the whole "group" into departments, as well as a way to share parts of its structure with partners, affiliates, and other cartel members. The "one-size-fits-all" (or even "two-sizes-fit-all" model simply doesn't apply.

Secondly, even Beth assumes that the first stage of a "democracy of groups" needs a government, a legal system, and a way for citizens to participate in that system — at the very least, to get the "proper" tools implemented! We have nothing of the sort in SL. Groups live in a legal vacuum. People have no way to get basic rights (as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) protected. There is no enforcement ability. There is no "citizen participation" at the Linden government level — certainly, there are ad hoc "advisory boards", but no real "decision-level" abilities. And even if those were set in place, how would these decisions be enforced? Simple things like a dispute between two groups claiming contrary opinions on an argument cannot be arbitrated in SL — except voluntarily. Creating a group to provide that arbitration — something that Beth slightly hints at — is impossible in SL. You can mediate, not arbitrate. A group like that has no powers, no abilities, and is basically worthless. Worse than that, even if it had some enforcement power, where would its authority come from? Groups are volunteerily joined and formed — authority comes neither from above, neither from below. And secondly, who would control/oversee/supervise the decision processes of an "empowered group"? Residents can't "vote" people out from groups they don't belong to (and neither does Beth advocate such an outrageous idea!); they don't have anyone to complain to beyond ToS (ie. what about the whole range of ethical behaviour and commercial disputes which arise every day? None are covered by ToS/CS); even if they did, how would those complains be fairly judged and tried, since there is no legal system in place, no court of appeals, and no way to certify the accountability?

Let's face it: better group tools in SL are seriously needed, and LL is already addressing the issue as we speak. But implementing a "new society" in SL, based on "a democracy of groups", is fated to go the way all Utopias go.

Gwyneth Llewelyn is neither a political analyst nor has any sociological training. Her opinions are only her own. Caveat lector.