Bayle Shanks's website: proj-liquidRepublic-liquidRepublicDesignTodos

modifications that i plan to make in the bylaws, or things to think about further:

It is important that there be no rules on members which could be construed or miscontrued to prevent dissidents from forming an effective political opposition. There shall be no rule against subversion. There shall be no vague rules such as 'harming organizational security' or 'corrupting others' or 'advocating' something bad. Freedom of speech (and other forms of communication) is absolute. However, employees of the organization may be held to stricter standards than members, including rules against these things.

  note: for a nongovermental org, this is maybe going too far; dont we need to be able to expel members for bringing disrepute onto the organization, eg ppl with highly offensive politics? Perhaps we should merely say that for these offenses no one can be punished, although they can be expelled for cause.

mb have 3 product divisions but appointed by ceo unless rejected by member vote

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imposing positive duties on members should require an even higher threshold than negative ones. (what about positive vs negative directives to the CEO?)

note that the extra-low (simple majority) threshold for enlarging the rights of members only applies to negative rights (restrictions on the organization's action), not positive.

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summary of still active ideas from the next subsection down:

If 2/3s of the Seed or a majority of the Forum wishes it, then all Delegates (including but not limited to Board members) must be 'independent' of employment by the CEO, in a manner similar to publicly traded company director independence.

The Board has a Compensation Committee.

To get the lower levels of the delegate pyramid involved, the Board's votes are distributed as follows: 3/4 distributed among the Board members (in proportion to their strength); 3/4 of what is remaining to the next layer down from them; etc, until you have distributed votes to the lowest layer of Delegates, just above the members; the remainder goes back to the Board. To make voting quicker, the Board votes on things, and votes from the other layers (otherwise assumed to vote against proposals) can be called for by a 50% majority of Board member votes (eg before reduction via multiplication by 3/4th; still in proportion to their strength). This means that (if all Board members had equal strength, and disregarding the 'remainder' votes returned to the Board) 3/5 of the Board members would be required to call for votes from other layers; 4/5 would be required to achieve a 60% threshold; and a consensus among Board members can achieve a 75% threshold (which is >= the most ever required, i think). A CEO replacement, if it passes the initial 50% recall threshold, would always involve all levels

There is an Audit Court-Committee.

In addition to the Board, a group of 5 Forum Speakers. 3 are elected by Score Voting; 1 is nominated by the JAC (judicial appointment commission); 1 is the winner of a prediction-market like thingee. The 3 which are elected by score voting must satisfy criteria set by the Seeds. There Seeds can set any number of 'major criteria' that all candidates must satisfy; they can also set 1 'minor criteria' that only 1 or 2 seats needs to satisfy. Which candidates satisfy the criteria is decided by a Court-Committee. Using a 66% voting threshold, the Speakers can place items onto the Forum's agenda (creating an ADDITIONAL Forum issue slot, not occupying one of the 3 existing slots), write summaries for Forum proposals, write 'announcements' to be broadcast to the Forum, or force a public rollcall vote on any issue in the Board. I'm not sure about this, it seems to give more powers to the Powers That Be, ie factional leaders.

on the 'winner of a prediction-market like thingee'; perhaps instead you create a copy of influence and allow ppl to bet/trade their influence-copy according to a prediction market, then have an election amongst the winners for this seat.

There might be a Nomination Committee. It might be from the Board. It might give suggested nominees for Forum Speakers.

There are Permanent Members. By a 2/3s vote, the Seed Group can give someone (who already has at least a certain amount of influence currently) a semi-guarantee that they will hold at least that much influence indefinitely. This can be stripped by expulsion for cause.

It is possible for the composition of the seed group can be affected from the outside. There are three ways that seedshare can be reallocated: (a) seed group vote by 2/3s; (b) seed group vote by 1/2 and overall vote by 1/2 and permanent vote by 1/2 and either overall vote by 2/3 or permanent vote by 2/3; (c) overall vote by 2/3 and permanent vote by 2/3. In those calculations, the 'permanent vote' includes the permanent voting strength of permanent members, but also 'permanent votes' said to be held by the seed group members by virtue of their seedshare times the influence that seed group is reserving for itself. While the seed group keeps more than 50% of influence for itself, (b) and (c) are not yet allowed. note: a faction of 1/3 of the seed group cant block scenarios b and c earlier than you might think; eg if the seed group is only reserving 50% of the votes for itself, than such a faction only has 1/6 of the votes, not enough to block.

there are a bunch of notes on stock exchange rules on Board composition in the next section down.

make stripping seedshare by a 2/3s vote of seed group members more clear

Another possible idea for the Forum discussion summaries (in addition to the other ideas for that) is to say that any 1/3 faction can add their own comment to the summary.

to punish a Chair takes the other 2 Chairs to indict and then the High Court to convict.

the motivation for Permanent Members:

seed group and 'permanent members' : i keep trying to think of ways to eventually, smoothly reduce the seed group power, while still giving the seed group power in the beginning and the choice as to when to devolve it. The seed group's role is, aided by delegation via the reputation system, to answer the question WHO; who is a member? The answer that the seeds give to this question is graded, rather than discrete; one person can be given more influence than another. At the beginning, we want to allow the seed group to change it's mind, and to take some or all influence away from either some people whom it has directly selected, or from some people whom were indirectly given influence via the reputation system. There is initially no bottom-up way in which those selected as members BY the seed group can themselves affect membership of the seed group; the seed group members (collectively) have total power to choose their successors. This allows founders to adopt this system for project with the confidence that the system wont allow a scammer to accumulate influence via credulous members and then to translate this temporary influence into permanent power via appointing themselves to the seed group.

But if this system continues into perpetuity, eventually the aging seed group members will have to retire and select new ones, and at this point it seems undesirable that the seed group remains forever self-selecting, rather than tethered to the will of the larger contributor community.

Therefore, i would like to create some mechanism for the membership to eventually influence the seed group, once the seed group has decided to permit such. The most obvious thing is just to have the seed group one day say 'now seed share == influence'. The issue with that is that from that day forward, scammers who get influence from credulous members can't be dealt with anymore.

The next most obvious thing is to make some optional rules for members to have power over the seed group using their votes, then to let the seed group decide if or when these rules take hold. A potential issue with that is that it seems like the distribution of influence at that moment may have an outsized impact; but this could probably be ameliorated.

In addition, i have been thinking that it would be good to reward the best long-time contributors with something more permanent than ordinary reputation, which can go to zero in a moment through no fault of one's own. If the organization is a corporation with investors, we can give these people investor equity, but what if it is not? And even in a corporation with investors, if investor equity is non-voting, how to give them enduring influence?

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this subsection has a lot of thinking out loud and abandoned ideas in it, see the next section up for a summary of it

producers, consumers, regulators or legal or academic

i was thinking of that for a regulator, but what about a 7 person discussion group? past competitor, customer, academic/regulator, employee, contributor, predictor, independent? maybe also 3 topical expertise areas (eg programming) and 3 job types (eg engineer or 'do-er', sales or support or fundraiser, manager or support role)? use the obvious method for multiseat score voting with certification constraints. i guess high court does certifications.

consider enlarging the Board to 7. The last two spots should be able to absorb typical domain-specific requirements for independent directors and/or directors with specific competencies. A suggestions:

the 6th board member is some sort of competence-based analytical person. Perhaps there are certification requirements. Perhaps this person is a Predictor; someone who wins in the organization's Predication Markets. The idea is this is someone who is good at having reasonable expectations, a truth-speaker; but maybe an unpopular person.
the 7th board member is an Independent, in the usual sense for corporate governance. I generally prefer 'insiders', people who are familiar with what is going on on a day-to-day basis, rather than someone who waltzes in every now and then and (possibly carelessly) casts votes that affect others' lives; this one is meant to balance out the insider focus on the first 5 members, providing the usual benefits that independents are thought to provide (noting when the organization's groupthink has transgressed the boundaries of common sense; preventing the board from being composed of only cronies, which if unchecked could lead to corruption; providing social networking with the outside world; reminding the board how the organization is perceived by the rest of the world; representing the interests of broader society against those of the organization; a wildcard) (but how to choose this person? i'm thinking the Seeds choose them, or maybe the Seeds nominate and someone else (the current Board? the Forum? a direct vote, as for the Chairs?) approves).

for a 7board, consider also parent/engineer/warrior roles from http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/Countdown/alien.html ? what is a 'warrior' in the context of civil society? as that document notes, it's anything which would not be needed when things are going normally; and i'd add two more criterion, that 'emergency action' is needed and that this is an 'existential issue' (mb not for the whole organization, but at least for some member or project) (eg Kenneth Schweller's letter within https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7_UBx7_zDkKNWl2clZDQzd0SU0/edit , pdf page 5/17; note the language of 'survival', 'command decision', 'keep the lights on'). But what about competition, attack/defence; is a lawyer a 'warrior'?

i wonder if more triumvarates (besides the Chairs) would be useful?

for this, todo: read stock exchange listing standards, https://www.google.com/search?q=board+committee+independent+director http://www.weil.com/~/media/files/pdfs/Chart_of_Board_Requirements_December_2013.pdf

notes:

NASDAQ exempts cooperatives (is this their defn?): http://www.nasdaq.com/investing/glossary/c/cooperative "An organization owned by its members.". More details may be in http://nasdaq.cchwallstreet.com/nasdaq/main/nasdaq-equityrules/chp_1_1/chp_1_1_4/chp_1_1_4_3/chp_1_1_4_3_8/default.asp, which says "Cooperative entities, such as agricultural cooperatives, that are structured to comply with relevant state law and federal tax law and that do not have a publicly traded class of common stock are exempt from Rules 5605(b), (d), (e), and 5615(c)(2). However, such entities must comply with all federal securities laws, including without limitation those rules required by Section 10A(m) of the Act and Rule 10A-3 thereunder. IM-5615-2. Cooperatives Certain member-owned cooperatives that list their preferred stock are required to have their common stock owned by their members. Because of their unique structure and the fact that they do not have a publicly traded class of common stock, such entities are exempt from Rule 5605(b), (d), and (e). This is consistent with Nasdaq's traditional approach to such Companies. Adopted Mar. 12, 2009 (SR-NASDAQ-2009-018); amended Apr. 27, 2009 (SR-NASDAQ-2009-040)."
- 10A of the Securities and Exchange Act appears to have to do with audit committees, including their independence. So i guess this is saying that a bunch of stuff is waived but there still has to be some independent ppl making up an uadit committee.
the minimum requirement appear to be (a) to have a majority of independent directors, (b) to have at least 3 independent directors for the audit committee, one of whom is financially literate, (c) to have at least 2 independent directors for the compensation committee (afaict these folks can overlap with audit committee), (d) must have audit, compensation, and nominating committees; (e) entire audit and compensation and nominating committees must be independent
if the nominating committee nominates everyone to the Board, how do "proxy contests" work, in which activist shareholders attempt to get their own ppl onto the Board? The procedure appears to be that actually shareholders can vote for their own nominees. I dont yet know if anyone can 'write-in' a vote at voting time, or if the shareholder must officially nominate their candidate beforehand. There are also some provisions, called 'shareholder access', by which external nominees can be included on the official ballot that the company sends out to everyone. Now, as to how the votes are counted. Rather than using a modern multiseat proportional election procedure such as score voting, the election seems to be structured as many separate simultaneous single-seat elections, one election for each board seat. The default is 'straight voting' in which each share of stock gets one vote for each board seat (ie in each separate election). Clearly, this is not a proportional voting method, and a majority faction can control every seat. An alternative is 'cumulative voting', in which each share gets a number of votes equal to the number of available seats, and can spend these votes between all of the separate elections. Cumulative voting is regarded as a 'semiproportional' voting system, not a 'proportional' one. In this system, a minority faction, if they coordinate and concentrate their votes correctly onto a limited number of board seats, can elect candidates to the Board. In addition to the straight/cumulative divide, some companies are 'plurality' and some are 'majority'; according to https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/proxymatters/voting_mechanics.shtml it seems that the difference is that in 'plurality' companies, whichever director gets the most votes for a seat wins that seat, whereas in 'majority' systems, the winning director must in addition get a majority of votes in order to hold the seat; but as [1] notes, in majority voting, if the director fails to get their majority, this may have little effect, depending on the procedure for what happens next.
- in other words, it appears to me that the function of the nominating committee is merely to nominate those candidates that the current board RECOMMENDS for the election; shareholders can also directly (nominate? or just write-in at election time?) other directors, although except as provided for by 'shareholder access' these may not appear on the official ballot.
- imo the function of the traditional board nomination process is out-of-date now that modern communications media make it cheap for voting blocs of shareholders to self-organize. This hasn't happened yet because corporations currently use the traditional system to place themselves as a communications intermediary, the only entity who has an easy way to effectively communicate with all the shareholders (even if a dissident shareholder got everyone else's mailing and email addresses and mass-mailed them, most of the recipients, even that minority who doesn't throw away the company's own communications, might consider it spam and throw it away); by making it expensive for the shareholders to effectively contact other shareholders whom they don't currently already know, the company places the nominees who appear on the offical ballot at a huge advantage.
- the branch democracy procedure already facilitates the organization of dissident voters into blocs, both in the delegate pyramid which elects its Board, and also in the Forum. This greatly lessens the advantage held by any 'company-recommended slate of nominees'.
- the requirements that the nominating committee for the company-recommended slate of nominees be composed of independent directors therefore wouldn't place much of a burden on branch democracy. Blocs of shareholders who want to vote for someone other than whom the nominating committee recommends would still be able to do so. The Board procedure is essentially a structured mechanism for distribution of proxies.
- independence requirements are also waived for 'controlled companies', those for which "more than 50% of the voting power for the election of directors is held by an individual, a group or another company." according to NASDAQ [2]

i'm no longer certain if there is an 'obvious' non NP-hard procedure for extending score voting to deal with a list of requirements of the form that at least k_i members of the elected body have certification c_i. If there is only one such requirement, you can do the usual score voting, then backtrack and replace the lowest-scored candidates with next-best candidates who satisfy the certification; but with multiple certifications, and with some candidates who hold multiple certifications, it appears to get more complicated. What we could do is split the 7-person body into 2 separate multiseat elections, each with their own certification criteria binding on everyone, and one additional criterion binding on at least n members, plus 1 extra candidate who is chosen by pure multiseat score voting for the last seat on the 7-person body assuming the other 6 have been chosen.

That would fulfill my personal criterion of having every multiseat election done via a proportional method on bodies of at least 3, to permit at least the potential for escape from two party dominance.

If we want a majority of the Speakers to be 'independent' (in a reputation-based system, are contributors considered 'independent'? They aren't employees, so i guess yes), we could make independence be the 'minor' criterion binding on 2/3 of the members for each of the 2 sub-bodies, and then also be a criterion for the 7-th member. We could make 'basic financial/accounting, governance, and mathematical literacy' a criterion for one of the sub-bodies, and leave the other criterion up to the organization (or maybe up to the Seed group); i suggest that basic programming knowledge would be a good one for a software organization.

Alternately, we could split the 7-person body into a 5-person body in which all nominees must fulfill the criteria, and 2 other members elected by other means; OR into a 3 person body in which all nominees must fulfill the criteria, and 4 others elected by different means; or alternately the other 4 just by score voting; or alternately only 5 speakers rather than 7. I kind of like these better.

Very small organizations are too small to want to deal with independence requirements. We could make this an optional provision. Or, riffing off of NASDAQ's controlled company exemption, we could say that an independence requirement comes into effect at the behest of a simple majority of votes.

i also like the idea of letting the Seed Group state the addition criteria, and letting the Courts/Committees judge individual candidates according to this criteria. Also, the Speakers should get to write a summary of each issue to be voted upon (by 66% vote, eg wiki with 66% approval to choose which version is the final one?). Also, the Forum proposal slot controlled by the Speakers should be in addition to the other 3 slots, so that a 3rd faction still gets a slot. And i guess the Speakers should act by 2/3s.

i guess it's i'm beginning to think that the idea of having a 7-person group with a diversity of criteria is incompatible with having non-NP-hard score voting (or another proportional method). So we may as well fall back to a smaller group size. It must be at least 3, both to satisfy my own criterion for 3rd-party access, and so that we can use these guys as the 3 independent directors. And it would be nice to get to add at least a few more members with other criteria. So let's make it 5.

Also, another alternative is just to require that the 5-person Board be all independents, when there is an independence requirement at least. This may be more sensible in that the Board selects the CEO, so you may want independence for them.

Yeah, let's do that. Either 2/3s of the Seed group or a majority vote of the Forum can force an independence requirement to be applied to the Board.

Also, two ideas for getting the lower-level Delegates more involved:

give the Board members only 1/2 of the votes on the Board issues; give the next level down 1/4; etc (the members aren't included in this, eg you stop after giving some voting power to the first layer of Delegates); then the Board the remainder after this procedure is applied (so if there is only 1 layer of Delegates below the Board, the Board gets 3/4 and that layer gets 1/4)
- to allow quick decision-making, these extra layers would only be involved when the Board can achive a majority (of its own votes) for something; but the other layers would need to be involved to achieve the req'd supermajority in most cases
- to make decision-making even quicker, could concentrate more power on top, so that by consensus the Board can avoid involving the lower layers on anything; so give the Board 2/3s of the votes, give the next layer down 2/3s of what remains, etc; so with 1 layer below the board, the Board ends up with 7/9th, the next layers gets 2/9th (each of the 5 Board members then gets (7/9)/5 ~= .155 voting strength; this works out nicely, requiring 4 board members to get a 60% supermajority); however with many layers below, the Board gets about 6/9th, and then 4 Board member is only >~50%, and 5 Board members are already >2/3s; but if the Board had 3/4 of the total, 4 Board members would get 60%. This allows 3 Board members to order a call-up of additional votes from the other levels; 4 Board members to do 50% and 60% voting threshold things; and 5 Board members to do anything the Board can do (unless there are 80% threshold things, which i dont think there are)
- so i guess 3/4 is a good concentration #
- of course, a CEO replacement, if it passes the initial 50% recall threshold, would always involve all levels
- would the independence requirement apply to all levels of Delegates? yes, i think it must, otherwise lower, CEO-faction delegates could appoint puppets to the Board
do the 'withholding' thing, where Delegates can 'withhold' their vote from their upper constituency's delegate (not needed if we do the above)
- thinking about how to define independence from POLITICAL FACTIONS (parties) rather than from the CEO; perhaps ONLY allow withholding delegates to be elected to some sort of position? But then how to prevent ppl from just forming a lowest-level delegacy and withholding just a few votes? Perhaps have to let the winners be decided by how many votes they got and then withheld.
- perhaps if there are 5 Forum speakers, 1 of them is the Delegate with the largest faction who is currently Withholding? But then won't a political party just try to gather as many votes as they can, and then compute how many votes are 'wasted' in that they arent needed for a board seat, and then instruct a Delegate with about that many votes to withhold? Yeah, i guess so; i like the idea of an 'factionally independent' seat but i cant see how to objectively determine that.

alternately, could give the 5th Speaker seat to be appointed by the Judicial Appointment Commission, to get some governance expertise; or let them be appointed by the CEO, to get a voice from management in there; or both. Or should this be an opportunity to get a nominating Court/Committee involved?

so, in summary of much of the above, what i currently like is:

all Delegates: independence requirement, if 2/3s of the Seeds or 1/2 of the Forum wishes it
Speakers: 5 speakers. 1 is nominated by the JAC and confirmed by the CEO; OR mb involves a nominating Court/Committee (perhaps nominated by JAC and confirmed by nominating Court/Committee? this allows the consensus nature of the NomCom? to be put to good use). 1 is the winner of a prediction market type thingee. 3 are score voted by the Forum; these 3 must meet criteria selected by the Seeds (1 major, which they all have to meet, and 1 minor, which only 1 or 2 of them have to meet) and verified by a NomCom?/nominating court.

now, where is the "Board" Audit committee and the Compensation Committee and the Nominating Committee? Does it come from the Board? Or from the Court/Committee structure? Or from the Speakers? In any case there should be an independence requirement on these committees. It seems like perhaps the Compensation Committee at least should be drawn from the Board, because it seems weird that they should having hiring/firing authority over the CEO but not the authority to negotiate compensation with em. The Audit Committee seems like a good place to involve the Court-Committee structure. The Nominating Committee isnt too powerful here, but it could be taken from the Board, giving the Factions some power to put their stamp on the Forum speakers.

hmm this idea for electing Speakers has morphed from an attempt to include a diverse 7body to something that encouraged the existing Powers That Be on the Board to inject their opinion into Forum discussions. Don't know if i like that. I was

One potential alternative is to create an intermediate type of membership between ordinary membership and the seed group. Call it 'permanent membership' (recalling the permanent members on the UN security council). This sort of membership is defined by the member having a slice of influence that the seed group can no longer take away. But how is this different from actually being on the seed group? Hmm.. i'm not sure if it is; in fact perhaps such a person would be even more powerful than the seed group, because seed group members themselves can have their seedshare effectively stripped by a 2/3s vote of the seed group members. so permanent membership should be strippable by the same mechanism. Oh, how about this: the permanent member does not get redistributable influence, the way that seedshare is; it affects their voting power only after the operation of the reputation system; they themselves get a (non-transferrable vote that disappears when they die) permanent (except in case of expulsion for cause; should we allow stripping by 2/3s of the seed group?) vote in governance issues (their actual voting strength would then be the greater of (a) what they earn from the reputation system, and (b) their permanent strength; this requires an addition step of renormalization of voting strength after the conclusion of the influence-distribution reputation algorithm). It can only be given by a vote of 2/3s of the seed share (like expansion of the seed group itself).

This provides a more gradual way for the seed group to eventually give up its power; rather than effectively saying 'everyone is now in the seed group' or 'everyone has power over the seed group', they can start by giving some members this assurance of their continuing voting strength.

Then there can be some rules such as letting 2/3s of the voters join with 1/2 of the seed group to reallocate seedshare, if we assume that all non-permanent voters' votes (including the non-permanent voting strength part held by permanent voters) are used to automatically vote against the proposal. This means that until 2/3s of voting power has been given out as permanent voting power, this won't mean anything. That's a lot; we probably expect non-permanent voters to hold more than 1/3 of influence indefinitely; so maybe make that 1/2, and 2/3s without the seed group; eg there would be three ways to reallocate seedshare: (a) seed group vote by 2/3s; (b) seed group vote by 1/2 and permanent vote by 1/2; (c) permanent vote by 2/3s. that seems a little unnecessarily complicated. How about: (a) seed group vote by 2/3s; (b) seed group has previously authorized external voting on the seed group, and seed group vote by 1/2 and overall vote by 1/2 and permanent vote by 1/2; (c) seed group has previously authorized external voting on the seed group, and overall vote by 2/3 and permanent vote by 2/3. In those calculations, the seed group members themselves are automatically thought to have 'permanent votes' according to how much influence the seed group is declared to reserve for itself. Or, we could use the seed group reserving less than 50% of influence for itself as a trigger, and just have these rules apply from the beginnig. So how about: (a) seed group vote by 2/3s; (b) seed group vote by 1/2 and overall vote by 1/2 and permanent vote by 1/2; (c) overall vote by 2/3 and permanent vote by 2/3. In those calculations, the 'permanent vote' includes the permanent voting strength of permanent members, but also 'permanent votes' said to be held by the seed group members by virtue of their seedshare times the influence that seed group is reserving for itself.

todo make stripping seedshare by a 2/3s vote of seed group members more clear

having Speakers do a discussion summary for the Forum makes me wonder if Forum discussion summaries can be further simplified. Another possible idea for the Forum discussion summaries is just to say that any 1/3 faction can add their own comment to the summary. i forgot what the existing system is, should re-read

perhaps you can 'make' more independent directors by adding one more layer of indirection; allowing the directors specified by the existing rules who are not independent to replace themselves with an independent appointee. But would that be deemed non-independent anyway?

one problem with giving a seat to a Predictor are the problems of:

'insider trading', someone who makes good predictions not because they are an analytical realist but because they have cultivated good insider information sources
'throwing the game', someone who makes good predictions not because they are an analytical realist but because they are able to control the organization's actions, allowing them to 'underpromise' and then force the organization to do things against it's interest to meet their targets

these would be partially but not totally ameliorated by requiring the Predictor to be independent

hmm.. i am uncomfortable giving power to a 7-person group, though, because that's a lot of people for a meeting; also, it seems like it would be hard to such a group to become a unified actor with a single shared vision.

but perhaps a 7-person group would make a good 'parliament', in the sense of a discussion section that collects diverse opinions from across the organization. On this topic, i note that we havent yet had a body elected by simple multiseat score voting. should this be another legislative 'house'? or not have legislative power?

hmm i kind of dont want to split the executive and representative legislative powers; because then, unlike the parliamentary system and like the presidential, there is the opportunity for both the executive and legislative to place responsibility onto the other. How about if the 7-person body was ONLY for talking ('parliament'), 'advisory'; they would have a right of publicity, to broadcast to the Forum, and perhaps other rights, to place items onto the agenda, and to question the CEO (and perhaps the 5-person Board); because of the Forum's power, if we can get the Forum to listen to them, they will have real power.

yes, let the 7body force a public rollcall vote on any issue in the Board, and control up to 1 of th forumm's 3 agenda slots. can call the 7body 'Forum speakers'.

chairs to punish a Chair takes the other 2 Chairs to indict and then the high court to convict

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change name: so far "branch governance" is the frontrunner

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on the notion of 'branch governance system': maybe this is an ok name, because one can argue that we are redefining 'branch' from function-based (legislative, executive) to method of selection (direct democracy, delegation, sortition, at-large election, self-selecting (or, if we say the judiciary, not the seed, is the fifth 'branch', then we it's indirect appointment from multiple other branches)) and also because 'branch' can be used in many places (branches of government, constituencies as recursive 'branches', version control branching of legislative proposals, branch as more easily understood synonym for open source software's 'fork').

two things this leads to:

an emphasis on reliance of 'separation of method of selection' rather than the (similar but subtly different) 'separation of powers'
an emphasis on 'forkability', which i would like to pursue further

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so the message i am getting from the UK system and from http://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/publication/policy_position_03_2007_promoting_fairness_in_judicial_appointments is that instead of having High Court judges elected by Score Voting on the Board, we should have them appointed by a separate commission, controlled by the Board but also from outside the Board if possible, and with a measure of indirection (providing temporal delay), and possibly feedback.

one obvious starting point is to allow each of the five branches of governance (chairs, forum, board, juries, seed) to have a say. This could immediately provide a 5-member Commission if each branch got to place 1 person on this committee, or a 15-member Commission if 3 (3 is advisable so we don't get gerrymandering leading to majority faction control). The UK's Judicial Appointments Commission has 15 members so that's not crazy. But if members are placed by these various branches then they will feel factional loyalties to those branches. So maybe it's better to just give each of the five branches of governance an equal vote, and then use score voting to combine these to select the commission members. This allows us to have less commission members again (maybe 5, or maybe 7, esp. if you also gave a vote to the High Court). However, if we did that, then every member of the panel, by virtue of the Forum vote, must in effect run a mass campaign for political office. So go back to letting each branch put in 3 members:

Chairs: each of the three combinations of pairs of Chairs put forward one panel commissioner, by mutual agreement of the pair Forum: the Forum elects 3 commissioners by score voting Board: the Board elects 3 commissioners by score voting Jurors: 3 Juror justice commmittees each select 1 commissioner by near-consensus Seed: the Seeds elect 3 commissioners by score voting

for the Forum and Board elections, one commissioner must be a judge, and one must not be a judge or official.

the timing of commissioner replacement is present and staggered so that only 1/3 of the committee is replaced in one cycle; in one cycle, the Forum replaces theirs, in another, the Board replaces theirs, in a third, the Seed replaces theirs; in each cycle, one Juror committee replacement is made; in each cycle, the two pair involving the Senior Chair are replaced.

The commissioners fill judicial vacancies in groups of three via Score Voting but with a subsequent approval vote 66% vote threshold (if they refuse to agree, then after the last 3 judges rotate off, the threshold goes away).

The commissioners may dissolve the High Court and repopulate it (if the 66% vote afterwards fails, then the High Court is not dissolved), but pending cases are finished by the old High Court members? no, just swap out some High Court members each cycle:

mb also have 9 high court justices, not 3, so that you can stagger and yet still have score voting for each one (yuck! that's too many -- but there's a good reason)

this way, each of these officers (commissioners, high court judges) serve for fixed terms of 3 cycles, and each is elected by score voting (except the Chair-pair selections and the Juror committee selections).

if we do this, maybe since the High Court is now more independent, we should consider the High Court the fifth branch, and let them, instead of the Seeds, elect 3 of the Commissioners.

however, is this enough indirection? i think so: in the UK system there was a panel appointed to replace people on the Commission. However afaict those panels were per-slot, so imo that wouldnt have much effect. So we can dispense with it.

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notes on judicial appointment system recommendations from http://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/publication/policy_position_03_2007_promoting_fairness_in_judicial_appointments:

"In the civil law tradition, judges are generally selected through examination at a young age and previous professional experience plays a relatively minor role. The judicial corps is organised on a hierarchical pattern, according to which promotions are granted on criteria that combine seniority and merit.

In the common law system, on the other hand, judges are typically selected from a body of experienced practicing lawyers. Once appointed, they are almost certain to remain until the mandatory age of retirement. Judges in these jurisdictions enjoy high social status, partly because of the power they exercise in making case law. "

" At the centre of any appointment process should be an appointing body that acts independently of both the executive and the legislature and whose members are appointed in an objective and transparent process.

It is essential that at all stages — from selection to nomination to appointment — a clear, objective criteria is used which aims at ascertaining the professional qualifications of candidates and predicts (as far as possible) their integrity and high professional standards on the bench.

It is advisable that the recruitment process should be open in part to experienced professionals. In this way, the judicial corps will be enriched with solid experience and assessments of candidates will take into account previous work activity, as well as theoretical knowledge. "

" Election criteria should be clear and well publicised, allowing candidates, selectors and others to have a clear unerstanding of where the bar lies to be part of the bench. Candidates should be required to demonstrate a record of competence and integrity.

Civil society groups, including professional associations linked to judicial matters, should be consulted on the merits of specific candidates. "

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to get Transparency International recommendations on various parts of governance structure, start at:

also start at the new search; select a given topic (eg Judiciary, http://www.transparency.org/search?topic=81 , or just go to http://www.transparency.org/search then select in By Topic), then select By Region: Global, By Country: International, By Language: English, then select a SINGLE By Content Type. Useful ones appear to be Corruption Topic (the page has a short "Solution" section), Publication (especially Policy Positions), Helpdesk Answer, and possibly Project/Activity (i dont recommend Project/Activity, though).

also, their 'source book' from the year 2000: http://archive.transparency.org/publications/sourcebook

also, the old ("archived") website topics, http://archive.transparency.org/global_priorities, then find the topic, then read the relevant Policy Position, eg Fairness in Judicial Appointments, http://archive.transparency.org/content/download/19487/269469 ; most but not all of these seem to come up in the new search as used above; eg Fairness in Judicial Appointments didnt (because it is erroneously excluded by their English filter)

things not to use:

the search in their "publications" section, eg http://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/publications/top/81, because that page does not allow boolean AND between "policy position" and "topic", only one or the other.
the old ("archived") webisite helpdesk, http://archive.transparency.org/policy_research/u4_helpdesk ; i presume without evidence that these are also included in the new search, above

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consider making committes courts out of delegates?

later: i thought about saying that only Delegates could be Judges, but that would seem to work against what imo is the most crucial part of separation of powers (separation of judicial from executive).

on that note, it would be nice to empower the Jurors even more. Note: a historical meaning of "juror" is "a person taking an oath, especially one of allegiance". Note: near the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury , it notes that the word came from ancient Athens juries, where it appears to include the Boule, or Council.

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"investigator" was suggested as an alternate name for "chair" but in our society i feel like it would not bestow as much prestige as "chair" or "president", either of which are also appropriate. other alternative names were "deputy".

it was suggested that "liquid republic" may not be the best name. "branch democracy" was suggested as an alternative name for "liquid republic"; i like it but i'm afraid that since government has multiple "branches" in current lingo, ppl would just say, 'isn't every democracy a branch democracy?'. "ruleset 5" was suggested as a possible name.

"ruleset 5" is for two reasons, (1) there are 5 Board members, (2) 5 "branches/houses" of governance: Chairs, Forum, Board, High Court, Jurors

other suggested names:

atlantis (not as strong a suggestion)
logcabin

i wonder about Boule? Kind of overly suggests sortition, though.

mb let only the rank of Delegates immediately BELOW Board members select High Court Judges. This (a) gives them some power (which means that it (i) provides a check on conspiracy of the small Board by distributing this function to approximately 125, not 5, ppl)?

above, i listed 'high court' as a 'branch' of governance. However, currently in the system, the High Court is selected by Board. This places the Board in indirct control of both the Executive and Judicial powers, and with a substantial role in the legislative. Is this desired?

A union of legislative and executive is the core of the Parliamentary system (as opposed to Presidential), and it seems to work well (and we dont even have as complete a union due to the Forum).

The UK's system [3] has a Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) which is required to have a diverse membership, and which is itself selected by a panel (see [4]). The panel has 4 members, the first and third members (the third member is nominated by the first member) are essentially agreed-upon by the Chancellor (cabinet member, eg controlled by the Prime Minister) and Chief Justice (appointed by the JAC), the second member is controlled by the Chief Justice, and the fourth member is the chair of the JAC. However, for at least one member of the commission, the first member of the selecting panel is controlled by agreement between the Chancellor and the Senior President of Tribunals [5] (appointed by the Chancellor), rather than Chancellor+Chief Justice.

The indirection of the panel itself can be neglected because it is not a long-lived position (not adding a temporal delay). So, we have the Chancellor (indirection level 0), the panel, the JAC (indirection level 1), the Chief Justice (indirection level 2). The panel is composed of a first member with indirection level 3- (agreed-upon by the Chancellor and the Chief Justice), a third member with indirection level 4- (appointed by the first member), a second member with indirection level 3 (appointed by the Chief JUstice), and a fourth member with indirection level 1 (chair of the JAC). So the average indirection level of the panel is between 2 and 3.

In sum, the selection of Judges in the UK derives from Parliament, but with various levels of recursive indirection giving a lot of voice to indirect appointees of past Parliaments.

the UK Supreme Court is even more indirect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Kingdom#Appointment_process ). A selection commission is formed from reps from various JAC boards, and also the President and Deputy President of the Supreme Court, and approved by the Chancellor.

which systems are better for producing a good judiciary? Might also want to look at http://www.transparency.org/topic/detail/judiciary . They say:

" A range of simple reforms can prevent judicial corruption. An independent body should oversee appointments. This helps ensure they’re based on merit rather than favouritism. If the public is given proper information, we can also monitor the process.

Fair judicial salaries and pensions make court personnel less vulnerable to bribery. These should reflect experience, performance and an honest track record. In the face of powerful interests, several measures can also protect judges from pressure. These include investigations of credible allegations against them, and limited liability for decisions. Court officials must be aware that if corruption is proved, they’ll be removed in a fair, open way. "

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could have legislative committes, and courts, both be restricted to lower-ranking delegates in the delegate pyramids

make a shorter list of tribune powers, in multiple bullet lists, one bullet list for each voting threshold

mb take away the power of the high court

council = jury

juries ideas:

a council + a judge is a court. in this case the council is acting as a jury.

the court must decide thing unanimously. the judge is supposed to vote in agreement with the jury unless they feel that the decision must be the other way as a question of law, however. (so e.g. the judge can throw out a case obviously without merit)

in a given constituency, the only eligible candidates for delegate are those whose council score is positive, and also greater than the median of their constituency. for elect, greater than the median of the country.

notes: the >median requirement ensures that each higher layer of the delegate pyramid will tend to have delegates with higher council scores

in order to bring a court case, you must put at risk/temporarily spend 6 points of your council score. if the case looks like it will take a long time (time = the average amount of time a juror must serve per score point gained (note: this time includes time in unsuccessful councils) * 6 jurors), the council can ask another council (an appeal council) to review and assign/demand more points for this case. each council member has a preset limit on how large a case they are willing to accept (or mb do this according to next scheduled vacation), and if the point score for this case is too high for any member, the case will not be assigned to this council. the system tries to keep together council members with high limits (e.g. willing to hear long cases). the council must come to consensus within the time limit set for the case (otherwise the issue is undecided and automatically goes to another council, and the councilmembers are penalized for indecision, see below).

if you win the case, you get your 6+ points back, and the defendant is charged them instead. you cannot bring a case with points you do not have, but defendants without enough points just go to zero.

you can have just a trial by a single judge if you only want to risk 1 point. the defendant, however, can always insist that it be a jury trial, in which case the prosecution is forced to risk more too.

other things that cost points (generally 6 points):

a council must second every main motion or amendment; so if you submit one you must pay for the council to review it. You pay even if their decision is 'no', but you don't pay if they can't come to consensus.

each person's score goes up 1 whenever the council they are sitting on decides a case (which is always by consensus) (regardless of if the decision is 'accept' or 'reject'). the score goes down 1 whenever a council they are sitting on cannot come to consensus within the time limit set for the case, or down by 4 when they resign from a council (even if no case is pending). if a member resigns, the issue at hand is undecided and gets reassigned as if the council could not come to consensus, but the other members are not penalized.

there is no 'findings of fact/findings of law' distinction, although the judge (who is not anonymous) is bound to vote against the rest only if there is an issue that is a question of law. mb the judge should only talk about questions of law, too.

judges are not anonymous, although the other jurists are.

issues can be appealed, but only if the court decides other than the 'default' for that issue type. for trials, the default is 'innocent'. For resolutions, the default is 'accept', and for flagged posts, the default is 'unflag'.

an appeal costs points as if the issue were re-brought, minus one (e.g. there is little reason you would re-submit, rather than appeal, if your main motion were rejected). when an issue is appealed, it it sent to a council where the minimum score over all members is greater than or equal to the median score in the old council.

appeal court levels are created by taking the median score over all councils in the next lower level

we try to place people on councils with similar scores to their own. so the more experienced councilmembers dont have to deal with educating noobs. this makes the system less miserable for the most dedicated council volunteers.

when a court is reviewing a proposed main motion, they can ask for amendments and the proposer can make them, or not. the court may refuse to accept the motion if their demands are not heeded, or they can make suggestions that are not demands if they choose to. The suggested criterion for approving main motion and amendment texts is:

You should approve motions even if you disagree with them; however, you may reject motions if your disagreement is so strong that one of:
- its successful passage would cause you to terminate your affiliation with the organization
- you think its passage would be grossly unethical
- you think its passage would cause extreme harm to the organization
- you think the motion is dilatory
the motion contains phrasing in breach of decorum, an acceptable alternative has been proposed by the council, yet the proposer refuses to modify the offensive phrasing
- you think that merely debating the motion would cause substantial and unnecessary harm to the organization
- the motion is internally logically inconsistent
- the motion is not a motion to amend the bylaws, yet it is logically consistent with the bylaws

You may also reject motions if the submitter rejects amendments to it that the council has demanded. The council should only demand amendments accomplishing what seems to be the main aim, while that greatly improving it, or while making it much more pallatable to its opposition.

A candidate for delegate (even of a low constituency) or elector must have their jury record reviewed by jury to ascertain whether they actually participated or whether they just agree all the time to get points. If the latter, there is a note on them on the ballot that says so, and they are listed on the last page along with the candidates that a jury judged to be likely corrupt or criminal or violent (censored candidates, see below); but if they are a candidate for judge, this blocks their candidacy (if not appealed). However, the record stays anonymous (clearly, in a small enough group, this effectively breaks anonymity, however -- i guess that's fine).

It suffices to meet the council score condition at the beginning of a run for elected office; after that point, if one's score drops, it does not disqualify. a candidate remains a candidate in their own recall election regardless of their council score. however, to be re-elected, one's council score must satisfy the condition.

having the councils as 'courts' allows us to use the 'positive votes only' variant of reweighted score voting, which gives little incentive for negative campaigning. to take care of the equivalent of 'flagged comments', the courts adjudicate the flag (which they might actually do when the system is being used on an online forum; or, there might be a 'decorum' category of court for this; actually i guess we should call them 'censors'. note: no PRIOR restraint; also, all banned comments can still be viewed by browsing at -1).

what about the actual situation of crazy or evil candidates, those for whom negative campaigning might be appropriate? We could allow them to be 'flagged/censored' on the ballot if a court determines that they should be. This doesnt mean they're hidden, it just means that they're listed is a special section of 'censored candidates', along with a short statement of why the council censored them, and a rebuttal by the candidate.

'refer to committee' refers to courts. a court that takes a motion referred to them cannot 'reject', they can only approve, by consensus, a rewritten version. BOTH the original version and the rewritten version become alternatives in the final vote (which i guess is decided by approval voting?, with a runoff between status-quo and the winning motion).

court category ideas:

censorship
trials
- subcategories by type of crime
legislation: reviewing motions and refer to committee and parliamentary categorization
- subcategories by topical area, such as:
- budget
- meta (procedural topics)
- external relations
- internal
- justice

or should censorship and trials be mixed in with legislation, to give legislative committees more 'hands on experience' with the effects of legislation? maybe trials should all be mixed in with 'justice'. and maybe censorship legislation should be mixed in with the activity of censorship. so:

court category ideas:

budget
meta (procedural topics)
external relations
internal
justice (all trials go under here, as well as legislation about rules that members could break)
censorship (the activity of censorship goes here, as well as legislation about censorship)

note: motions by the reps (the delegates and the electors) ARE NOT reviewed by councils. the parliamentarians do that. delegates and electors can appeal parliamentarian decisions to the High Court, who can overturn with a vote of consensus - 1.

perhaps only the highest-level (e.g. appeal) councils get referred to by refer to committee. e.g. you work your way up reviewing member motions? this suggests that motion reviews should be subcategorized by topical area, so that committeemembers can become experts by the time they are elgible to be referred to.

refer to committee always contains a time limit. if the committee cannot come to consensus by this time limit, the topic is simply returned to the Forum as-is.

subreferral: if a committee gets a big topic, it may wish to divide it into parts and have each part be sent to another committee, and then to integrate the parts together.

"parliamentary categorization" refers to determinations like which voting threshold category a given motion falls within

now, can courts still influence legislation? i propose yes, and i propose a different mechanism than the one i envisioned before: when there is a tie among the 3 houses of the legislature (that is, 1 passes a resolution, one rejects that resolution), then councils can break the tie; each council can, if it reaches consensus, cast a vote one way or the other, and the sum of the votes, times the council scores of the councils casting them, determines the vote of a fourth, tie-breaker house. If the third house accepts or rejects, however, then the council votes have no effect.

councils decide via majority vote whether to begin discussing tiebreaking legislation. there is no score penalty if they fail to come to consensus on this, although they still get +1 if they do come to consensus.

council scores are just the sum of the council scores of everyone on the council, with the exception that councilmembers with negative council scores only contribute a 0 to the sum (actually i think i decided that there can be no negative scores..).

councils could also produce a 'council summary' of a legislative debate, to be shown alongside the for- and against- summaries created by voting up.

the system randomly assigns incoming requests to juries (must be random to avoid stacked jury attack, where one political party tells a small proportion of its members to vote for other parties, just to have a few juries whose members are all really from one party -- with stacked attack, this only helps in proportion to the votes that the large party is giving up)

if there is no queue of appeals, appeals courts are always routed to first -- if there are not enough incoming requests+appeals to saturate them, then the lower courts get no action (because we are guessing that the experienced appeals courts produce the quickest and best results)

maybe # of appeals levels is determined by queue; the goal is to add more and more levels until waiting time is minimized (e.g. until the reduction in waiting time at the next appeal level is balanced by the increase in waiting time at the lower level because of the loss of jurors to create the new level)

in appeals, the court first makes a decision and records it, then they can look at what the lower level said, and consider changing their decision.

should we let councilmembers stay with one council, and try and form bonds with them and bargain and such (i'll agree on this case if you agree with me on that legislative tie-breaker)? i'd like that, but i think it makes the logistics too complicated when people go on vacation -- when they're on vacation, the rest of their council would have to wait for them (or accept a temporary replacement member, leading to more complex logistics). also, then you have to have rules about how many vacations you can take. it's logistically simpler to just ask each person how long they have to continuously serve, then place them randomly on juries with people with a similar length of time currently available.

should we let juries refuse cases assigned to them? i'd like to say no, but if we said that, people cant recuse themselves. on the other hand, since identities are anonymous, we cant easily enforce recusation, so maybe we should not have it because it would be uneven. on the third hand, we could disclose identities to the judge, and they could ask ppl questions relating to recusement.

written jury deliberations are public but identity of members is anonymous, even to the other members

the judge's identity is not anonymous.

resigning from a jury, or being kicked off by being absent too often, subtracts 4 from your score. this can go negative (only skill: see below). it costs 1 to bring a case. corporate entities can bring cases only using their officers' pts (so the corporation better have at least one officer who is a good citizen -- hiring someone to only do that (only provide points), without having other powers comparable to the company's other officers, is illegal). points are non transferable and cannot be bought.

but since it costs 6 pts and only 5 ppl get 1 pt, and there are negative pts for nonagreement, the system will run out of pts and no one will be able to propose anything or bring a case. so, give ppl pts for offering to serve when no case is assigned. split pts into 'skill' pts and 'effort' pts. only effort pts are incremented just for offering to serve. otherwise, both are affected similarly by actions. pts are per-category. everyone starts with 0 points in each category at the beginning.

defending a case cant give you negative pts: the price you pay when you lose a case that you were defending cant push you below 0 (effort pts); and the price for being on a council that didnt come to consensus cant push you below 0. if you were already below 0, it cant push you lower. skill pts can go below 0.

effort pts are the things that you spend. skill pts are used in selecting appeals courts. remember, both skill and effort are normally incremented and decremented together depending upon the outcome of things, except for the effort below 0 exception, and the effort points awarded for offering to serve but not being assigned.

effort pts can be decremented by voluntary actions such as resignation or too many unexcused absences for council sessions.

effort points are awarded for offering to serve but not serving only until you have 6 pts in the category. you can only earn more pts than this by actually serving.

hmm now that councils are so great, i'd rather have them immediately, rather than the three phases of org size. how would we handle that, though? it seems silly to tell people that if there are 6 people in the organization, 5 of them must be delegates. usually in that situation, 1-3 of them are more involved or respected than the others. i guess the answer is to allow 1 person to hold multiple elector or delegate seats. disallowing this could be an option that the group could enable later. i guess that term limits should be similarly made optional, to allow small projects to adopt this system immediately in full form. and similarly the same person can be an elector and a delegate. maybe these restrictions could automatically come into being when the group got sufficiently large.. or maybe not.

this is a little dangerous though.. if the same person holds a majority of the elector seats, and a majority of the delegate seats, then they are a dictator and can't be overruled by anyone else. if they hold a supermajority of both, they can amend the constitution. maybe let that go though... if 66% of the voters want that to happen, how could anything be done about it? That's a constitution-amending supermajority already. another answer would be: this is one cases where the rules for a government should differ from the rules for a private organization.

btw did i ever write down anywhere that p should be 5 (not 7 or 11), because it's just too hard to get anything done with lots of people, and

open question for amendable code: should non-top-level delegates have open or secret ballots? split it somehow (some levels open, some secret, or maybe some delegates on each level are open, some secret)?

each delegation can pass resolutions with a 66% vote. the set of such passed resolutions become the 'platform' (as in 'party platform') of that delegation. delegates are encouraged but not required (e.g. they are allowed to disagree and to vote their conscience) to try to get their delegation's platform resolutions passed at the next higher level.

resolutions may not say anything about individual candidates for higher levels of the delegate pyramid -- they may only discuss general issues, not individual people.

each candidate must say if they 'agree as stated, disagree, sort of agree (agree but think there's a minor problem with the wording of the question, or think that their opinion on this issue cannot be reduced to a yes/no on this question)'. each candidate must also rank-order their priority of the resolutions for their delegation.

if constituents of a constituency can complain if they think that their constituency's parliamentary procedure was not followed. a candidate with more than 40% complaints is not elected (e.g. that constituency has no delegate).

delegates are provided standard software for doing all of this by the organization as a whole, but each constituency can, if it chooses, adopt its own parliamentary procedure and not use this software. in fact, all this stuff about platforms and voting thresholds is itself only a default. all the top-level organization cares about is the registration of who is with which delegation (each delegation submits a list, and so does each persion, and a person is considered to be with a delegation only if both the delegation and the person say that they are), and which delegate was selected. recall that to initially form a constituency you need 50% more than the minimum threshold below which the delegate will be removed; so if 1/3 of the ppl leave, then the delegate is removed. this means that at least 66% of the candidacy needs to agree to support whoever is chosen even if they weren't their first choice; if the constituency's parliamentary procedure has turned into something unfair, or if its chair is not enforcing it correctly, the remedy for the constituents is to resign. as a side-effect, have the std/default parliamentary procedure requires a candidate to get at least 66% approval.

if a higher-level constituency passes a resolution, this is (in the default parliamentary procedure) put to a vote in each supporting delegation. this gives supporting delegations a chance to express dissent by not passing the resolution or even by passing its opposite.

architectural principals: -- competition between constituencies -- no mass campaigning for delegates -- delegates chosen bottom-up, no top-down influence or circle of power in the delegate pyramid -- little incentive for negative campaigning -- small groups -- when no firm agreement, usually better not to pass legislation (which is restrictive) or (negative) judgement -- in the absence of strong opposition or procedural obstacles, the executive should just decide things unilaterally -- the chair's role is solely negative -- the chair opposes the government -- the chair is a position of individual conscience, not a position where one relays the views of those who elected you -- judges are a position of individual conscience, not a position where one relays the views of those who elected you -- electors and delegates are free to vote their conscience, but the system encourages them not to via the threat of losing the next election or being recalled

a condition for elgibility of a person to be initially appointed a judge in a circuit is that they, as a councilmember, have more than the median number of skill points out of councilmembers in the highest appeals level of that circuit (e.g. the same condition to be on a higher appeals court, except that here there aren't any). in addition to their other confirmation requirements, they must be 'confirmed' by a court (starting at a low level court and working their way up via appeal if they lose). a censor court looks at their past juror history and confirms that they truly participated, just like for political candidates, and that they maintain decorum. another court, in the subject area the judge is being appointed for, confirms that they seem to be knowledgable and correct in their application of the law.

sentencing: in a trial, if the verdict is guilty, then judge proposes a sentence and a majority of the jury must accept it.

(all) appeals courts decide by majority vote which cases to hear.

judges are supposed to only vote based on determinations of law, not determinations of fact; that is, they should vote in agreement with the non-judge-councilmember consensus, even if they personally disagree with it, unless they think it is wrong on a point of law.

perhaps every time you go up 2 appeals levels, you get 2 more judges added to the case. these judges vote and do not have to be in consensus with the non-judges for a decision; but the majority of the judges must be in consensus with the non-judges for the non-default decision to be made.

in trials, the default in innocent. for resolutions, the default is to allow them. for flags of abusive posts, the default is not to flag.

a new judge, after their nomination is confirmed by 2 courts, as above, can be appointed by an Act. they are appointed for a designated subject area. They can be removed for any cause by a unanimous - 1 action of the High Court (e.g. 4 out of 5 High Court judges must vote to remove; or 3 out of 4 if there are only 4 of them; etc; and judges cannot be removed otherwise, until their term expires; their term must be as long as the longest other term).

when an appeals case with a jury assignment comes up (or when a judge comes up, depending on which one is more busy), a judge is assigned to it based on a random seniority-weighted selection process from among the judges in that subject area; that is, there is a higher probability that an experienced judge is assigned to an appeals case, but not necessarily. if there is an overabundance of judges, the chance of a judge being assigned at all is also proportional to seniority. seniority is the sum of skill points earned by jurors in cases that the judge presides over, that is, the judge might feel pressure to serve as a facilitator helping the jury come to consensus. eh, strike that, the rich get richer dynamic is too strong. same for juries -- even if there is sufficient unused jurors to constitute an appeals court when a case comes in, a normal court is started with. this both gives novice jurors a chance to accumulate cases, as well as giving the parties a chance to first come before a uniform random distribution of volunteer jurors in their community (although, if this is a reputation franchise, should weight by reputation).

high court selection process: reweighted approval voting (binary score voting) by the electors and delegates where all judges are candidates. the process is continuous, in that electors and delegates always change their approvals, and the system always reports who would win. To actually reconstitute the High Court with the current winners, a Reconstitute the Court motion is made. It automatically contains the names of the winning judges at the time that the motion is made. It must be passed as an Act with a 2/3 threshold. (if the winning judges based on approval voting would change after the motion is made but before it is passed, the original roster is still the one that takes effect). The court is reconstituted only for cases which have not yet asked the High Court to hear them; for any cases which the High Court has already been asked to hear, the old roster decides whether to hear them and if so, decides. the new roster, however, is immediately and simultaneously available for new cases.

put the money and term limits and different ppl restrictions into the govmt only section

high court or a majority of chairs can force a higher voting threshold (eg the decision of a chair to allow a lower threshold can be appealed to the high court); the court must act with the higher threshold being considered to allow the lower threshold

change the name to just Amendable Code. Fluid Democracy is way too confusable with Liquid Democracy.

hmm, for pietrust groups, reputation should be incorporated somehow into juries, to deter attackers from infiltrating the jury system and then either blocking it or making crazy decisions when they find a bunch of themselves on the same jury (it deters because it makes this more expensive, because each attacker would have to spend the time accumulating a high reputation before they can damage the jury system). So in addition to the minimum jury skill score for appeal courts, have a minimum reputation score.

military selected/promoted by ceoi, but commanded by ceoe.

active military is forbidden from taking public political positions or from intervention, even to prevent corruption

ceoe must resign upon either a declaration of war, or upon ordering violence.

eliminate electors -- to simplify, but also to enhance the prestige of chairs.

chairs elected by multiseat reweighted score voting.

shall we allow the chairs to veto legislation? no, i think that gets them too involved. they can veto judges, though (but they can't veto more than some fraction of the available judges, perhaps?)

if you appeal from the decision of the chair, you appeal to the 'en banc' all 3 chairs, i guess. this is majoritarian (e.g. if a minority faction controls only 1 of the 3 chairs, they dont have the ability to prevent the majority from misinterpreting the rules), but so is Robert's Rules Appeal from the Decision of the Chair, so i guess that may be unavoidable.

when one high judge (out of the 3) resigns, that forces their 2 colleagues to resign at the same time, and forces an immediate replacement election after 1 week (e.g. as if the 66% majority had been achieved).

government groups also the rules about not holding multiple offices, reporting of outside income, and term limits. term limits includes not reelecting a judge. mb their judges should be 4 life.

since we got rid of electors, allow the tribunes to decide when the forum and the senate deadlocks (one passes, one vetos).

so now the high officials are:

3 chairs
3 judges
5 boardmembers
2 CEOs/Presidents

and there's no dicrete scaling transitions.

chairs, judges, boardmembers, forum topics, and highlighted forum proposals among un-selected forum topics are all selected using multiseat proportional voting (reweighted score). CEOs election and forum voting uses single-seat score voting (forum voting also has a followup simple 2-choice yes/no vote after each proposal is selected from among the alternatives).

forum standing committees and citizen court/councils both use the mechanism of board-coloring (5 person committees) and consensus decision making. Comment-flagging in the unofficial forums uses a similar mechanism to forum proposal submission, flagging of potentially corrupt candidates, and screening of elgible candidates.

non-governmental groups have no limitation on holding multiple offices or term limits, making the scaling of the Board unnecessary, as a small group could just have 1 or 2 people holding multiple seats, and just one person as Chair.

the only set electoral term if that of the chairs. boardmembers, judges, presidents are recalled at will (by constituencies, the board and the board respectively).

the complexity of token contests is gone. the electors are gone. scaling is gone, except for scaling the delegate pyramid.

so i think (once all this gets incorporated into the bylaws), we'll have simplified things a lot. the system should be easy to scale down for small groups, too.

minority reports: on judicial decisions and committee reports, each member (assenting or dissenting) may write a 'minority report' but it can only be 1/15 the length of the main opinion/report. So e.g. the maximal summed length will be 5/15 = 1/3 of the length of the majority document, = 1/4 of the length of the total document (e.g. the majority report + the minority report). For committees, the entire committee must agree to the majority report, for the judges, a majority must agree with the majority report (e.g. if 4/5 judges vote No, then 3/5 judges (a majority of 5; the 4/5 doesn't affect this number) must consent to the majority report). If they cannot agree reasonably quickly, there is no majority report, just a decision without explanation (and the minority report length is bounded by 1/3 the length of the proposition being decided).

quorum for board is >50%. note that a minority cannot therefore block business by fleeing quorum.

note that all 5 of the board seats may not be filled

initial conditions: before judges have been selected, chairs fill in. before internal and external PMs have been selected, senior chair is internal and next chair is external. if judges or PMs are incapacitated, this is also the order of succession for interim judges/PMs.

3 judges

unanimity among high judges to remove (impeach) another judge or a chair, whether for incapacity or for bad behavior. delegates are recallable by their constituency and hence cannot be impeached by judges.

the board can and should informally discuss whatever they wish in closed session amongst themselves (with no chair present) as much as possible. however, in order to take action (to have binding votes), they must enter a formal open session run by a Chair. the formal session gives them the chance to make speeches on the record for public consumption.

anonymity

have both a transparent and an anonymous ballet, and separate scores for each; but only the transparent one counts (or, take the min of both? configurable option; only transparent, only anonymous, min of both, multiply both)

i think multiplying both together is a good default (with the default being that your transparent ballot is also your anon ballot). This way, there is an incentive to bother to fill in the anon if you have something anonymous to say, but there's also an incentive to fill in the transparent accurately, and an incentive for them to try to match, so that others can still delegate to you based on what they see in the transparent one.

another name: concord? accord, concur, cohere, harmony, concert

ooo -- fractal consensus minority reports in forum

---

todo: remove the remaining forum emergency scheduling motions -- the Board/Senate can handle things that need quick action, and the potential to veto is now automatically forced onto the schedule

draw up a new emergency procedure. how about: if the senate is killed, then all of the chairs can act together to make a temporary exception. if the senate's still there, they can already pass a temporary exception, so i see no need for anything further. if the chairs and the senate are killed, the judges can unanimously make the exception. Note that temporary exceptions cannot permit the delay of the reestablishment of whoever was killed by the usual means (e.g. cant prevent constituencies from replacing the senators; cant delay a snap election for new chairs).

on the difficulty of amending the us constitution: http://www.ivr.uzh.ch/institutsmitglieder/diggelmann/lehre/usconstitutionallaw/Ackermann_The_Living_Constitution.pdf

people with similar interests:

this guy claims to be writing a book in line with Bagehot, the Federalist Papers, etc: http://www.usconstitution.org/

http://www.ivr.uzh.ch/institutsmitglieder/diggelmann/lehre/usconstitutionallaw/Ackermann_The_Living_Constitution.pdf : Bruce Ackerman

Lawrence Lessig might be interested

surely the ongoing nomic games and the people involved with machine nomics such as PerlNomic?

http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Main_Page and similar a ton of links: http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Active_projects

http://www.tgde.org/

IDEA FOR RECONCILING WITH C-CORPORATION:

C Corporations often have mandatory minimum quorums for their annual meeting. In Delaware the quorum may be set by the bylaws but must be at least 1/3, at least for the purposes of certain mandated types of votes. People who send in proxies and vote on anything are marked as 'present' for the whole meeting. Translating this to our domain:

in the Forum, no vote is final until it meets quorum, meaning that >=1/3 of all voters, or their proxies, ratify it
when you sign in, or mb when you take any action after signing in, you ratify all previous votes (and proxies that you hold do too)
the prior notice requirement for C Corp meetings translates into a minimum time requirement for issues
this strenghens the notion that the Board must do fast stuff ---

NOTE: some suggestions may also be in [6] and possibly also in [7]