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maybe further restrict the number of things the Forum can vote on per unit time? the idea being that public opinion should get to determine only the things it cares about the most? nah.
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victimless crime is not a crime. living your life in a way that puts more strain on a public service without otherwise harming others (eg ating unhealthily, smoking in private) does not create a 'victim' for the purposes of this rule (although in these cases thee public service may b withheld or may carry an extra fee)
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majority of boardmembers to select a CEO when vacancy
2/3s of boardmembers to replace the CEO
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mb a "Citizen" is a member who:
and then say that only Citizens:
and as for Councils:
hmm, the 'active in Council service' requirement could be used by especially repressive regimes such as under Stalin to require people to serve on Councils, but then intimidate the Councils into rubberstamping what they want, providng a false veneer of popular support.
what should be the minimal number of simultaneous delegations to receive, to prevent collusion?
"The average cartel formed between 1958 and 1969 had 12.1 members, whereas the cartels formed during the 1970s and 1980s had 7.6 and 7.7 members, respectively. During the 1990s,the average number was 6.9,and during the 2000s,it further decreased to 5.1. ... Several studies suggest that cartels with many members are difficult to manage (LeClair?, 2011; Utton, 2011: 60). Consequently, cartels mainly exist in oligopolistic industries. " -- The Scale and Geography of Collusion in the European Market: A Longitudinal View Hubert Buch-Hansen Clement Levallois, Forthcoming in the Journal of Common Market Studies
" In a number of cross-section studies4surveyedby De (2010), the mean number of cartel members varies between 7.25 and 29.1, and concentration is only moderately high in many cases (the average 4-firm concentration ratio ranges from 43% to 75%). With the exception of Alexander (1997), no previous cross section study reports data on the size distribution of cartel members, but in their case studies of selected EC prosecuted cartels, Grout and Sonderegger (2005) findconsiderable heterogeneity in market shares amongst members. De (2010), in a studywhichcoversroughly the same sample as in the current paper, alsoreports a relatively large number of membersin many cartels(on average,6.85 for 98 cartels) and often significant levels of asymmetry among firms ... Moreover, in the case of an explicit cartel using output quotas, a large number of firms can be problematic if the cartel is not all-inclusive (Selten, 1973, suggests that the maximum number is 6). ... " -- What do cartel ringleaders do? Stephen Davies and Oindrila De May 16th, 2012
" 25. In our sample, the number of undertakings across the industries varies from 2 (two of the Vitamins Cartels convicted in 2001 encompassed Hoffman-Laroche and BASF) to 42 firms (the cement cartel convicted in 1994). The overall average number of undertakings is equal to 7.7 firms and the median is equal to 5. Most of the cartels involved fewer than 10 members – two third of the cases – and half of the cartels regrouped less than 5 members.
... Table 7: Average number of undertakings per sector ... Sector Number of undertakings (on average) Metal and non metallic mineral products 12.1 Machinery and equipment 8.1 Wood, paper, rubber and plastic products 13.6 Textile, construction 12.8 Chemicals and chemical products 4.8 Of which: Basic chemicals 5.1 Pharmaceutical preparations 3.2 Other chemicals 5.6 Services (business activities, banking and transport) 6.8 Food products, beverage and tobacco 5.5 Total 7.7
...
27. Cartels can rely on trade association to organize the cartel, in order to solve internal coordination problems and/ or to perform monitoring activities. These trade associations play a role of conductor. In our sample, 25% of the cartels relied on the active involvement of a trade association, particularly when cartels included a large number of firms: in one third of the cases implying more than 10 firms and in all cartels with more than 16 members a trade association was involved. For instance, the European Cement Association (Cembureau) was in charge of the organization of the cement cartel convicted in 1994, and who regrouped 33 producers and 9 trade associations. 28. If we compare our results with those obtained in other studies on international cartels, we can note that the average number of undertakings varies from 7.25 to 29 firms. In fact, Posner finds that the average number of members per cartel is equal to 29. However, he adds that his result is biased as two third of his sample regroups 10 members or less. Some of the cartels he studied encompassed more than 90 members which
drives up the average. In fact, we can note that most of the time, cartels regroup less than 10 firms, whatever the sample retained: 79% for Hay and Kelley [1974], 60% for Fraas and Greer [1977] and 64% for Posner [1970]. Concerning the role of trade association, Hay and Kelly [1974] obtained that a quarter of the cartels of their sample and 7 cartels out of 8 relied on a trade association when more than 15 firms were involved. Levenstein and Suslow [2006] found that 29% of the cases in their sample involved a trade association. Table 8: Number of undertakings and trade association involvement Combe and Monnier [2009] Levenstein and Suslow [2006b] Zimmerman and Connor [2005] Fraas and Greer [1977] Hay and Kelley [1974] Posner [1970] Average number of firms 7.70 na 11.20 16.70 7.25 29.00 <10 members 76% 43% (< 5 firms) na60%79%64% Trade Association involvement 25%29%12%36%29%44% " -- Cartels in Europe: Main features. Law & Economics. Concurrences N° 2-2010 – pp. 23-31. Emmanuel Combe, Constance Monnier
http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/McEvoy_Dave_2011_The_Problem_of_Maintaining.pdf shows various experimental conditions in which coalitions with up to 10 person 'thresholds' formed. i didn't read it too closely.
in sum, around 12 seems to be large enough to make it annoying or even difficult to form a cartel, but not impossible. In this application, given the 5-member Board and the preference for ~5*5=25 reps below each Boardmember, we might select 25 as the threshold. Otoh if we want 'citizenship' to depend on becoming a Rep at some point, then it seems pretty difficult to convince 25 people to proxy their vote to you at the same time; you'd have to recruit more than 25, probably at least e*26 = ~70, which means actually mounting a 'campaign'. So i'd prefer to either take this out from the citizen requirements, or to make it just 12.
another issue with this threshold is that it must be enforced before the ballots are made public, which violates the requirementso, to prevent the following attack: the attacker tells some ppl to delegate to them. Sometimes they only tell 1 person, knowing that this will fall below the threshold, but as a test of loyalty. The person being told doesn't know how many others have been similarly told.
another issue with requiring someone to be a Rep before a Citizen is that (a) ppl might find that the easiest way to satisfy this is to join a political party, which then cycles through Citizen-izing its ppl through rotating Reps; this would increase the pernicious influence of parties, and (b) organziations might spring up for the purpose of Citizenizing any member who asks. And another issue is that the number 12 is problematic in small-sized and even medium-small-sized groups.
in order to make the system receipt-free (the voter must not be able to prove to another which way e voted and delegated):
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todo look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absentee_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Coercion_Evidence https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=voting+ballot+coercion&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/library/71.pdf "receipt-freeness" "As introduced by Benaloh and Tuinstra [3], receipt-freeness is the inability of a voter to prove to an adversary how he voted, even if the voter would li e to provide this proof." "More recently , Juels and Jakobsson [7 ] introduced a stronger notion of coer cion r esistance . A coercion-resistant system is a system where the voter can cheat an adv ersary who may interact with him and instruct him to vote in a given manner , but the adversary will not be able to determine whether the voter behaved as instructed—even if the adv ersary asks the voter to disclose his keys or to abstain from voting."
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could turn the way federalism currently works on its head: each federal sub-body (in the U.S., the states) could 'opt-out' of given laws, or give new freedoms to their citizens or within their bounds. Contrast with the current system, in which sub-bodies can only add new laws (take away freedoms).
any IP of which development the organization ccontractts for paying a majority of the direct or indirect dev costs must be (noneexclusively) available for the usee of thee organization and its members?
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maybe major contracts must be ratified by BOTH houses of the legislature?
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http://www.asis.org/asist2010/proceedings/proceedings/ASIST_AM10/submissions/19_Final_Submission.pdf notes 3 depts of ancient Chinese govmt: military, divination, healing.
This increases my feeling that 'prediction' mb should be a separate fn.
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maybe even if legislature has an up-or-down vote on agreements, a draft of the agreement should be published?
or maybe they should have a third vote, up,down, or go back and negotiate something better?
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_of_correspondence
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban#Literature_and_vocabulary_development says that there are lojban translations for 'Parliamentary Rules: Lojban terms for parliamentary actions.'
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infraction/misdemeanor/felony distinction, and types of allowed punishment:
infraction: summary judgement misdemeanor/felony: right to trial
punishments:
if an individual repeatedly and willfully repeats infractions after warnings, perhaps this becomes a misdemeanor
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department of lists/ontologies/protocols related to accounting?
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mb the way to do amendments (without relying on a quorum to determine when 'enough' ppl have voted to amend) is to have the top-n potential options be on the final ballot
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note that reputation should be used only when the reputation-counting authority can be trusted to do so secretly, without public verification; unless reputation gifts expire after some time
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also mb if reputation is used, hold a voter's influence stable for each issue, to prevent open polls from being scanned via transient influence gifts
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state explicitly that all of the chairs are equal to one another
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board members r equal? mb so, it makes things simpler
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unless i can find a way to do publicly verifiable secret ballot revocable proxy voting in the face of a threat model where an attacker can coerce you to do anything that you can verify that you have done (ie so the demand is that you should be unable to verify how you voted and/or to whom you gave your proxy to), change the Bylaws so that instead of being able to give revocable proxies, at the time of any election, you can publicly state that you are giving a proxy and for how long (there are only a few options for 'how long', to prevent your secret ballot from being identified by this choice), and then via secret ballot you give a proxy; the proxy expires at the appointed time but cannot be revoked or overridden in the meantime. Proxies may be 'by topic', and in theory you could even have decentralized topic assignment, although again if there were too many choices for this, ballots could be de-anonymized. Also if the electorate is too small then you could de-anonymize ballots by when the proxy was given, so mb do not permit proxy-giving at every Forum vote-casting time; mb in the std bylaws just do it only once per electoral cycle, to the default simple and useful for small organizations.
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write my legal bidding / cost-sharing proceduree into the bylaws [1]
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mb require an Act to raise the reserved seedshare proportion
(but what about permanent seedshare? i think we should require an Act regardless)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegated_legislation_in_the_United_Kingdom
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mb require an Act to raise the reserved seedshare proportion
but then what about permanent seedshare?
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in intro: "Up to three Chairs and up to five Boardmembers"
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mb disallow 'precedent' in court cases, but do allow appeals courts to issue binding regulations on how to interpret the rules to their lower courts where the rules are ambiguous. these regulations are of course overridden by the rules themselves.
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instead of scoring based on court consensus/case completion, mb score based on completion + others' views of u?!? want to ensure that you participated, after all. hmm not sure if that's a good idea, suppresses minority POVs.. but mb have a separate court for that, after all, deliberations are public record
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merge 'state of emergency' and 'temporary exceptions'; time-limit to 1 month; Chairs can veto or prematurely terminate
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in bd, could use the multiwinner mixed approval/pr-score(2)/cumulative system for the 7body of Speakers: 1 member by non-pr approval, 3 by pr-score, 1 by favs (cumulative), and then the 2 specials i described before (predictor and sortition-recc'd outsider)
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perhaps require 2/3s 'recall' to change ceos (AFTER runoff). What happens in bd if the ceo resigns or dies? provisional ceo elected via score voting w/runoff w/ no 'recall' voted necessary; but if there is a 'recall' req, ceo is 'provisonal' until such time as they get a 2/3s vote (with no abstentions) (all these votes are only among the 5 boardmembers).
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note: the non-boardmembers Delegates never get to vote with the Board on selection of ppl (eg selection of the CEO), only on policy resolutions
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vacancies for chair can be set by reexamining ballots from prvious election
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let's just have secret voting in the Forum and open voting in the Delegates.
KISS
wait, it's not so simple.. is there a way to keep both votes AND proxies secret?
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consider taking out author's nonexclusive rights to IP, as it's controversial?
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it's called a 'semi-direct democracy'
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more rights:
securee aand defend home, body, companions to compute free from compusion to have anyonhe in their home from search or seizure without a court-authorized warrant or probable cause to return of property seized by law enforcement unless the person is convicted to potential pardon by jury of peers, where peers may be by living area or by expertise aaccording to the person's choice from being lied to by an official unless pursuant to a court-authorized undercover operation to have the laws enforced by members of one's own community not to have the laws enforced by the military or using military tactics to personal property to save or to spend money to sense, think, remember, act, have emotions to control of one's mind and body from involuntary surveillane or interference of one's mind
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as far as removing corrupt/abusive chairs, i still think they should only be removed if both of their co-chairs also resign, forcing a new Chair election.
but if a Chair dies or becomes medically unavailable, then the Judges must remove them, because you can't rely on the co-chairs to do so, since they are probably from a different faction due to the proportional voting. The Judges can't remove a Chair against their will, eg this procedure can only be used when the Chair can't protest their removal because they are dead or unavailable. In this case should there be a new Chair election? Or just leave that spot vacant? Or just have an election for that single spot? The latter two options are less tumultuous but could tempt a majority party to assassinate the minority party's Chair, leaving the minority party without a Chair. So i guess there should be an immediate new special election for Chairs. However, the old Chairs still simultaneously serve out their terms, although they only keep their individual (eg investigatory and declassification) powers.
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still uncomfortable about the Chairs doing summaries.
also, i thought for awhile to see if i could come up with a good way to have staggered terms for Chairs while still electing 3 Chairs at a time, without having more than 3 Chairs at a time, but i couldn't (without using randomness)
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i guess one (extreme) thing we could do is, if we decide to have the Chairs elected continuously multi-seat proportional, is to have the Speakers BE the Chairs, possibly also with the addition of the Predictor and Outsider Speakers.
hmm.. the powers of the Speakers will be:
that's pretty.. positive. I don't want the Chairs so caught up with policy decision-making that they become elected for their promises to Get Things Done instead of their promises to ferret out corruption.
Some of these powers cohere well with what the Chairs do anyways:
The most 'positive' power in the above is 'place item onto agenda'. We can remove that. If the Chairs have a really important and popular idea, they can always put it forward in an Announcement, but taking away the power to initiate agenda items will help ppl from thinking that doing such is the Chair's real job. Forcing a rollcall vote doesn't sound too bad, but i suppose it is in conflict with the idea that secret ballots are good; since i dont think this issue is decided yet, let's take this away. This leaves 'summarize Forum proposals', perhaps the most 'Speakery' thing. This already doesn't have votes, so it's only somewhat 'positive', but it's very much getting into specific positive policies. But if we have a supermajority requirement for Speaker agreement then it's less likely that ppl will elect Chairs on a promise to rock the boat here.
Now, my evolving thoughts on whether Chairs should be elected staggered or continuous multi-seat proportional: there are many extant examples of investigative positions failing to keep out corruption when they are filled by the same majority party that runs the government; there seems to be less, or less salient, examples where a corruption investigation is stymied because the prosecutor or investigator is openly voted out or even removed in the middle of their investigation, perhaps because this would become obvious if it were done in a highly public manner, which the Chairs are. So let's go continuous multi-seat proportional. This removes the main motivation to have Speakers, that is, the lack of a mass election multiseat proportional class of official.
hmm i guess Chairs are more powerful if they are elected for a fixed term, even if that term is not staggered.
So i think we should do it:
i say 4/5 of Speakers, rather than unanimous of Chairs, b/c i am still considering adding a Predictor and a sortition-recommended Outsider Speaker. Note that the 4/5 consensus requirement ensures that many important points will not make it into the Forum Proposal summaries, but informally, all Speakers will probably be able to individually attract media attention and make their point heard.
Another alternative is to allow Speakers to write a summary comment whenever at least 3/5 of them can come to consensus, but to allow the 1 or 2 remaining members to write a 'minority opinion' that is also pushed as a summary comment. No, i think that makes the Chairs too issue-based; people will expect that 'their' Chair should "say something!" about contentious policies. With a requirement for 4/5 consensus, any two Chairs can discreetly decide that they don't want the Chairs to issue any official summary.
The 4/5 requirement for summaries makes it clear that this is usually supposed to be used for objective facts such as budget estimates.
given that the elections are for a fixed term, i guess mb a better way to 'impeach' a Chair is for the other two Chairs to resign; this forces immediate new elections for Chair.
does this still serve the idea of the Speakers, that is, to provide a small, unifying committee of ppl who think about the 'big picture' and direct the Forum's attention? Not so much. But at least it does provide for an independent power centre in case that the Board becomes an unaccountable cabal of political party leaders, and the parties use their influence with the mass media to dominate discussion in the Forum. I imagine the Speakers will find themselves being called upon to conduct official investigations of troubling failures and events, and issue a consensus report. Which is in-line with the Chair's mission (to investigate, prosecute, expose, criticize, and to represent the organization as a whole). Also, if the Forum's attention really needs to be shifted, the Speakers can make an Announcement, having a similar effect in practice to placing an item upon the agenda.
The 4/5 requirement does, however, reduce the power of the Predictor and the Outsider to introduce change from the outside, because they would have to win over not just 1 but 2 Chairs in order to make a public announcement. That's too bad, but i don't see an easy way around it, given these other concerns. What it does allow them to do is, compared to a system where you needed 3/3 Chairs to announce something, now you just need 2/3 plus the two non-Chair speakers, to serve as a outside counterweight when one of the three Chairs refuses to sign something; eg it would end up helping to prevent the minority party from vetoing announcements when the outside world thinks the minority party is nuts in this case.
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im a little concerned that the presence of Speakers might detract from the popular mandate of the Chairs. i guess if there are no Speakers that's a stronger argument for multiseat proportional Chairs. Otoh if Chairs are the only popularly elected guys that might cause them to tend to be elected for their positive views on policy, even tho they only have negative powers.
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ok something i'm not sure about:
so, should the 3 Chairs have staggered terms but be majoritarian (the current proposal)? or should they be continuous multi-seat proportional? or should we have more than 3? can i think of a way to have BOTH staggered terms AND proportional election?
hmm (this didnt look too relevant so i didnt read it and dont particularly recommend it, but just putting it here in case i change my mind and want to look it up later: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&hs=SvL&channel=fs&q=proportional+election+with+staggered+terms&spell=1&sa=X&ei=b3JGVbXDE4fHogTJooGoCA&ved=0CBsQvwUoAA&biw=1440&bih=767 )
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"quadratic voting" is interesting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477747
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"not proven" is the conventional name of the neutral verdict
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Judges, Councils, Speakers are too complicated for small groups. Like term limits and independence criteria, make these optional until requested by the Forum; until then, there are no Speakers, the Chairs are the Judges, and the Board is all Councils
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Councils dont screen bills regarding the powers of Councils?
better: a petition can overcome a Council rejection, although the Council rejection explanation is presented along with the bill (the Forum GUI can even include a list of rejected bills seeking petitions)
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if there is a 'predictor' role Speaker, must that person satisfy independence criteria?
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some more ideas for an 'independent/outsider' 5th (or 7th) Speaker. council? (vote-weighted) sortition? outparty voters or delegates ('outparty' meaning constituencies that did not join into the constituency of any of the five Boardmembers)? independent (in the publicly traded corporation sense, eg independent of employment/influence from the CEO)? apathetic voter (or maybe someone who doesnt vote at all, a nonvoter)? someone who didnt vote for any of the 1st 3 Speakers? sortition out of the set of voters mtng some of the previous? someone recommended by a voter selected by one of the above methods (nonmember (at the time of recommendation) or criminal or criminal member stripped of vote).
hmm.. most of these additions become majoritarian in the face of ablative strategy by the major parties (by 'ablative' i mean eg if a voter is chosen by sortition out of the set of voters who belong to outparty constituencies, then a party can instruct some small proportion of their adherents to deliberately create constituencies for the purpose of being labeled 'outparty', but which in reality are filled with the party faithful); bigger parties can probably afford proportionately more ablation). so mb K.I.S.S. (keep in simple, stupid) and have voting-strength-weighted sortition SECRET BALLOT recommendation of independent person who at the time of recc. had no vote (eg was not a member or was expelled member of was nonvoting member) (or mb say nonmember or exmember).
that is:
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remove the complicated clarification-if-promped-by-jury thing?
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rro motions chart: http://www.robertsrules.org/motions.html
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good read: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/ten-roberts-rules-to-customize.html
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if quorum is desired for Forum, could have a system where ppl check a 'i want to be included in quorum' box. If they check the box and then 'miss' a 'meeting' then the box is automatically unchecked and they cannot check the box until they attend one. or something like that. When quorum is missed, the mtng is rescheduled.
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so, shortlist of motions below that every voter should probably understand:
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after reading std code of parliamentary procedure, mb formulate a simplified version of that, too, for small group IRC (actually upon further thought this could also be for voice, and for async mtngs like email). idea:
A lightweight, algorithmic parliamentary procedure (for small or large groups, and for meetings that are either synchronous or asynchronous in time or in space) ('algorithmic' meaning that the Chair does not need to exercise any intelligent judgement but just needs to follow the algorithm exactly; so can be chaired by a computer)
(todo unify with mass procedure i designed earlier; note that i've abandoned the 'token contests' in that proposal and replaced it with Score Voting, which is simpler)
motions during a topic discussion:
secrecy/transparency motions during a topic discussion:
scheduling motions during a topic discussion:
main motions: proposal main motions:
advanced main motions:
parameter changes:
one member actions:
motions that are not needed if the straw polls are real votes and if there is always an 'extend debate' alternative:
todo: i dont think the system of just adding amendments as alternatives can be handled like this; we might need actual amendments. ok wait an amend is just the same as the combination of remove alternative+add alternative. 2/3s seems like too much of a burden for amending, so make remove alt 1/2 (ok, i just changed it from 2/3s to 1/2, above). sponsors have no special control over proposals, but perhaps the GUI might note 'endorsements' of an amendment (public votes for it), or for amendments to it, eg so you could see that a given alternative has, in its sponsor's eyes, been superceded by another.
can we include the consensus-decision-making "block" option here? i'm not sure if i even like "block", because it introduces a conservative bias. But, let's think about it; 'block' is a veto; so extending to the continuous case, we would let 1/3rd veto; the effect of a veto would be to make the status quo win (or rather perhaps, to abandon the proposal without a final vote). If we did proceed to a vote, a block would be signaled by giving a +2 to Status Quo and a +0 to every other option. As you can see, the effect of this would be to introduce a strong conservative bias by letting 1/3 of the votes kill any proposal (or, if we used the U.S. Senate threshold, 40% instead of 2/3). A block is very similar to a filibuster, except that a filibuster prolongs debate (possibly preventing other business, unless there are multiple parallel tracks). In a very partisan situation i suppose that a block or filibuster would be used every time, necessitating 2/3s agreement for everything. perhaps one idea to make blocking 'expensive' would be a tally of how many blocks you have accumulated. You accumulate Blocks once per session (or somesuch), and then you spend them by Blocking. Maybe you can acquire more when you are Blocked? but then you'd have devious manuvers where people pile onto the other side of a Block, causing confusion. But.. limiting the number of Blocks is not cloneproof, and the majority could take advantage of that. You could say that Blocks merely extend debate time, but, if the extension is limited, then that's much less strong than actually being able to veto the proposal. if all that is wished from Blocking is letting ppl express 'pls listen to me, i especilly care about this issue!' then perhaps the 0-1-2 Score Voting already does enough. Or, perhaps we could have a 'Block' and then just have a special Unblock motion that the majority can invoke if they feel the need. This would ensure that Block has no effect in a partisan setting, but could have an effect in a setting where the other side cares enough to retreat upon request; eg the effect would be merely rhetorical; could also say that Unblock doubles speaker limits.
y'know, we could get rid of the Close Debate and Abandon Debate motions if we just take the straw poll votes as real votes. i like that. we can remove limit/extend debate too using this if we also have an Extend Debate alternative on the ballot. That is, if the winning alternative has 2/3s of the votes, we count that as a Close Debate.
should the system enforce quorum? i guess so.. mb members and quorum are outside of scope, however?
the default Voting Type is 2-Score Voting: each person can vote one of +0, +1, +2 for each alternative
straw polls are always secret ballot
the system records an official transcript (all speeches and motions and the vote tallies on all motions) and also an official minutes. The minutes include the date/time, and who attended, and all main motions and for each main motion, all alternatives and the result (passed, failed, referred to committee, queued). There is also a minutes summary, which is just the date/time and the list of passed main motions.
All votes are by secret ballot except when an open vote is called for.
'vote now' is the same as 'alter speech limits' and set to zero. Abandon topic is similar, but the effect is the same as if a vote takes place and 'status quo' wins.
when there are no topics in the queue, a new topic is chosen via score voting, with 'adjourn' one of the options (and always a runoff b/t new topic and 'adjourn'). this new topic vote is always an open poll, so we move onto the new topic immediately at the conclusion of the prev topic, once enough ppl have voted to decide the issue (including 'abstain') OR some amount of time (1 minute?) has elapsed since the conclusion of the prev topic.
when it is a person's turn to speak, they have a short amount of time (30 seconds?) before they have to submit their speech, in order to consider what the person who just finished speaking has said (they should have their speech written and just be making adjustments at this point). if the medium is written, the speech is given to the computerized moderator, who posts it.
the speech limits are in terms of total limits for each topic debate. the computer then divides this limit by the number of people present at the meeting. Member may 'donate' their time to others. For very large groups, each member could have only a fractional amount of speaking credits, necessitating coalition formation and donation for anyone to be able to speak at all.
ordinary main motions ('proposals') can take the form of a standalone text, or of a 'diff' to be applied to a document
this program can be run over a mailing list, or IRC, or a web interface, or can run conference calls w/ an irc or web interface, too.
speaking is limited by time and/or by character count, not by number of speeches. This allows ppl to have very short speeches where they say "hey i motioned a referToCommittee, we should do it because X, pls vote 4 it".
motions made are queued by the system and then announced in between speeches.
all standing committees and officers are re-elected continuously via score voting when termDuration=None; in this case each member starts each meeting voting for whoever they voted for last time. O/w they come up for re-election after their term expires or when recalled.
All motions are open polls with no debate.
no Chair (the computer 'chairs').
'amend' would have the same effect as 'topic change' so must be 2/3s
each vote is Score Voting. 'Status Quo/no action' is always one alternative to begin with. When there is a 'Status Quo' alternative, there will be a Score Vote between the other alternatives, and then a runoff between the Score Voting winner and Status Quo (if the winner was not Status Quo). Another alternative is 'continue debate'. If this wins, a new debate is started with the same topic, but only alternatives which got more than 1/3 support are kept (plus Status Quo and Continue Debate).
the 'transitory' queue is just for this meeting. The non-transitory queue is for the beginning of every meeting. When a meeting is adjourned, the new mtng starts out with the non-transitory queue added to the queue, and then any remaining items from the transitory queue.
mb just get rid of the queue...
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mb 3 Speakers, plus 2 (Predictor and one other)
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50% quorum for the 5-person Board
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simplify CXP (council experience points) system:
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the following are passable by simple majority of any single house, and may not be vetoed by another house:
? probably doesnt justify a special case; this should fall under the existing 50% rules, so all this would means is that it cant be vetoed
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How can 'to leave any region' be an absolute human right if governments can put people in jail?
(hmm.. could you seriously have a country that always allowed criminals the choice of deportment? no, b/c then people who could survive elsewhere could committ horrible crimes with impunity. i guess what you could say is that war is when a country thinks an outside entity is so dangerous that the country must violate its rights, or similarly that the country must violate its rights as a public deterrent against past crimes that the target has committed; so you could frame imprisonment as being outside normal human rights, and being a form of war; but this isnt so great bc couldnt you then torture criminals, etc? hmm... maybe as a condition of entering or remaining in a country, you could give up your right to leave if you commit a crime? but that would mean that some human rights can be given up, and others cannot. a puzzle.. i still have not resolved this)
ok here's my attempt:
and then under member rights:
the idea is that when you come of age or immigrate, you are asked to agree that if you break the law you thereby owe the government a debt to be punished; punishment can include preventing you from leaving (can include imprisonment in jail), but cannot include eg torture (because it is only this human right that has the exception of 'after first settling any debts..'). So we frame the acceptance of imprisonment conditional upon breaking the law as contract in which a conditional debt is assumed. Then, to prevent this from legitimating debtor's prisons, we give the non-absolute right of having debts deferred; which can be interpreted as having the implicit exception of when the debt is punishment for a crime.
eh, mb the first one sounds too much like legitimizing 'debt bondage' (debt where as collateral, you cant leave until it's paid), even though the second one (indefinite deferral) should prevent that. so mb just mention crime explicitly, even though that's inelegant (would be more elegant to have a general principal w/o reference to the subjective (or, if objective, only in a jurisdiction-dependent way) notion of 'crime').
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remove references to CEOi and CEOe
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simplify thresholds:
obviously, if something falls into more than one of those categories at once, the threshold is the max.
simplify description of amendments: like temporary exception but twice over 2 electoral periods
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board members should have equal votes, after all?
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define/require +2 score voting
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absolute freedom of speech for the Speakers, the Board, Councils (only when they make group pronuncements)?
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presumption of publicity for the organization, and of privacy for its members
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modifications that i plan to make in the bylaws, or things to think about further:
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secret ballots for all but the Boardmembers when the other Delegates are asked to vote
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to punish a tribune takes the other 2 tribunes to indict and then the high court to convict
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the Seeds can (collectively; by majority?) add membership criteria
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merge courts/committees with the idea of civil service via examinations. High Court has final say over examination questions, but there is a court/committee to help with it.
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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.
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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:
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:
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:
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:
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
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?
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:
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:
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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:
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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:
i wonder about Boule? Kind of overly suggests sortition, though.
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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)?
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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 [4] has a Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) which is required to have a diverse membership, and which is itself selected by a panel (see [5]). 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 [6] (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.
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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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make a shorter list of tribune powers, in multiple bullet lists, one bullet list for each voting threshold
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mb take away the power of the high court
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):
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 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:
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:
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.
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
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:
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.
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
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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
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:
could have 5-member Speakers:
3 by proportional (direct) vote 1 by Predictor 1 by sortition-recc'd outsider (an outsider being someone who is not represented by any of the Board members)
wait i think i have a better idea. the function of the Speakers were supposed to be done by the Chairs, and they still are. the Chairs are directly elected already. i was thinking of expanding the Board to 7 anyways, so add the Predictor and the Outsider to the expanded Board.
in accord with External Affairs functions, maybe add ability to veto Treaties to the Chairs (although in corporate boards, various government and exchange rules will probably make it easiest if the Board has some control over that too; maybe the Board proposes, the Chairs can veto?). Instead of calling it a veto (negative, exceptional), say that the Chairs can 'approve' of treaties they do like. Also, give them the sole ability to choose and accredit official spokespeople for the organization, and the sole ability to direct legal action that the organization takes with respect to other (non-member, non-employee) entities.
My motivation here is than i originally conceived of the Chairs as a combination of US president, parliamentarian, parliamentary-system president, prosecutor, corruption investigator, and investigative reporter. But what about candidates who are well-known and popular among the public and who like to make a big splash? They may not be attracted by either the 'negative powers' of the Chairs or the parliamentary-system president aspects. They might consider the CEO or the Board attractive, but the Board isn't a good venue for them either due to the indirect delegation system; they would probably try to subvert the anti-direct-campaigning aspects of the delegation system in order to use their strength (mass popularity among members) for the goal of attaining a prestigious position that they want. So let's make the Chair position more attractive to them. They want to be the big dog, so the Chairs need more positive powers. Since the Chairs are directly elected, we can combine this with some of my old ideas for External Affairs CEO.
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the board and the forum and even the CEO don't directly make official announcements to the public, though they do send reports to the Chairs. the Chairs can make announcements to the public. Of course, the CEO or anyone else can make informal/unofficial announcements, can hold press conferences, can post updates on websites, can have opt-in mailing lists for them to send announcements to others, etc. And the Board and the CEO give periodic 'reports' (in writing or by voice) to the Chairs, which could also be publicaly broadcast for other members to read/watch (although the Board and CEO are also allowed to meet with the Chairs privately). The difference is (a) what is 'official', and (b) only the Chairs can 'push' information to members, eg email a non-opt-in mailing list that with all members on it (possibly unless they opt-out).
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how would you accomodate, say, a requirement for a university to have one student rep, one faculty rep, and one staff rep on the board?
perhaps it would be easiest to give students/faculty/staff plain votes and dispense with the requirement at the board level
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NOTE: some suggestions may also be in [7] and possibly also in [8]
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http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
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i'm considering making futarchy another house of legislature.
also still considering:
problem with do-ocracy:
problem with deliberative polling:
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ok to prevent this from being like gambling, ppl cannot use money in our prediction market, only 'credits' or votes.
and it should be votes, not credits, because otherwise, assuming the top-n individuals have some special power, a good strategy for political parties would be to assign a diversity of portfolios to their members, so that there is a good chance that at least one member gets lucky and wins big (in the same way that someone wanting to be a hedge fund manager might open two funds, one in which they go all in on SPY calls, and one in which they go all in on SPY puts, and then quietly close the fund that fails, and then brag about their huge returns in the other fund).
now if it's votes, we may not even need to do anything with the top-n best predictors, because they will already have outsized # of votes.
to make things simpler for external investors, we could exclude external investors from this; that way there will always be one vote per investor 'share', so investor shares remain fungible commodities.
So only the contributors can participate in the prediction market. The votes that contributors get via the prediction market cannot be sold because the anti-corruption rules prevent vote selling.
The purpose of using votes in the prediction market is not to benefit the participants in the market (except in that they benefit if the organization makes better decisions). The purpose is to help to organization make better decisions. There are three ways that using votes in the prediction market help to achieve this:
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excepting investor shares and their attached votes (clearly, investor shares, and hence their attached votes, can be sold), votes (or any action within the governance system) cannot be traded or sold unless the thing they are being traded or sold for is other governance system actions (eg it's ok to say "i'll vote for your proposal if you'll vote for mine" or "i'll vote for your proposal in exchange for your support for my candidate", etc, but it's not okay to say "i'll vote for your proposal for $1000").
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now that the best predictors are being given more votes anyways, do we still need my idea of reserving one of the seats on the Board for the best predictor? Probably not. Eliminating this helps anyways because single-seat elections introduce various technical sub-optimalities.
i'm still looking for a way to give some votes to futarchy. The Board probably isn't the best place for this, as the Board is supposed to be vetting individual people without forcing those candidates to mount a mass campaign.
the obvious chance would be to make futarchy a third 'house'. As noted above, the makes one wonder if perhaps there should also be a deliberative polling house, and an do-ocracy house.
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i still like the idea of reserving one seat for 'indirect sortition', by which i mean, each voter chooses a write-in candidate, and then one voter is chosen randomly (weighted by their voting strength of course) and their write-in candidate get the seat. The reason is that (a) like sortition, this gives 'ordinary people' a chance to be on the Board, but the indirection means that 'ordinary people' who are liked by more other ordinary people still have a greater chance; and (b) if the incumbents are setting unfair procedural roadblocks in the way of outside-the-system challengers, or if they are threatening to retaliate against a challenger who runs, then this allows a chance of someone who is ideologically a challenger to get the seat without mounting a campaign (in proportion to the (weighted) proportion of voters who support the challenger ideology).
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i'm also considering (again) quadratic voting. My initial objection to quadratic voting is, whatever, in a sockpuppet world one individual can pose as many, so they completely evade the quadratic restriction.
however, i'm reconsidering this stance. If the quadradicity is not just 'per voter' but is 'per voting weight' then we can probably recover most of the benefits. In other words, the price of 'purchasing' additional votes is something like (votes_purchased/voting_weight)^2. So, eg a person or faction with two votes.
Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl suggests 'square root voting' as a simple alternative that fits more easily within the status quo procedures.
But that's kinda the opposite of what we need in a pseudonym/sockpuppet world.
The Robustness of Quadratic Voting by E Glen Weyl considers, among other things, collusion, and says QV is robust, but one of his reasons is his assumption that very large colluding groups would probably be caught by the authorities. But in a pseudonym world, where sockpuppets are undetectable, this is not true. However, his other reasons seem to not be dependent upon this, so maybe it's okay.
But now i remember the other objection to quadratic voting. It is not 'clone-independent'; that is, if you actually pay money to buy more votes, or even if you just spend 'vote-boosting-credits', then if you are against something then all the opponent has to do is to cause it to come up on the agenda over and over again until you are bankrupt. Square-root voting is clone-independent (unless ppl are buying more shares just for one vote, which unfortunately may in fact be at the root of the argument for the social efficiency of quadratic voting, although i'm not sure). But it's not sockpuppet resistant.
One special case where clone-independence is present is when a bunch of votes are presented at once; then you can have vote-boosting-credits that are only good for this voting occasion. For example, maybe the budget fits this.
Note: the papers on quadratic voting ('QV') also compare it to 'VCG' (Vickrey–Clarke–Groves? auction) which the QV guys say is more vulnerable to collusion than QV.
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it all seems to come back to allowing strong central leadership so as to 'get things done' while at the same time preserving the option of 'the people' to eject the leader if they get too greedy, and preventing this from degenerating into a situation where the leadership can prosecute the opposition and so cause a positive feedback loop at the end of which no one is left to effectively oppose a transition to dictatorship).
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reduce the # back to 5, not 7. on the Board, keep an indirect sortition position, but lose the prediction market guy; having the prediction market affect effective #s of votes will already provide the desired stronger voice for good predictors.
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if this is implemented in something like Ethereum, then what is the procedure for deciding that the entire Smart Contract has a terrible bug and must be thrown out and replaced?
running voting systems falls within the gambit of the Chairs, but since this is essentially also amending the Bylaws, i think there should be another check in this case. But requiring unanimity of the Chairs is not good either, because one faction may want to exploit the bug.
So how about:
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add vote-based prediction market
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in a vote-based prediction market, do we care if someone loses 100% of their vote (and so can't recover)?
Maybe we average their current 'prediction market multiplier' with a flat number (sorta like a Bayesian prior) to allow their voting strength multiplier to slowly decay (or regrow) back to 1?
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also, in a vote-based prediction market, what if someone 'wins' a 'bet' with someone else, but then the second person's Influence is taken away by others? Does the winner's won influence decrease?
i think no, this is not how it will work. There are not really 'bets' between people, there is just a system keeping track of how well someone has done at predicting. This system adjusts a 'vote multiplier' which is applied after counting a voter's Influence but before the votes are summed. Votes are not really transferred between winners and losers (the sum of post-vote-multiplier votes is not conserved), this is just a simplified way of imagining how the system is computing the vote multiplier. As ppl's Influence fluctuates, this affects the 'market prices' shown to others, but their 'vote multiplier' is only a reflection of their own performance.
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a system where any member can submit a petition to the CEO, and the CEO is obliged to respond (not do it, just publicly respond in writing) if there are more than a certain proportion of member signatures on it
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a friend mentioned a voting system where you have rounds in which one person is eliminated each round, to ensure that the most broadly hated candidates don't win. This is negative campaigning, but maybe worth it.
So how about a 3-round system:
Note that even during the 'negative' round two, the candidates want to eliminate an opponent but they also want to be the one to pick up that opponent's supporters if they are eliminated; this might moderate the negativity (but may just encourage ugly personal attacks, because those can target the opponent without also disagreeing with eis policies).
eh, mb would be better just to have a -1,0,1 score vote?
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" How could we improve price transparency and give consumers the ability to choose less expensive for.s of treatment in non emergency situations? By forcing all medical providers to post prices. That includes pharmacies, doctors, hospitals, etc... Also, insurance companies should by forced to itemize how much they pay to each type of provider. Currently, all medical costs in the insurance financial statements are simply lumped together as "medical costs" without any clarification. "
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the organization may not impose any cost or disincentize to voting (eg using voter registration for some other purpose such as part of the construction of jury duty rolls)
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perhaps choose the high court Judges via an indirect process (a judge selection committee) whose legislative-selected component is proportional?
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