Personally, what comes to mind reading the article is that people under-rate the importance of facilitation and personal connection in community decision making.
I think systems which incorporate and work with our human characteristics are important.
Often conventional en-mass democratic voting per issues results in both a tyrany of the majority (if it’s even possible without representatives), and at least in the US the presidential and even representative vote process seem to result in a lot of schismogenesis.
The sortician model for me also seems a fair bit random and runs a high risk of going astray by accident. It runs the risk of a tyranny of the arbirtrary…
One thing that’s already been discussed in some fediverse circles is sociocracy.
I think sociocracy is a great balance of distributed capacity, and integration of human relationship building along side the a very balanced consent based process that helps prevent both a tyranny of the minority and a tyranny of the majority.
The main question that one would need to answer to start using sociocracy on the fediverse (other than getting people acquainted) would be:
what is the purpose of a given organization or community?
From there, it would be an interesting matter of integrating all of the desperate parts.
Sociocracy does however, have a bit of a challenge when there are large pools of people, however socioracy is built for federated linking already and can also implement all sorts of creative feedback methods depending on the constituencies. It’s also designed to responsive (one of it’s other names is of course “dynamic governance”).
I think the biggest challenge that the fediverse would come up against is really handling the significance of what it means to make decision together, especially as it grows. In the same way that the general populace isn’t used to creating its own software (and hence, the are content to be commodified for easy access), it seems most folks also aren’t used to - and sometimes don’t even desire - to participate in governance.
Ultimately, it calls for a very high level of accountability and participation.
Does anyone else have experience with sociocracy or other consent based models in open source or tech spheres?
Sociocracy 3.0 is a flavor of sociocracy that’s highly influenced by AGILE.
Holacracy is another sociocratic flavor that was designed by software developers for software developers and has destinctly business feel.
Sociocracy for All is another relatively vanilla sociocracy - sort of the debian of sociocracy I’d say. I’m actually a member of the organization (it’s a multi-national ngo - nonprofit in the US and NGO in Spain/Europe) and the 'free and open source content’ sector circle there.
I think for a federated system to really shine, groups would need to develop fluency, and probably also flexibility in self governance methods.
Even within sociocratic organizations specific cultures can vary greatly. In order to make federated decisions, people would need to be able to easily link between groups making decisions at different scales. Sociocracy lends itself to this, but it doesn’t seem to happen very formally so often.
For instance, maybe your mastodon server is collectively managed (it’s moderation, it’s budget, its devops, development support, etc.), and it’s part of a regional collective of servers, who send delegates to an international entity that represents a particular subculture of fediverse participants.
In order for representation to be responsively shifting, people would need some basic familiarity with the decision making processes used by those groups in order to participate on multiple levels, and understand the dynamics of each system across the federated network.
At least using similar systems, and having familiarity with basic meeting facilitation, note taking, etc. would go a very long way to helping people organize within themselves and across a network of federated organizations. I
IMO, equipping people with basic governance skills and practices would be the best first step before even trying to orchestrate some kind of grand structure. That way, the people can just build the governance structure they need dynamically.