What would a fediverse "governance" body look like?

Fediversity Fediverse Futures
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Let me give an example if why I don’t like being governed, whether by consensus or otherwise.

I am a proponent of certain innovative features being added to a fediverse app that I use. I ran the ideas by the powers-that-be, and they either said no or showed no interest. And many naysayers said that my ideas did not fit their use case.

That’s fine. I understand that. I have a different use case in mind than they do. So the developers did not want to implement the idea, and the consensus of existing users was that they weren’t interested in the features I proposed.

So, let’s say things were run by OGB. Well, the consensus is against me, so it is still a no. But perhaps, if I win the lottery, maybe I can use my position to push my ideas through as a leader.

Or, I can do what I wound up doing. I created my own project that implements the features I need for my use case, use that code for my own projects, and will release it as open source.

If the consensus or lottery winners tells people no, they are just going to do it anyway if they are motivated enough. It does not matter if it is a dictatorship, committee, voting, or OGB. You are never going to get everyone to agree to a giant governing body because as soon as you say no to their proposals and ideas, they will eventually leave.

As I said, OGB might work for local communities, but the whole concept of governing people on a wide scale is problematic from the start.

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This is irrelevant as this is “governance” not RULE, yes I understand it easy to get these mixed up, but its still irrelevant, can you understand why?

Short answer, the USA example is irrelevant.

More considered answer It’s based on the Fediverse and ActivityPub so expands horizontally in the same way, this is one of the few things working currently, so a good thing to build from.

For example, do you understand how the Fediverse solves the problem of moderation? This is the same idea, but for TRUST based “governance”, we make meany small things behave like a “big thing” you have a voice from the small trust group that you build/join/support #OGB

This is clearly nothing to do with the value of the #OGB it produces “trust” “accountability” and “voice”. It does not touch power or money directly, both of those are complex and dangerous subjects, that are on the edge of the scope of the original coding project. We likely outsource money to projects, example https://opencollective.com and traditional POWER we avoid at all costs :wink:

The #OGB is set up to be a digital copy of existing working practices that we KNOW work for the last hundred years. These work BECAUSE they do not deal with POWER or MONEY.

I understand this is hard for you to see, trust me the is a whole big world out there, example the original FOSS and open-source built the worlds we live in.

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Let’s look at a practical example, how do we as a #openweb community make a decision on this.

#openweb dev What is a document? with a focus on #4opens and #KISS

Currently, an individual pushes it, it’s maybe taken up by a small community for a time, then it vanishes.

BUT this is an important document that we could get a consensus about, and it comes from a VERY TRUSTED SOURCE, but few people will likely know this.

The #OGB gives the person a voice and we as a community have a memory of this and can come to agreements, wether devs do anything is up to their reputations, but something like grassroots 3 strikes and out will come into play if people join #OGB instance reach a strong consensus, so they will likely engage… maybe something “else” comes out of this.

TICK, we have solved a “problem” that need a solution.

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What do you mean by governance, and what exactly will this governing body do?

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I can see this working for a community or an individual project, on a small scale. Although randomly selecting leaders who probably do not have the understand and skills needed to run an organization or develop the technology could be disastrous. And, as I said, the system could be open to abuse.

We already have a problem with elected government leaders making decisions about technology they do not understand. Selecting random people to govern a project will probably result in similar results.

And the whole notion of blocking people or kicking the out seems to be an important component of OGB… too important. This can be abused. Whoever has the ability to kick people out also has the ability to abuse such power and weed out opponents.

Supposedly this is a governance system meant to decide things on consensus, but then has ways for people to get kicked out if they don’t agree with the consensus. This could result in an information bubble or a consolidation of power.

A lot of risks with this system.

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So basically, the people who want something done (i.e. the community) decide they want something done and they decide this by consensus. The people who know how to do stuff (i.e. the developers or administrators) technically don’t have to do it, but are pressured into doing it, or else their reputation will suffer or they get kicked out.

And since OGB isn’t about power or money, there is no mechanism for compensating the developers or instance operators for their time, effort, and expenses.

You keep saying that OGB is not about power, but if people can be pressured into doing things and risk being kicked out if they don’t comply, that is a form of power and social control. And the three strikes policy is a sanction.

It sounds like a community that feels entitled could wind up kicking out all of the people who actually know how to make things work. The whole thing seems very one sided.

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let’s focus on a grassroots view of this statement:

Governance is the process of interactions through the norms of societies of social systems (family, tribe, formal or informal organization, a territory or across territories). The governance of a network. It is the decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that leads to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and process". In lay terms, it could be described as the political processes that exist in and between (semi) formal institutions.

Hope the non #mainstreming rewording helps, please add clarity, thanks.

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This make no comment on the actual #OGB

The project comes from a working practice (and yes you have no understanding, like meany people) of the groups and history of the people who have created most of the civil right you enjoy today. There are few if any good links about this, so here is a bad one Direct action | Activist Handbook

The social and technological paths of the project are both sound… good to focus on this and not get lost in hate/fear and negativity. As I have said before, this is a well trodden path, yes in creative different technical ways, but this technological path is already now well trodden and is where the value is, so please don’t keep #BLOCKING out of fear, thanks.

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The body/community making the decisions are the people who make the #Fediverse happen. Your statements are thus off-topic at best and borderline trolling at worst :wink:

Pressuring people is a not building a consensus. Though, it is often an outcome of bad consensus process. Democracy is full of bad consensus by its nature… the #OGB mediates this, and in no way remove this.

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Please define “the people who make the Fediverse happen.”

How does OGB mediate this?

If they are truly off topic, instead of brushing my concerns aside, it would be more convincing if you addressed my concerns and explained why in OGB that is not a concern.

Although your roots might be direct action, you have to consider that OGB is an attempt at institutionalizing the concepts you are promoting. Funny things happen when you try to institutionalize grass root concepts. It starts to morph and there are often unintentional consequences. What works at a grass root level does not always work at an institutional level. This is the message I am trying to communicate, and I have studied many attempts to institutionalize grass roots efforts. I can give you examples of things that went wrong.

I am trying to say, I have concerns. How does OGB address my concerns? Saying that my concerns are irrelevant without addressing them is not an effective argument for OGB.

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All these points have been addressed before. This questioning is irrelevant because it’s not about the #OGB project, signal-to-noise, talk about the project in specifics and am happy to reply. This is noise at best, trolling at worst.

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Have they been addressed in this conversation?

I am not trolling. I am asking real questions. Instead of answers, I am told to “Read the Manual.” Well, I “Read the Manual”, and it still does not address my concerns, or I do not understand how it addresses my concerns.

Since you have a direct action background, you should know that in order to mobilize a grass roots effort, people need to understand, in easy terms, what they are getting involved in and why it is important.

If the people who promote OGB cannot answer simple questions or address concerns in a conversation, then OGB is doomed. When organizing a grass roots effort, leaders don’t tell people to read the 10,000 to 50,000 word manifesto. They explain it to people in terms they would understand.

Giving people a link to a giant wall of text that uses terminology they are probably unfamiliar with is not an effective recruitment model.

I have studied political science and am truly interested in alternate social structures, formal and informal. I’ve even read the Constitution of the USSR, and can tell you why the Soviet Union failed to convert the promises of the revolution into their society. I love learning about this stuff.

If you want people to adopt OGB, you are going to have to be able to field these question, regardless of how irrelevant you consider them to be. And, just as importantly, you need to address questions and concerns in a way that does not feel insulting to the person asking the question or make them feel like you are brushing them off.

I know that this is unsolicited feedback, and you can take it or leave it, but I think that modelling other grass roots leaders, like MLK Jr. would help. He did not tell people “read my manifesto” and chastise anyone who did not. He explained things in a variety of different ways, and he adapted his conversations so that different audiences would understand what he was saying.

I find OGB interesting. But I would also like my questions answered, irrelevant or not. At least tell me why it is irrelevant. Maybe I just don’t understand something.

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@hamishcampbell I’ve been following the discussion you’ve been having with @WisTex here and I think you’re trying to be helpful. But so far you’ve insulted @WisTex, discredited their ideas, and dismissed their concerns as being irrelevant. While your intentions may be good, this comes off very divisive, unproductive, and makes others not want to engage in the discussion. The culture here needs to stay positive, or this forum will slowly erode over time.

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This thried is well off-topic, so best to let it mellow.

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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.

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After just arriving today, I wound up coming here looking for hope there would be indication of how ActivityPub is addressing the immediate requirement to manage the building of momentum, size & impact.

I expect by 2025 the core of the strongest governance administration will be handled by a ChatGPT service & current leadership will have either adopted democratic voting on decisions along with a pursuit of ever expanding increases of crowd wisdom in real time action, or they will be replaced by those who do.

Though he may of come across as brash, I applaud @hamishcampbell for staying firm on charting the course & doing their best to avoid ongoing tangents.

I came here after looking at Bluesky, as I’m developing my own application for the space & have to say governance was my primary concern, so wound up on this thread seeing if it was being addressed. If there is anything solidly being worked on, I would appreciate learning more.

Otherwise, in addition to what I mentioned above. In short, the governance will mainly be done by people as influencers of the applications that are largely spin offs or directly built off Deepmind, OpenAI or the closest Chinese equivalents. The line between civil society & the tech sector will blur out near completely as they become one and the same for most intents & purposes. All of which is to be made certain because of the UN 2030 Leave No One Behind & WEF AI Initiatives.

If the fediverse is going to have any relevant bodies representing them at the Athen’s Round Table on AI & The Rule of Law, then we would have to not only wireframe answering this question, we would have to put it in action as soon as possible. Otherwise the fediverse will remain in the shadows as the people who couldn’t stop fighting long enough to rise up.

So a fediverse governance body would look like one that is in action in 2023 & demonstrating it is effective enough to take on the governmental influence of big technology as an alternative line up of protagonists other than the tech giants. It’s governance that addresses the needs of post 2040 societal needs & actively leads by example of how to meet all the requirements of successfully achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

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This thread has gone off-topic and reached a point where there’s little value in it getting longer so I’m closing it. Feel free to create new topics to pick up on the useful threads within.

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