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A Protocol for Scaling Loving Kindness
Collaborative Governance Framework
In this framework, we will share an idea for a way we can use software to build new collaborative systems of economics, politics, and business from the ground up into a truly distributed ecosystem of voluntary exchanges. We believe that we are presenting practical steps to achieve the lofty goal of truly empowering every citizen with transparency and influence in all of the systems in which they participate.
What you are about to read was written by people like you. Maybe you’ve thought a lot about technology, government, economics, and sociology and you have ideas about how technology can be used to create a world of great abundance, freedom, peace, and justice. Or maybe you haven’t thought much about these things, or don’t have many specific ideas. Regardless of where you fall in the spectrum of thought around these topics, our intent in writing this document is that nothing within it is beyond your understanding.
Vocabulary choices can be difficult to make. Since every reader is a unique being on a unique journey, each of our experiences lead us all to have varying feelings and interpretations about particular words. In order to create the best experience in reading this document, we encourage you to focus on the good intentions of the writers, and move past any triggers you might have around particular vocabulary. We ask you to hold some faith that while this document makes bold proposals about things that might affect all life on the planet, we attempted to write it in a way that boils these ideas down into a format that you can participate in, and that creates a space from within which you could even become one of the contributors to this document, and the ideas it proposes.
We encourage you to read the parts of this document that catch your interest, and even comment to let us know your thoughts or ideas. We encourage you to be part of the discussion about how we can move into a new way of being with each other on planet Earth. We honor your participation in that transformation, whether active or passive. And we honor you as a unique, sovereign, and amazing being of unlimited potential. Thank you for being here.
Table of Contents
Living systems on every scale have forms of organic governance—methods of self-regulation to manage the coherence and continuity of the system, also for steering toward goals or away from dangers. In the Information Age, and in a more human-specific sense, governance is a means by which multiple participants can maintain synergy and cohesiveness with each other. It relates to the processes of interaction and decision-making among those participants—perhaps most often oriented around the management of assets. Governance is a deep and complex subject that touches on psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology. Software engineering and other sciences also play a role in the digitization of governance.
Governance happens—whether we like it or not. All living beings govern each other with every interaction they have. And since it is not possible or practical for any individual human, in our modern world, to have the capacity to make every decision about everything that affects them, what we present in this document is a proposed means of doing the best we can to offer as much transparency and opportunity for individual humans to have a voice in many (or even most) of the things that affect them. It additionally proposes how an individual gets to choose to specialize in certain areas where they are more passionate or expert, and then perhaps ultimately become more influential in decisions that affect others in those areas.
Everything proposed in this document is about organizing humans at scale in a way that offers the maximum transparency and opportunity for their voices to be heard in the things that affect them. And in the spirit of biomimicry, everything proposed in this document attempts to simply identify, highlight, and enumerate the things that are actually already happening in natural systems—both on the human, and non-human levels. These insights then form a feedback mechanism from which we can better design systems and iterate those designs in ways that mimic the natural, healthy patterns inherent and proven through the evolution of creation.
What are the specifications for a sovereign governance system that functions with the operating values of fairness, equal opportunity, consent, privacy, transparency, and integrity—and yet still manages to be agile, flexible and effective? Great question. And we will NOT try to answer it with this document. What we will do is present a plan to build an ecosystem that enhances the expressive capacity of humans to such an extent that in reasonably short order, we can actually start answering that question. Perhaps we will find there is no one answer. Perhaps every group of humans that come together will have unique approaches to how to answer this question. We think that is likely, and have prepared this document to propose how we can create an ecosystem where exploration can happen with optimal transparency and interoperability between the various groups using various approaches, and where “business” can be conducted by and between these groups most effectively, and most immediately.
This document presents the idea that “The Future of Governance is not Governments". It will make the strong case that it is well past time for humans on planet Earth to accept the truth that we can no longer offset our responsibility for the stewardship of our lives and our shared resources to anything which is perceived or believed to be disconnected from ourselves. Perhaps Bela Banathy, the Hungarian-American systems scientist and educator, said it best: “I have become increasingly convinced that even if people fully develop their potential, they cannot give direction to their lives, they cannot forge their destiny, they cannot take charge of their future—unless they also develop competence to take part directly and authentically in the design of the systems in which they live and work, and reclaim their right to do so. This is what true empowerment is about.”
Based on that idea, this document presents an overview of the general concepts involved in digital governance required to produce that outcome. It proposes a set of the minimum concepts, technologies and metrics that are required, and it further proposes a new global standard, called CoGov, which individuals and organizations of all sizes can voluntarily choose to align with and which would enhance their ability to interact with each other cooperatively, dynamically, and synergistically—especially at scale.