Holochats: Governance
Written in collaboration with Raymond D. Powell
Let’s talk about you and me, let’s talk about all the things that we can be. I am singing this in my head. I am not even sure it is a real song, or one I made up. But it in my head it sounds like a Sesame Street song to explain governance and the agreements we come to. Governance can be explicit: no tagging. It can be implicit: the Golden Rule.
How about an explanation from our collective awareness, also known as Wikipedia:
That was a bit more complicated than my little verse. Really what we mean is what agreements people come to with each other and with institutions to help us operate at larger scales with some shared expectations. Governance happens — whether we like it or not. All living beings govern each other with every interaction they have.
Living Systems
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.
Digital Governance
Online there are many layers of governance. For example, we have governance over the way ISPs inter operate, and we have governance for the web (ICANN being the governing body for name space). These governing processes and bodies help create the vast stability for all the applications and websites that participate. Each application and website also has governance. What are people or bots allowed to do and not allowed to do. What are the terms of service and what gets you booted from a community? We can divide the mechanisms for that into two layers: the code and the humans. The code is a hard stop — you can or cannot take an action. And on say, an interactive website, humans have the ability to respond and adapt to what is being said and shared.
As we move into the world of crypto and the decentralized internet, what does that mean for governance? What does it enable? What does it require to function? Are new possibilities available? What are the benefits and risks of those opportunities?
Holochats
For Holochats, let’s explore:
- Philosophically: What does it mean to govern? Is governance always managed through force (the threat of violence)? Can it be negotiated through other means?
- For Business: How do we make agreements to be able to inter operate with each other, to share our resources and the benefits of pooling such resources together? How do we take advantage of scaling efficiency as a collective (not just mechanically, but also the agreements and protocols for doing so)? Can we create massively scalable cooperatives for holding these sharing agreements and distributing shared costs?
- Technologically: How do we create a governance system that obeys the guiding principles of fairness, equal opportunity, consent, privacy, transparency, and integrity, and yet still manages to be agile, flexible and effective? Where can we hard code governance and engage process hierarchies to help us scale outward more effectively? And where should we avoid coding governance because we aspire to principles rather than rules?
The Future of Governance is not Governments
It is time to level up our collective ability to govern ourselves. Perhaps Bela Banathy 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.” For us Holo as the bridge and Holochain as the platform offers the tools for doing this collective governance.
We will be releasing a five part series laying out five ways Holochain can upgrade democracy envisioned by several members of our team.
We invite you into our community, #Holochats, a distributed conversation! Each of our topics include philosophical inquiry into the nature of the theme as well as business and technical applications around the theme.
Collectively, our wisdom together can emerge.
To participate, include #Holochats and #theme tags.
Holochats are distributed explorations of themes with several steps:
- A blog post stating the #theme: posing questions, creating shared context, and considerations up for debate. (This one!)
- An interview around the theme {and we encourage you to do so as well!}
- You join in with your own blog, video, and links (new or pre-existing) using the tags #holochats and #theme to be included in the distributed dialogue!
- We can collect together the juicy evolution of responses to the theme and share back through the tags, re-post on our medium, and share our favorite insights.
We hope you join in! This is about distributed awareness and growing our collective intelligence together!
Post your own interviews, blog posts, and other content with the #Holochats #Governance tags so we can learn from and with you!
Everything is linked by #Holochats #Governance.
