Experimenting with new forms of self-government

Think about our presidential elections – almost everything associated with having an electoral college is now obsolete.  So why do we insist on selecting a group of individuals and sending them to a central location to make our decisions for us?  This model is breaking down at every level.  Just try to keep up with the news – everything is moving so fast and filled with information overload, there’s no way a small group of people can keep up with it all, certainly not effectively. 

Our whole system of government was invented when everything moved more slowly, and “mass media” took weeks to percolate through the population.  Now, everyone is instantly connected.

And it’s not just the national level where we’re seeing an increasing irrelevance and counter-productivity of sending a small group to make decisions for the masses.  (Note I’m talking structures here, not core principles.  The Bill of Rights is as relevant as ever, as is representative government.)

Even at the most local level, with our homeowner’s association, we couldn’t get a quorum at our annual meeting to elect new board members.  This is with everyone living less than a mile from each other!  Everyone is too busy, and the relative effort required for a meeting is not worth it.  So we had to change our CC&R’s to declare a quorum based on whoever showed up.  But why do we even need an annual meeting?  Why not use social networking tools to form committees as needed and make our decisions with online polling? 

We also saw the limitations of the represento-kit first hand in a local charter school, now going through an intense financial crisis.  The school built up too much too fast; in the simplest of terms they got in over their head with the mortgage and didn’t have the budgetary expertise to handle the more complex situation.  To the best of my knowledge, the school board started dealing with the crisis, as a crisis, only five months ago.  But a year or two prior, several parents, founding members of the charter school – with vested interest but lacking any authoritative position – were predicting the crisis.  These parents are not your typical rabble; they’re CPAs and CEOs who know how to deal with financial situations and could have been of great help.  After a limited effort of playing the prophet, they pulled their children and went to different charter schools. 

So why didn’t the problem start getting addressed much sooner?  Answer:  too much work, plain and simple.  The founding parents first needed to convince the school board and administration to act, when even admitting to a crisis was “egg on the face” for anyone in a position of responsibility.  Or they could have run for the school board themselves, which meant committing to dozens of hours every month for two years, not just to solve the financial problems but deal with everything, and I mean everything.

Instead, why not have a system where problems can be raised publicly and ad hoc task groups formed as a regular course of business?  With modern technology, all of the constituents can be connected online; even those without PC’s or an Internet connection have public access at libraries.  If an issue is raised that receives a critical mass of acclamation (for example, an online vote hits a  threshold to deal with it), then set up a task group.  Then, the CPAs and CEOs could volunteer for a few weeks of focused effort – using their specialization – rather than months or years of draining effort on behalf of the other 99.9% doing very little. 

In other words, we deal with the fundamental limitation of overloading a central committee.  Share the decision load, based on talents, skills and constituent passion, using focused and time-boxed volunteer effort.  This could have a side benefit of getting around the typical barriers of politics and bureaucracy by enabling more participatory, informed constituents.

Smaller, local organizations such as a homeowners association, a public charter school, or a small town are the perfect places to test out these kinds of new forms of participatory democracy.  In a new, more direct participatory model at the smaller scale, we will learn how checks and balances can be built into the system before rolling it out at a statewide or national level.  For example, one of the things that the electoral college does is help prevent not only the tyranny of a minority, but the tyranny of the majority.  (As a result, a presidential candidate can’t completely ignore the ‘”fly-over” states between the population centers.)  We’ll figure it out, but we need to get started, since the system we have now is creaking.