Please take it with grain of salt, no guarantee of the accuracy of the conversation. For the full conversation, please click the youtube link below:
Fractal Governance: What, Why, & How? – With Mike Manfredi
Eden second mock trial election
Will be this Saturday. So July 17, at 1700 UTC, or 1pm, Eastern Daylight Time
There’s no fee to join,
You don’t need to be an Eden member,
There’s no real requirement that way.
You should have an EOS account,
If there’s any issues there, I’m sure some folks in the telegram channels can help get that set up for you, it definitely is an opportunity for those who aren’t so familiar with the process with what fractal governance is how it works.
This is your chance to give it a try before going through the process of actually becoming a full-fledged Eden on EOS member.
What is true democracy?
The idea behind democracy is the people being represented in government. A true democracy is really trying to restore what we expect out of democracy. True democracy aimed at power the people, not just represent them.
What is the benefit of fractal governance?
Fractal governance is enabling a new form of coordination, you have power right from the beginning, your opinion gets expressed and, and passed on way. Through political discourse, you can express your power in a community.
How to archive fractal governance?
You’re in a Zoom room with six people. It’s really easy to discuss the topic. There’s not too many people, you’re literally interacting one on one. Everyone can share their view and respond. It’s a conversation. It’s a very relatable thing.
So you start in a room of six. And you either don’t become the representative, you vote for a representative. After having discussed your ideas, and your concerns and your thoughts for an hour, that representative then moves up with that whole conversation in mind. And everyone who moves up to that first level of representation has had a conversation with five other people, and takes that experience, that conversation to that next level of representation.
Now they get in a group with five other people who have talked to five other people. And now they have a conversation. Now that person that from level one representative, is representing their five people in a conversation with five other people representing each of five other people. So you get this aggregation of ideas from the bottom up.
Compare that to voting or compare that to any way you relate to political discourse currently. You don’t have that interaction. Think about current political discourse, i.e. discourse in Ben Shapiro on YouTube. There’s a huge disconnect for the individual to participate.
Chris Barnes’s experience of participating first trial election
If it wasn’t for those discussions in the first rounds, I wouldn’t have said what I said in the subsequent rounds. So like it was integral for me to take what they said, and it helped my case. If it’s not going to be you, what are you going to then pick for the next to move on? If I was doing this properly, were I carrying this wisdom the crowd or this collaborative aggregated ideas as Patrick from Nova Crypto just wrote, I use that information to sort of feed upwards, which is the scale piece moves forward.
The goal of fractal governance
The goal here isn’t to replace country governments necessarily. It’s just a means of coordination. So if you think of all of the different people who want to coordinate, there’s a lot of other applications we could talk about. But I think the comparison to the national election is really useful. Because it draws out these large scale problems. You have that same scale problem of one person talking to a crowd. There isn’t a whole lot of exchange of ideas. There’s a person who’s already some form of leader speaking on what they want.
Dan’s book said that the media has a way to make the minority seem like the majority? Does fractal governance solve for that?
In fractal democracy, you get in your small group, and you discuss, and the only way you’re going to not express your view is if you sit there in silence. Unless those people have identical opinions which is the only thing you ever get from the media, it’s gonna spark a discussion. i.e. I agree with that person, but I don’t agree with that person, or I agree with you, but not in this aspect. It’s going to be a conversation.
Fractal governance brings back the natural, normal richness and complexity of opinion into it.
Fractal governance solve the problem of one-sidedness of perspective generated by two-party system in US.
For example, if we create two teams, even if people come in with I’ve chosen my team, unless you get a room full of your team, you’re going to have to discuss. You have to come to consensus.
The other critical thing is when you sit down and talk to people, like if you’re actually going to get into conversation with someone, (I may discover) my views don’t differ dramatically from the other sides. People want to be happy. They want to be well off, comfortable, wealthy, and in a more general sense. We have similar things we want in our life, we have different views on how to make it happen. But I think that differences are way smaller than we think they are. And when you get in a conversation, you start talking to people, we find that common ground.
Randomness in fractal democracy prevent rubber stamp
We randomly grouping people into those initial groups, right? We start off with X number of people, we group them into groups of six, and then they discuss all in separate meetings, that randomization is going to level the playing field. You’re going to have a pretty even distribution. And every time you add another level, that this stats say that you’re going to level that playing field even more. So randomizing into groups is a big deal.
What is the meaning of secession?
Secession means the members of community are able to leave if they disagree. You need to be able to say disagree. And you are able to disagree that this isn’t my crowd, and leave.
If you don’t have the capacity to leave, then it’s the tyranny of something over you. You have to have that capacity to walk away. It’s something that’s built into fractal governance from the beginning. The purpose of secession is you can start your own thing if you are unhappy with the current community. But it doesn’t mean you live alone, like exile. If you find a third of the people in a community think that the majority that’s running the community is off base, they can going to secede together and form a new community, start a their own thing.
How the fractal governance process solve for trust? Why the fractal governance are missing from current forms of democracy?
There are two things that establish trust. You’ve got this discourse, they actually carry your opinion forward. If the community members vote a person up to number one position (top level representative) and this person got the money and went off, there is a transparency of everyone being able to look at this person’s action and look at this person’s spending of the budget. This person is never getting elected again. Feedback is really valuable. We want to protect against the bad more than worry about the perfect. These chief delegates they’re going to be working together they should be working with the head delegate. The difference between the best and the second best isn’t as big. It kind of all works out and protects against the worst outcome.
What’s the process to remove that person from Eden?
We are writing the software for this part in Eden OS right now. We want the ability to pull someone out of office. And we want that to be kind of hard. i.e. We all agree he/she spending money all the wrong way, everybody agrees it’s clear fraud, well, then it’ll be easy to get the supermajority vote. But it takes a supermajority vote. So you can’t just have a small group of people not liking someone, that’s not going to get you the supermajority.
We’ll look at there is something like the level one delegates or the level two delegates, kind of low level close to the membership. And if they agree as a supermajority to pull someone out of office, we would we would do a re-election.
But we would not redo the entire election, because the chances are, the process works. So what you’re dealing with is actually the very small percentage of this person shouldn’t have made it to the top and then randomly been selected. But the rest of the, the chief delegate should be solid people. So probably all we would need to do is re-run sortition and pop someone else to the top.
Does the Eden process cost too much? Does it require too much time?
When you’re effectively coordinating to get done stuff that you want to see done that benefits you. That’s a different case. If putting in my 10 EOS gives me leverage of everyone putting in 10 EOS, that’s a big pot. If I’ve got 1000 people in my community, we all put in 10 EOS, and then we had someone who’s representing us who spent that money on something that would benefit us collectively. That’s quite a bit of power, that’s worth quite a bit. Is that worth that time to me? Absolutely. Is it worth 10 EOS? Absolutely. It’s worth a lot more than that.
As we see, we’re having impact as we see this as an effective way to coordinate. I think people are going to donate, I think people are gonna request upping the membership fees. I think, as we have multiple communities who choose different bylaws, there’ll be communities who say, “hey, 1000 EOS to participate.” Like we may have dramatically different things.