A sovereign community
Just a brief note — an attempt to insert a powerful idea into your brains.
I conceive of the Citizendium as an unusual kind of community. Once it is off the ground, and the work of setting up governance bodies and leaders has been established, it will not be beholden to anything other than the Citizendium Charter (anticipated by our Statement of Fundamental Policies, but not yet drafted) and the various balanced bodies that execute it.
I don’t want decisions ultimately to be made by any small, stable group of people who make up a non-profit board, or (of course) the owners of a private business, or the shareholders of a public corporation. I want society to recognize a new social fact: that there can be rule-governed communities that live online, whose membership is much more fluid, and which are directed by their members, according to agreed-upon rules.
Many open source projects are essentially “benevolent dictatorships,” and others are oligarchies. But there are relatively few examples of communities that are really genuinely self-governed, particularly according to an established charter. Many communities give lip service to democratic governance, but due to the lack of clear, enumerated rules that are actually enforced, they end up more closely resembling mob rule.
We can do better.
Well, for sake of argument, what happens if one of the various balanced bodies does something that conflicts with what one of the other balanced bodies is doing?
Comment by Otto Kerner — April 26, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
The method for resolving such conflicts should be laid out in the Charter. It depends on the bodies in question.
Comment by Larry Sanger — April 27, 2007 @ 5:15 am
So, basically, it has yet to be decided, right? It’s a very nice-sounding idea, so I’ll be interested in seeing the proof once the pudding is ready.
Comment by Otto Kerner — April 28, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
Ah, but…you wouldn’t judge the viability of a political idea on one example, would you? So even if we are a crashing failure, it will not prove anything about the possibility of genuine online self-government; it would only be one data point.
What would it be, anyway, about being online that would make an constitutional republic impossible online? They’re possible offline.
Comment by Larry Sanger — April 28, 2007 @ 12:50 pm
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