Direct democracy: The people's power to mandate and veto
In the context of how sovereignty is delegated to the people and how the people grant authority to larger entities following the principle of subsidiarity, direct democracy becomes an insurance policy, that every entity which is receiving authority has to grant to its people, as a minimal guarantee that the granted authority will not be abused.
Direct democracy can only provide the people with an brute-force instrument for correcting the direction and maintaining ultimate control. It does not provide sufficient fine grained control over the high volume work of drafting and applying legislation, nor does it ensure that issues are appropriately deliberated before new legislation is created and decisions are made.
Representative democracy: The people's meritocratic secretariat
The mountain of work that is today's legislative process is something that the people need to be able to delegate to a group of volunteers, willing to labor over legal drafts with more dedication than the average citizen. That is the role of representative democracy. The people elect their representatives based on merit, with a motivation of efficiency and feeling represented in the best possible way. To the extent that these representatives do not directly draft legislation themselves, they, by choosing the executive branch, select the experts that do, and are responsible for their oversight.
The ability for the people to meritocraticly empower certain individuals to get heavily involved in overseeing the creation and application of legislation is not to be underestimated. When integrated into a framework with direct democratic control the way I am describing it here, representative democracy becomes a sandbox for leaders. They can do their good, but they can do no harm. The representative aspect of democracy is important, but has relatively little actual political power. In a sense, it merely provides the direct and the participatory pillars of democracy with administrative support.
Participatory democracy: The people's collective wisdom
On a large scale, such as a state or national level, where people can no longer meet all together to discuss the issues and vote, direct democracy can only work efficiently inside a framework that ensures issues are widely discussed by both experts and the general public and that these perspectives are taken into account before any proposals for new legislation come to a popular vote. Direct democracy requires a surrounding framework of a fine tuned political system, grinding political issues towards a consensus where all qualified minorities refrain from using their de facto veto power. With the ability to collect signatures in order to block a proposal and require it to go to a popular vote, even a relatively small minority of the people will often be able to mobilize the sympathy of the majority of the people that actually go and cast their ballot, getting the solidarity required to block new legislation.
In other words, if minority views and sentiments of the people are not taken into account when considering new legislation, the proposal will likely be vetoed into thin air in a referendum, after it has successfully passed through the entire legislative process of the federal government, the commissions, and the two chambers of parliament. This threat of potentially destroying years of work forces the legislative process to make all the efforts to attentively listen to what the people want from the very outset, and to carefully consider all minority views. Without such a practice, the direct democratic controls would bring the entire system to a grinding halt. Direct democracy, by making public participation in the early process a mandatory requirement in this way, becomes the enabler of participatory democracy. The history of the consultation procedure in the swiss system illustrates this perfectly.
Consultation procedure
Relative to Switzerland's long history of democracy, the consultation procedure has only recently evolved out of pure necessity over the past century. However, it could become the most essential pillar of democracy, with the other two, representative and direct democracy merely ensuring efficiency and control.
During the 20th century in Switzerland, the threat of a qualified minority being able to potentially kill new legislation after it has been drafted and revised for often many years in the legislative process, has forced the government to listen to minority input early on during the process, submitting drafts for public consultation and revising them based on the obtained feedback, in order to avoid a referendum or to increase the chance of new legislation to survive a referendum and be approved in a popular vote. This process has become known as the "consultation procedure" and had become common practice many decades ago, before that there ever was a formal legal requirement for it.
At the end of the twenties century the Swiss constitution was rewritten from scratch, basically a complete cleanup of it's language without changing it's meaning, bringing its text inline with the legal practice of how it was interpreted. As part of this total revision, passed by popular vote in 1999 and in force since January 1, 2000, the consultation procedure has formally become a binding part of the legislative process, with its own article in the constitution: "Art. 147 Consultation procedure: The Cantons, the political parties and interested groups shall be invited to express their views when preparing important legislation or other projects of substantial impact as well as in relation to significant international treaties."
Since 2005, when a new law and detailed regulations on the workings of the consultation procedure went into force, the draft legislation and supporting expert documentation effectively became public record and all citizens are invited to provide feedback as part of this process.
As it stands, the consultation procedure can be taken to provide the ideal platform to plug a much more sophisticated system of participatory democracy into the Swiss system, offering ample room for new innovations and solidifying this three pillar system.
Three pillars, resulting in scalable, deliberative democracy
Direct democracy, representative democracy, and participatory democracy together form a balanced and scalable system of deliberative democracy. Direct democracy and representative democracy primarily providing a stable infrastructure, with participative democracy being responsible for shaping the quality of its output. While the two other pillars must be carefully designed and enforced, participative democracy can be more freely experimented with and can be continuously re-adjusted and organized much more flexibly.
Due to its decentralized structure and stability, such a system provides vast opportunities for innovation, where new ideas can be locally experimented with, good ideas can spread, mistakes can be absorbed and lessons learned.
Open standards, open policy
In many ways, the political environment this creates has similarities to best practices developed over the past decades in the Open Source software community.
While policies of different communities and different regional levels need to be coordinated and harmonized to the point that they can coexist, such a three pillar system, together with the delegation of sovereignty and the principle of subsidiarity, provides no restrictions on the freedom of different communities to innovate with new ideas and follow their own bliss, entirely free of centralized control.
To the extent that different policies need to be compatible with each other, they will need to be negotiated within communities, between communities, and between different organizational layers to which authority has been delegated to. This harmonization process between the different entities will produce a multitude of consensuses that will effectively become a collection of open standards, developed at a certain level, and available for possible adaption by the more local entities.
Delivering on the promise of democracy
Non of what I've described is rocket science. Much of this is either already practiced to a large extent or is implied by the self-understanding of how the political system should work. In the case of Switzerland, as a result of the way the heritage and ideals of the old confederation were "marketed" to the Swiss citizens during the creation of modern Switzerland in the nineteenths century, and in many other places in the world, simply through the promise of democracy to be the means to define policies by the people for the people.
Evolving the Swiss system
Especially in Switzerland, all that is needed is a round of hardening of these principles, to solidify their real world implementation. Most notably, the consultation procedure offers an ideal opportunity for experimentation with different ways of institutionalizing the third, participatory pillar of democracy, finding the most effective ways to invoke participation and tap the collective wisdom of the people.
One opportunity in this regard certainly relates to further developing concepts and technologies for collective communication using the Internet, but offline gatherings of people have an important role to play in this as well. Certain forms of group facilitation can yield creative breakthrough consensus that we so far can not reproduce online.
Volksrat: The People's Council
While I've been experimenting with online concepts for collective communication since the early 1990s, I've followed the "offline work" of
Jim Rough
with great interest, originally in order to find ways of leveraging his Wisdom Council techniques for online tools, but I now think his ideas can be directly put to work as an important offline element for physical sessions of a People's Council in the context of the consultation procedure.
During the last few years,
Manfred Hellrigl
has in Vorarlberg started to apply these concepts in the spirit of what Jim Rough calls "creative insight councils". These experiments have yielded encouraging results, further evidence that this process can produce creative breakthrough results that are reflective of the consensus in general society.
For every People's Council session, the process would kick off by randomly selecting 12 to 25 citizens and inviting them to participate in a specific session, which could be of variable length, but would typically run for 2 days. The facilitation technique used during the session is geared towards creating an open minded and open hearted zone of thinking and talking, with solutions, concerns, data and problem-statements being collected thoroughly from each participant. In this way, the People Council can speak their minds and hearts, and achieve breakthroughs where unanimous conclusions naturally emerge. The People Council then creates consensus statements and presents these results to the public and the media. When the topic of a People's Council session was concerning a particular legal draft, the results also get submitted as feedback in the consultation procedure.
Beyond the context of the consultation procedure, there could also be sessions that are held without any predefined purpose or topic, with participants being entirely free to talk about what they think needs to be addressed. These open sessions could be held on a regular basis, with the public presentations of the consensus statements holding up a mirror to society and generating more collective consciousness.
At the most fundamental level, people council sessions could serve as a consensus factory, working on constantly evolving drafts of a totally revised constitution, from which parts or complete drafts can be moved forward for adaption in the form of initiatives. A perpetual revolution.
---
If any of this sounds interesting to you, if you could imagine to help moving things forward in such a direction in Switzerland, or if you want to exchange ideas or collaborate in the context of similar changes in other places in the world, please
get in touch with me
or simply
add yourself to this mailing list.
There is a tremendous source of entropic energy available from the salinity difference between river water and seawater, but this energy has yet to be efficiently captured and stored. Here we demonstrate that H2 can be produced in a single process by capturing the salinity driven energy along with organic matter degradation using exoelectrogenic bacteria. [...] These results show that pure H2 gas can efficiently be produced from virtually limitless supplies of seawater and river water, and biodegradable organic matter.
"[...] the technology [is] still in its infancy, which [is] one of the reasons why it [is] not being exploited commercially. [...] It is a new technology and it could be used, but right now it is probably a little expensive. So the question is, can we bring down the cost?"
Zu einzelnen Aspekten mit denen Punkt 6 zu tun hat, gibt es diverse Links (Regionalwährungen [1], WIR Bank [2], Grundeinkommen [3], Bitcoin [4], Talent Experiment [5], INWO Schweiz [6], Vollgeld [7], Monetative [8], Currency-Theorie [9], etc) aber dort wo es meiner Meinung nach wirklich interessant wird, sind mir keine Arbeiten oder Projekte bekannt. Nämlich bei der dezentralen Geldschöpfung und dem Ausgleich der Inflation via Steuerungsabgaben. Ich verspreche mir davon aber eine wirklich meritokratische, freie Marktwirtschaft, in der das Geld zwar immer knapp bleibt und nach Leistung verlangt, aber ohne dabei Armut zu erzeugen und ohne irgend eine Umverteilung. Freier Raum für die unsichtbare Hand wie Adam Smith sie verstanden hat. Die dezentrale Geldschöpfung macht sie sozial, die Steuerungsabgaben macht sie ökologisch. Mittels einer offiziellen Sekundärwährung liesse sich ein solches Experiment langsam über die Zeitdauer von Jahrzehnten gefahrlos/vorsichtig einführen.
Schildbürgerlich nenne ich das aktuelle Fractional Reserve Banking System übrigens weil der damit verbundene Wachstumszwang zum Selbstzweck wird und das System so ineffizient macht, dass die nachteiligen Effekte grösser werden als die positiven. Die unsichtbare Hand liegt in Handschellen. Adam Smith rotiert wahrscheinlich in seinem Grab.
Logischerweise haben wir (die Eidgenossenschaft) ein extrem kleines Interesse am bestehenden System zu rütteln, weil wir erstens sehr stark davon profitieren und zweitens auch tief fallen könnten, wenn das System eines Tages wirklich kollabiert. Entsprechend wichtig wäre es für uns daher aber auch ein redundantes, sekundäres System zu entwickeln. Mit solchen Alternativen zu experimentieren ist auch das mindeste was wir tun können, aus Solidarität mit jenen in der Welt, die vom aktuellen System nicht profitieren.
1 - Mehr direkte und partizipative Demokratie. Aufwertung der Vernehmlassungsverfahren auf allen politischen Ebenen zu einem starken Instrument für die Partizipative Demokratie. Einführung der Möglichkeit von eidgenössischen Volksmotionen und Ausweitung der Referendumsfähigkeit von Vorlagen. Alle plenarischen und politischen Entscheidungsgrundlagen sind vor der gültigen Beschlussfassung mit der Möglichkeit rechtzeitiger Mitsprache im Internet zu publizieren.
2 - EU-kritisch, gegen den EU-Beitritt, gegen jede Zentralisierung und Konzentration unkontrollierter Macht. Kleine, autonome Regionen statt undemokratisches Grossprojekt EU. Das Subsidiaritätsprinzip kann nicht zentralistisch in Brüssel diktiert werden, sondern soll im Gegenteil so ausgelegt werden, dass Kompetenzen von den Gemeinden ausgehend delegiert werden. Delegierte Kompetenzen müssen rückholbar sein.
3 - Informationsfreiheit für Sender und Empfänger. Freies Internet, Förderung offener Standards und Verpflichtung zum Grundsatz der Netzneutralität. Netzbetreiber dürfen nicht Datenübertragungen von bestimmten Anbietern bevorzugen oder behindern. Das Öffentlichkeitsprinzip der Verwaltung muss so umgesetzt werden, dass nicht personenbezogenen Daten (zB. Studien) im Internet unabhängig von einer Anfrage und kostenfrei zur Verfügung stehen.
4 - Keine Softwarepatente. Softwarepatente führen einzig zu Patentkriegen zwischen Konzernen und hemmen die Innovation. Verlierer sind insbesondere Entwickler offener Software, die durch die entstehende Rechtsunsicherheit grossen finanziellen Risiken ausgesetzt werden. Software ist durch das Urheberrecht bereits genügend geschützt.
5 - Dezentrale Energieversorgung. Energie soll nachhaltig und dezentral erzeugt sowie effizient und dank Suffizienz sinnvoll genutzt werden. Gegen die Beteiligung an Kohlekraftwerken, gegen Gaskraftwerke, industrielle Windparks und Atomkraftwerke. Letztere sind nicht ökonomisch, nicht ökologisch und ein untragbares Risiko. Wir müssen uns auf die Energie beschränken, die wir auf verhältnismässige Art und Weise auch produzieren können.
6 - Fortschritt statt Wachstum. Reform des Geldsystems mittels Sekundärwährung. Regionale Parallelwährungen rechtlich absichern und fördern. Komplementäre Geldschöpfung, zum Beispiel in direkter Verbindung mit einem Grundeinkommen, und gezielte Steuerungsabgaben statt Steuern und Zinsen.
7 - Sicherheit durch Dissuasion mittels dezentral und subsidiär strukturiertem Milizdienst mit breiter Beteiligung der Bevölkerung, statt einer herkömmlichen Armee. Konzentration auf Widerstand und zivile Ordnungsaufgaben. Dezentralisierte Staatsgewalt direkt durch das Volk, mit dem konzeptionellen Grundsatz der allgemeinen Dienstpflicht, jedoch de facto freiwillig. Der zu erwartende Widerstand muss so dezentralisiert und stark sein, dass eine Dissuasion entsteht, welche es erlaubt, auf eine militärische Luftraumsicherung zu verzichten. Die zivile Luftraumsicherung kann anschliessend in internationaler Zusammenarbeit geregelt werden.
8 - Respektierung der Würde aller Tiere, unter der Maxime der Verbesserung der Qualität allen Lebens. Verbandsbeschwerderecht für Tierschutzorganisationen. Abschaffung der Tierversuche. Keine Ausweitung des Begriffs des «Wildschadens» auf von Raubtieren gejagtes Wild. Kein Import von Produkten mit Herstellungsmethoden die in der Schweiz nicht zulässig sind.
9 - Regionale Lebensmittel zu kostendeckenden Preisen statt Billigimporte. Förderung von Bio und Permakultur. Förderung von Produzenten-Konsumenten-Genossenschaften. Alle Verbraucherinnen und Verbraucher sollen wissen, von wo ihre Nahrungsmittel stammen und wie sie produziert werden. Eine vielfältige Produktion von pflanzlichen Lebensmitteln und deren möglichst lokaler Konsum sollte besonders stark gefördert werden. Weiterführung des Gentech-Moratoriums.
10 - Förderung von neuen Gemeindeformen über die primären politischen Gemeinden hinaus. Fairer Lastenausgleich zwischen den Gemeinden. Subsidiarität als Dienstleistung in der Form von angebotenen Kompetenzen und der Entwicklung einer Diversität von offenen Standards für die Gemeindepolitik und die subsidiäre Delegation von Kompetenzen an Regionen, Kanton und Bund.
Elasticity, touch and context have been concepts that were omnipresent in many ways during
Adobe MAX
this week for everybody from individual creative professionals and developers to large enterprise customers.
There are several areas where Adobe is making its tools and services more and more accessible for freelancers and small studios. For example the
Digital Publishing Suite
gets a Single Edition offering and the
Business Catalyst
service has been there for web designers and small web studios for a while.
One major announcement was the
Adobe Creative Cloud,
which will, for an affordable monthly membership fee, provide creative professionals with access to desktop and tablet applications, creative services, and the ability to collaborate with each other and share their best work. This will include ongoing access to the latest versions of all the desktop apps of the
Adobe Creative Suite,
plus
Muse,Edge,
the
Adobe Touch Apps,
and also services such as
TypeKit,
which Adobe just acquired.
Another new Adobe acquisition,
PhoneGap,
is
entering incubation
at the Apache Software Foundation, joining
Sling,Jackrabbit
and other open source projects that are increasingly benefiting from Adobe/Apache synergies and Adobe's embracement of an Open Development, Open Source, Open Standards philosophy. Other recent examples include Adobe's involvement with
jQuery,
development of
web standards
and
embracement of HTML5 and CSS3.
Check out David Nuescheler's "The Future Enterprise Developer" talk to see how this all extends to the enterprise:
Your email address:
The "Decentralize" Newsletter
Exchanging ideas for building a
decentralized fabric of society.
Making true democracy work on a larger
scale while decentralizing "everything",
benefiting from local diversity and
global synergies at the same time.
http://tinyletter.com/zumbrunn
