[WikiEN-l] Anthere - "take decisions yourselves" - yes please!

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 08:14 AM 1/12/2008, Anthony wrote:
>Wikipedia has needed a constitution for a long time now.  Top-down or
>bottom-up, that's the only way to stop "this" from happening again.
>The board seems to have rejected the top-down approach, as has the arb
>com.  But then, the community seems to have rejected the bottom-up
>one.

There are two classic approaches to the structural problem: Anthony 
has named them top-down and bottom-up. Nearly all coherent 
organizations of any significant size are bottom-down, such that most 
of us think "organization" means top-down, and we know what problems 
top-down organizations have, so we reject "organization" entirely. Or 
others, quite correctly as well, see organization as necessary, but, 
again, from long habit, think it must come top-down, hence the call 
for "leadership."

This problem was actually solved over sixty years ago; a peer 
association was created that was, in its functions, bottom-up. There 
is no top-down organization, formally, though outsiders might think 
there is, out of the habit I mention above. The organization is 
Alcoholics Anonymous, and it was structured by Bill Wilson -- as the 
"leader" -- to avoid what had made prior attempts at temperance 
organizations fail. AA functions at the local meeting and personal 
level, the national organization has no control over local 
organizations ("intergroups"), and intergroup has no control over 
individual meetings, and individual meetings may have "leaders," but 
the AA Tradition is "Our leaders are but trusted servants, they do 
not govern." Also from the Traditions: "For our group purpose there 
is but one ultimate authority-a loving God as He may express Himself 
in our group conscience. " While many will immediately object to the 
"religious" aspect of this, consider when it was written and the 
context, it's actually irrelevant: notice how the AA group knows what 
"God" wants: its group conscience. Not some scripture, not some 
dogma, not what the leaders say. In AA, group conscience means 
consensus. Meetings will go a long way out of their way to satisfy 
*every* member with a decision. In the end, of course, they *might* 
decide to simply vote, but it is considered undesirable, damaging to 
group unity, only to be done when necessary.

At the national level, there is a General Service Conference 
consisting of delegates elected by -- if they follow Wilson's advice 
-- supermajority (2/3) from regions. If no supermajority can be 
obtained after repeated attempts, the delegate is chosen by lot from 
among the top two. The thinking is that this increases diversity. 
This, of course, is a very simple system, what Wilson thought of more 
than sixty years ago -- and I may be ascribing to Wilson what was 
actually the product of wide discussion in the fellowship --, and 
there are other possible ways to create a democratic and 
representative national structure. But the national structure doesn't 
control the local *at all*. Rather, it advises the nonprofit 
corporation, AA World Services, Inc., the most significant function 
of which is to publish literature and to handle a few other national 
and international coordinating functions. AA World Services, Inc., is 
a traditional nonprofit, with a self-elected board, legally. However, 
the Conference essentially nominates candidates for the board, and 
the board traditionally accepts them. What has been set up is a legal 
structure where the corporation is legally responsible for its own 
actions, and is free to follow its own opinion, but it has strong 
motivation to follow Conference recommendations.

Why? Well, there is another Tradition: AA "organizations," from 
meetings on up, don't accumulate assets beyond what is called a 
"prudent reserve," which is basically enough to shut down gracefully 
if the flow of donations stop. These service organizations within AA 
are continuously dependent upon the ongoing support of their members, 
and their members *do* have options. Don't like a meeting? Start 
another, and starting another meeting is trivial. AA grew in this 
way, actually. It's part of why it rapidly became almost the only 
show in town, competition to AA is tiny; and the strongest reason is 
that there is practically no reason for it. Tradition 3: "Our 
membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we 
may refuse none who wish to recover. Nor ought A.A. membership ever 
depend upon money or conformity. Any two or three alcoholics gathered 
together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. Group, provided 
that, as a group, they have no other affiliation." (Other affiliation 
means some defining characteristic that would exclude some 
alcoholics. Exceptions have been made, such as women's meetings, but 
even those have been hotly debated.) What this means that, in theory 
at least, there is no top-down dogma imposed on meetings. In 
practice, I'm sure, AA members are human and there may be places 
where some meeting which was promoting "controlled drinking" might 
have trouble getting listed. But I don't know what actually happens 
if that is tried.

My point is that AA is *highly* structured, but the structure is 
bottom-up. And AA has been phenomenally successful. I'm not an 
alcoholic, but study of AA led me to develop the concept of "Free 
Association," which is a peer association that essentially follows 
the AA traditions, organized for any purpose. There are actually 
countless such, for the Free Association concepts are pretty much the 
default for small peer associations. It's only when they grow beyond 
a certain point, or when they formally organize, that they become 
something different. So the problem reduces to the well-known problem 
of scale in democracy.

Attempts to maintain direct democracy as an organization grows run 
into the well-known problem on Wikipedia. The problem is not voting, 
in itself. The problem is deliberation. If everyone can participate 
in deliberation, and without structure to organize deliberation, the 
traffic becomes overwhelming as the organizational size grows. This 
discourages participation, and, for a time, there is some homeostasis 
due to participation bias. Only those who care participate; however, 
this, then warps the deliberation away from the general community. 
Town Meeting governments often make decisions in Town Meeting that 
are then, when they must be by law submitted for ratification by the 
electorate, rejected. Somehow the direct democracy of Town Meeting 
did not actually represent the town. It's participation bias, plus, 
as well, poor communication between Town Meeting and the general citizenry.

I have a solution. I invented it something like twenty years ago, but 
did not publish it. However, it's been independently invented in 
various places around the world, I've encountered at least five 
independent inventions. On Wikipedia, it's called [[Liquid 
democracy]], but liquid democracy  was a narrow concept dealing with 
elections and choice, whereas my own concept, delegable proxy -- 
which is structurally the same thing, at least in some version -- has 
been replicated by others, and there are a few small organizations 
using or planning to use it. In a Free Association context, DP would 
not make binding decision, it is an *advisory* network, and the 
advice flows in both directions, so the proxy network that DP creates 
essentially becomes a full "nervous system" for the organization, 
with afferent and efferent "nerves," and every "synapse" being an 
intelligent filter for information traffic. I'm not going to detail 
how it would specifically apply to Wikipedia, but I can see fairly 
clearly how it could solve the problem of participation bias, how it 
would create ad-hoc assemblies that directly or indirectly represent 
everyone, yet which can deliberate issues and make recommendations 
and measure consensus through the active participation of a 
relatively small group.

Contrary to what one might think at first, this creates no 
bureaucracy. It requires no action on the part of WikiMedia 
Foundation. It requires no general consensus. It would be, in fact 
users doing what they already have the right to do: communicate with 
each other, choosing whom they communicate with.

As there is little or no cost associated with it, and it is, in fact, 
designed to make communication efficient, and participation is fully 
voluntary, what's the problem? What is stopping this from happening? 
Two things. One is inertia. Few see the benefit, few will follow the 
analysis of the problem sufficiently to understand what this would do 
and why it would be desirable. Another aspect of inertia is a general 
despair over there being any solution at all to the problem of scale. 
The other obstacle is that if the proxy networds actually start to 
form, they will destabilize the existing power structure -- or, more 
accurately, those with excess power in that structure will fear this 
-- and action will be taken to stop it. I was shocked to discover 
how, on Wikipedia, voluntary associations of Wikipedia members that 
did not require anyone else to do anything, that were aimed at 
helping people with Wikipedia process, were deleted and salted. (I'm 
talking about Esperanza and the arbitration advocates, whatever they 
were called.) There was no significant allegation in the deletion 
reviews that they were harming anyone. Indeed, the deletion arguments 
were that they were inefficient; surely that would be a matter for 
the members, since all the cost of the inefficiency was born 
voluntarily by the members, and if no members carried it, nobody else 
was harmed. The lesson I took from this: if there are to be developed 
proxy structures for Wikipedia members, they must be independent of 
Wikipedia, not vulnerable to interdiction by deletion of the 
organizing mechanism. And, again, this would be taking an example 
from the AA experience. Members communicate directly with each other, 
they do not need any support or structure or permission from AA World 
Services, Inc., from Intergroup, from their local meeting. All those 
simply facilitated their meeting and do not control, in any way, the 
direct communication.

If anyone is interested in pursuing this topic, write to me directly, 
and I will organize a mailing list to help develop it. As far as 
possible general applications -- some of you who have come this far 
might easily recognize that Wikipedia would be a relatively minor 
application compared to some other possibilities -- again, I welcome 
communication. I'm not about to exhaust myself trying to "get" the 
Wikipedia community to adopt these concepts, it will or it won't, and 
if nobody is interested -- hey, the motion failed for lack of a 
second. I just think Wikipedia will be a *lot* more successful, in 
the long run, if some of us look at this, and it only takes a few. 
The problem of scale will get worse, unless the community develops a 
coherent means of addressing it, or, alternatively, the Foundation 
steps in and exerts control. Watch.

Wikipedia Anonymous First Step: We admitted we were powerless over 
Wikipedia. :-)

(This means individually, *not* collectively.)