A function to allow multilateral, federal, multi-layered and convoluted networking relationships between groups and subgroups

@williamasiata where are you based? My thoughts are not ordered enough to fit into text yet, but I'd love to have a chat with you about all this stuff :)

Hi @richarddbartlett I'm based in Auckland :)
sounds great, bit busy over next couple weeks, but time frees up a bit after that, let me know what suits

Choice chatting with you today @williamasiata - I said I would share some links so I figured it would be good to do so in public.

The first thing you will be interested to check out is Binding Chaos, a short book by Heather Marsh where she lays out a blueprint for a totally new system of global governance. Not necessarily right, but definitely interesting!

And I think any discussion of multilateral/federated/networked large scale intergroup democracy should be grounded in the reality of groups working this stuff out right now. You mentioned the Bahá'í people (links please :), and I said I would send through some links about the democratic experiment in Rojava:

• this 30min talk from Dilar Dirik was what first got me interested in the Kurdish situation.
• Some good followup: David Graeber's report from his recent trip - (45m video);
• and Carne Ross's report - (brief article);
• and basically everything else written by Dilar Dirik.

I would be keen to hear from anyone else that has articles, videos, books etc to share about on-the-ground experiments in these alternate forms of large-scale democratic organising.

Here is one of the many elements that feature in Bahá'í democracy - a form of approval based voting.
http://bahaiteachings.org/vote-for-a-person-not-a-party
@gregorycassel

Erm hey some more stuff related to Baha'i that might be worth reading
- Governance discourse & ISGP reflections on governance
- This article provides some insight into the dynamics of community organisation and structure.
- The wiki page is a bit dry but it also provides more specifics.

There are local annual general meetings, and cluster, national & international conventions where elections take place. There are also monthly neighbourhood/sector/local community meetings (19 day feast) that take place, as well as quarterly "reflection cycle" meetings used to reflect on & plan community development activity. These are all when the people gather to consult on affairs. I guess Loomio could parallel/augment/enhance these functions in some ways - and the Loomio meeting need never end.
Geographically, I guess Baha'i community is typically zoned as follows with appropriate variations in terminology and zoning in various parts of the world:
Neighbourhood (a suburb/village) ⊂ Sector (e.g. collection of suburbs) ⊂ Local (e.g. township, city, district, or village) ⊂ Cluster (several provinces/districts/towns "clustered") ⊂ Regional (greater collection of provinces/districts) ⊂ National ⊂ Continental ⊂ International/Global
In particular, the (federal) collection of subsets at each level that are formally legislated to democratically contribute to choosing the administration of each greater set are as follows:
Cluster ⊂ National ⊂ International

Just speculating, some Baha'i localities might find it easy, useful or even very interesting to e-augment some of their processes via internet based services, especially if community connectivity is quite accessible. But I hazard a guess that most Baha'i localities in the world are not so priviledged, yet...
Something like cobudget sounds really useful to enhance processes as well, as members often earmark funds towards particular inhouse/networked causes/services. However contributions are always censured/anonymous, so if cobudget had such a feature option, that would be really useful. Funding levels could be examined by members live at any time, not just the treasurer's report at each meeting.

Hope I didn't write too much :)

Thanks for sharing @williamasiata . I admire Baha'i significantly; one of my few favorite thinkers (Guy Murchie) was Baha'i. With that said, I think that the potential future domain of such representative politics (trust-based and/or competence based) is rather limited. I don't think that delegated authority is the mainstream of the future. However, there's surely a role for it. I personally think that that role may eventually be filled more by rotation and sortition (drawing of lots) of accepted candidates than by popularity contests of any sort. However-however (lol), I think that this suggested Baha'i method does seem to implicitly put the indication of preferred people within the context of specific roles/functions, as opposed to a preference for one human being over another on the level of the entire network. Does that make sense? (I'm alluding to another thread where I discussed the concept of personal approval ratings; it seems relevant to me here.)

Yes I agree, approval ratings should be used in relation to a specific role. Probably would actually be pretty neat if that were an alternate form of poll/proposal that users could set up among themselves in their group anytime.

BTW I love this OP and it resonates a great deal with my organizational goals. I too perceive a great variety of what I would call internetworking possibilities at levels such as supergroup, parent group, subgroup. I've been working lots on the sometimes-subtle differences I perceive between networks and projects. (Projects, in this sense, including all goal-oriented structures.)

Please allow me to chime in for a second.

As we are also talking about software development here, I am worried the resulting data model will just be a mess. Especially when thinking Loomio within its Open Apps Ecosystem, a focal point is interoperability. Unfortunately even OWL wouldn't be able to model this system, while in the same time it supports self-referentiality.

In a way the same criticism as to @ahdinosaur's Holocracy article applies here:

Don't confuse the topology of the graph with the graph itself, meaning that any of the super- and sub-structures anticipated above may just be special cases of a flat namespace which mutually shares links. Then the upper hierarchisation attempts are just special cases of convoluted, mutual linking of entities.

Nevertheless, one could of course offer strategies to restrict and constrain link relations depending on roles and the likes. Just to get around the mess which the invention of tags meant for vocabularies ;)

I'm not sure what all you may mean above @jonrichter but I'll riff on what I'm personally perceiving. 'Flatspace' (platform-wide, or universal) semantic metadata and user/group permissions can and IMO should be handled separately. Most hierarchical group membership structures are artificially and (ultimately) irrationally contrived, but there are cases, for instance, where a subgroup exists purely to fulfill a function or task which is subservient to a specific parent group task. (In other words, I perceive a genuine part/whole or task/ subtask relation.) Many other times, I think, tasks which a group has defined as subtasks actually hold many other potential stakeholders, and ideally ought to be internetworked.

Thanks for those links @richarddbartlett . It seems like the Kurds have managed to realise an expression of grassroots inclusive democracy / democratic confederalism / libertarian municipalism / communalism (not sure what the precise distinctions are yet) in living action. I don't want to imply any major assumptions, and there are distinct differences, but I do actually think it is quite similar to the ideals of Baha'i 'religious' organisation in a variety of ways (I also feel Baha'i lies somewhere in the libertarian socialist spectrum), except that the Kurds have established their ideals with intensification mainly limited to their own localised geographic areas as of yet; whereas Baha'i is spread across the world, living among all societies, and have yet to reach critical mass in local vicinities where such visible intensity and transformation in local community building endeavours can occur verging on a dual power situation, save a few emerging communities in various locations around the world.
Funnily enough, Baha'u'llah, prophet founder of the Baha'i Faith also spent a couple years living a hermetic lifestyle among the Kurds in the Kurdish mountains during his life traversing the middle eastern lands in the 1800s.

In about the last decade or so the global Baha'i community has been undergoing a gradual paradigmatic change in its approach to community development, also based on learnings captured from experience around the world; it could be considered to have developed a radical aspect by some, and among the more conservative/traditional sorts it has also come across as a culture shock at times.

A little bit more about the actual current grassroot activity that is going on at the moment within the Baha'i community:
Frontiers of learning video
Latest Reflections on Growth, newsletter #34 - Tanna, Vanuatu special edition
Spaces of consultation
Nineteen day feast

Thanks for the thoughts and the links William :) I will put them on my list!