Distributed Governance

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= DGov is here interpreted as 'governance by code, not by humans'.


Description

SecondRenaissance.net:

"Distributed governance is a method of forming consensus and legitimating decisions without the need for a central actor or hierarchy.

In traditional hierarchical organizations, there is always some level of human authority required to manage and protect organizational processes. For example, democratic groups need to trust that their secretaries will count the votes properly and democratic states need police to remove individuals who break the social contract. When such responsibilities sit with people, trust is necessarily required. And humans are fallible.

DGov offers a solution by allowing these decision-making processes to be governed by code, not humans.

If we see companies fundamentally as complex networks of contracts, then they are able to be stored on a blockchain. The earliest example of this is The DAO, an online venture capital fund. The DAO sought to allocate funds to projects in the fairest way possible, without funds getting misdirected to personal connections. 18,000 stakeholders held voting rights to allocate funds to certain projects. While The DAO did suffer a high-profile hack, the platform nonetheless proved the possibility of running a truly stateless, non-physical organization that controlled a very large amount of money without centralized human leaders.

Proponents of distributed governance argue that this method of governance supports faster learning and helps an organization to evolve in the long run. It is also argued it is a more efficient way of governance: usually, a decision needs to pass many levels of the hierarchy, meanwhile the opportunity window can be lost or the cost of that decision can exceed its value. In addition, those impacted by the decision in question tend to have the best grasp on the issue. It is therefore more suitable that these individuals be involved in the decision-making process, as opposed to actors higher up in the organization’s hierarchy and therefore more distanced from the issue at hand. The absence of human error is also a popular argument; code is not susceptible to bribery or persuasion."

(https://wiki.secondrenaissance.net/wiki/Alternative_governance)


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