Self-Organized Network Governance

Discussion

David Bollier:

"If networked technologies could enable individuals to negotiate their own social contract(s) and meet their needs more directly and responsively, it would enable the emergence of new sorts of effective, quasi-autonomous governance and self-provisioning. And it could achieve these goals without necessarily or directly requiring government. Online communities working in well-designed software environments could act more rapidly, with highly specific knowledge and with greater social legitimacy than conventional government institutions. Users, acting individually and in groups, could use their own secure digital identities to manage their own personal information.

...

Ostrom identified key principles by which self-organized groups can manage common-pool resources in fair, sustainable ways. If data were to be regarded as a common-pool resource, Ostrom’s research shows how it would be possible for online groups to devise their own data commons to manage their personal data in their own interests.

Of course, “law” emerging from self-organized digital institutions would have a very different character than the kinds of law emanating from Congress and the Supreme Court (just as blogging is a different from journalism and Wikipedia is different from Encyclopedia Britannica). “Digital law” would be algorithmic in the sense that machine-learning would help formulate and administer the law and enforce compliance. It would enable users to devise new types of legal contracts that are computationally expressible and executable, as well as evolvable and auditable. Such an innovation would make institutional corruption and insider collusion far easier to detect and eliminate. Arcane systems of law – once based on oral traditions and printed texts – could make the great leap to computable code, providing powerful new platforms for governance. Law that is dynamic, evolvable and outcome-oriented would make the art of governance subject to the iterative innovations of Moore’s Law. Designs could be experimentally tested, evaluated by actual outcomes, and made into better iterations." (http://bollier.org/blog/next-great-internet-disruption-authority-and-governance)

Example

under construction: Open Mustard Seed

More Information

• Paper: Rise of Digital Common Law