Standards Setting Organization
Description
The Auravana Project:
"Standard setting organizations are society’s means of sharing discoveries and integrating work for the purpose of developing, coordinating, revising, producing, and otherwise operating, socio-technical standards, and therein, specifications that are intended to address the needs of a group of affected adopters. And, in the case of this project, those affected are a global population humans and the planetary ecology. The Auravana Project exists to develop, produce, and distribute the open source societal specification standard for a global community-type society. Standards setting organizations are staffed with people that develop, publish, and coordinate standards. The Auravana standards setting organization [consortium] is comprised of groups of contributing individuals that are responsible for the development (i.e., setting) of standards through collaboration and coordination processes. The standards development activities in this organization are based on systems science, equitable access, and transparency.
At the standards level, Auravana Project [Consortium] is a global organization of professional working group members who are actively contributing and organized based on articles (which, are themselves composed into standards). In other words, the organization consists of people who are contributing to the information system for community by working on its information standard. Within Project Auravana there is a full-time project coordination working group structure dedicated to the informational tasks of developing the societal standard. Projects, coordinators, and working groups have a scope that defines the boundaries by which decisions may be taken. Scopes are set by the working groups in the form of formalized standards, which inform of changes to informational and spatial flows through human society. In this way, Project Auravana’s responsibilities include the distribution of a community-type societal information system [standard], developed through working groups.
In the working group, contributors work on the actual technical documents. The working group members work on each clause of a standard and make the document up to date and usable. To generate a new iteration of society, it is essential to know ‘how’ society currently operates. Given what is known, a socio-technical society of sufficient population size operates based upon standards set by organizations (of people and machines). There is a standardized process to the development and life-cycle of standards. Therein, scopes (that which boundaries projects at a coordinated information-level) can be broken down into subs-scopes and assigned to sub-coordinators. Each standards document is sub-composed of a set of articles that represents the discovery, understanding, and operation of society. Each article is a primary working group deliverable, with sub-working groups possibly present. In other words, the specification standards are a set of articles developed by working groups (et al.) that are used as formal standards for the specified understanding, construction, and operation of society by InterSystem Teams and the population at large.
To be of global applicability a societal standard must maintain the following characteristics:
- Scalable – increasingly usable and applicable to larger population sizes without violence and incidental artifacts.
- Open/accessible – trade/money is not required to contribute or use.
- Duplicable – is sufficiently accessible that it can be duplicated by others easily.
A societal specification standard details (i.e., is) the [unified] information system for an intentionally designed society. Every type of society is first and foremost an information system before it is anything else. In order to safely bring into existence the type of society we envision, the information system must be completed. A societal specification standard is a [published] document that a population uses to understand and engineer society; wherein, its design is continuously re-engineered as better/more information becomes available. Each new standard (or update to a standard) could be viewed as a proposal for the next iteration of society.
The term ‘societal specification standard’ refers to an information/documentation set with the following properties:
- Societal: Applicable at the societal/global level; it encompasses all of the axiomatic systems of society.
- Specification: Specifies the design and selection of the system. Specifications ensure actions are traceable. A specification is single source document that gives constructors and operators guidance during development and construction activities.
- Standard: Standardizes technical knowledge and procedures for doing and delivering the system. Standards ensure desired results are achieved. A specification is a document that gives operators operation activities. A standard describes the best way of doing something, given what is (1) known and (2) has been integrated by those with competence.
At the level of contribution to the Societal Specification Standard (SSS), the Project is composed of open source working groups that develop and publish the societal standard for a global community-type society. These working groups create documents that provide requirements, specifications, and reasoning that can be used consistently at the societal level for mutual human fulfillment. The project exists to open source and free-share the standard for global societal co-operation.
At a high-level, any given societal [project] standard may be divided into its principal system publications, which represent the axiomatic conceptual foundation of a socio-technical society:
- A System Overview of the society.
- A description standard.
- A Project Plan (Project System) for the society.
- A coordination standard.
- A Social System of the society
- A core societal standard.
- A Decision System of the society.
- A core societal standard.
- A Material System of the society
- A core societal standard.
- A Lifestyle System of the society.
- A core societal standard.
Note: Each of these standards is composed of multiple articles. Each article is the deliverable of one or more working groups. Models (figures), drawings, and simulations are associated with articles in each standard.
These systems (standards) are the fundamental basis of any society. Herein, an economic system is contained within the decision system and concerns decisions about resources. Note, it is not true to state that the fundamental basis for any society is any of its sub-systems individually (e.g., its social system individually, its economic system individually, etc.). Every society is composed of these fundamental systems, which may be understood and engineered by individuals therein, or not. In community, the societal [system] standard for a community-type society is a working socio-technical deliverable product. This standardized deliverable is sub-divided by the primary information sub-systems of any given society, into a set of standards’ articles (including, figures, tables, and simulations) representative of, and usable by, society to understand, construct, and operate. To understand, construct and operate society coherently, all of these systems must be acknowledge and accounted for (preferably, in a unified manner).
Question: Why explicate the aura (standard), why unify the aura (standard), and why contribute to the aura (standard)? Because, within the aura (standard) exists humanity’s potential for optimizing human survival and individual human flourishing. It is a population’s mutually unified and cohesive response to societal development, through standardization, that enables the fulfillment of all individuals’ potential (i.e., agency access). When we begin unifying all information, the understanding that we could all live better lives through co-operation at the societal scale becomes most clear."