Design Principles for Institutions Based on Social Freedom

Principles

Principles for transforming institutions, proposed by Jordan Hall:

• "The Principle of Choice. Designs should be oriented towards increasing the capacity for choice and building on top of that increasing capacity.

• The Principle of Wholeness. Designs should be mindful of creating and working with well integrated wholes.

• The Principle of Relationship. Designs should endeavor to place responsibility on real human relationships and endeavor to support the construction of strong, trusted relationships and infrastructure around relationships.

• Principle of Development. Designs should strive to build capacity from the ground up, rather than over-ride failures at the ground level with top-down capacity. Make people more capable of being responsible, rather than taking their responsibility away. Build structures at the human scale that can carry more responsibility, etc.

• The Principle of Subsidiarity. Designs should push as much responsibility and authority at the most immediate level that is consistent with their resolution.

• Principle of Unbundling. Designs should take care that no choice should be bound to any other choice, unless this binding is strictly required by the nature of the choice itself.

• Principle of Rights and Responsibilities. Designs should make rights symmetric with responsibilities. (e.g., the right to free speech should be replaced by the the right and responsibility of meaningful communication; the right to private property should be replaced with the right and responsibility of stewardship of property).

• The Principle of Fiduciary Responsibility. Designs should ensure that whenever a relationship is highly asymmetric (e.g. when AI is on one side of a relationship and not the other) that the relationship be returned to symmetry by establishing a fiduciary responsibility on the part of the stronger party.

• The Principle of Network Optimization for Collective Intelligence. Designs should strive to always promote the evolution of the human social network towards increasing collective intelligence. For example:
  • All nodes (people, families, communities, etc.) should be resourced so as to provide minimum viable signal.
  • Each node should be able to refuse an offered transaction without fear of privation.
  • The generator functions of network topology should balance efficiency and resilience."

(https://medium.com/deep-code/defund-and-redesign-everything-d1b9d674a45d)