Examples

I could tell you about similar decentralized leadership systems that are already used quite successfully by organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, Valve, or even the country of Switzerland. Oh yeah, and then there’s the fact that decentralized systems such as bitcoin, wikipedia, the human brain and the internet have been wildly successful.

But this page is for examples of the system in action, until there is a real D-2.0 system up and running for people to use.

Example 1) Joe has a problem in his community and he needs community help to fix it

Joe has to drive home from work each day on the other side of a river. Unfortunately he has to drive 30 minutes out of his way to get back home. He has noticed that a few of his friends have been complaining about this to. One day he has the ambition to propose legislation addressing this problem. He calls a local contractor and finds cost estimated for such a project is $29,000.

It takes an intelligent leader to write legislation that people will pass. There’s no incentive for writing legislation other than the additional power a citizen has over his or her own environment. The Bridge Bill will become the canon legislation that citizens will vote to pass or not later. It must include a vote date and a feedback mechanism to determine the effects of the bill. Another citizen edits his D-2.0 legislation for spelling errors. Another citizen edits that post to show how much money it could cost if corners were cut. Another citizen who owns a construction company edits that legislation to work out a deal with his company. Another foreign construction company uses a stolen citizen ID to make their own version of legislation using them as the bridge contractors. All of these changes are saved, tracked, and tied to the identity of the one doing the editing. Each citizen’s version of the original post can only be edited by them. This is known to coders as “version control.” The canon version of the Bridge Bill can only be updated by Joe. He approves some of these edits, but not others, changing the canon legislation that people vote on. If enough people have a problem with the version of canon legislation the creator chooses for the city to vote on, they can vote against it, not vote, or even write their own legislation. The chosen canon legislation becomes locked 3 days before the voting day.

A citizen trying to evaluate whether or not he should vote yes or no on this decision has to take several things into account. First of all, the cost. Being a citizen implies that you pay taxes but even if you didn’t, Joe would be able to raise the money for this bridge with a Kickstarter-like system, built into the D-2.0 system. Then this citizen could go through the actual legislation by navigating a visual representation of the branching tree different versions of legislation would create. The most popular legislation will have the biggest node. Most popular doesn’t always mean good, but remember: a population funding a project should always get what it wants. No one really knows better than anyone else. The best we can do is find out what the majority wants. This is supposed to be the basis of democracy. Representative democracy, like we have in America, tries to solve the problem our forefathers had of not being able to collect, tally, and transport every single citizen’s vote to Washington. Direct digital democracy solves this problem via internet and the concept of open source. I’m not saying our forefathers were too stupid to come up with this, but the technology literally did not exist until a few years ago.

Let’s walk through an example legislation post:

Name: Regular Joe …..maybe even more personal data

Location: Carrboro, NC, USA …..or even gps coordinates

Community affected: City of Carrboro …..how far do the ramifications of the bill reach?

Money required: $30,000 …..this money could be raised via crowdfunding if merely 2,000 people paid $15, bigger projects will require the unification of states, which is why we would probably still have countries, states, counties, cities, etc.

Summary: At the intersection of East Main St and Poplar Blvd a bridge will be erected across the river, connecting East Main St with Ash Lane on the other side of the river. The contractor Wilke’s Construction will be paid $29,000 to build this bridge. The Environmental Protection Union will be paid $1,000 to approve the environmental impact. …..the driving force and direction the money flows is explained here, it’s as detailed as it needs to be in order to be perceived as fair. this cannot be edited 3 days before the voting day

Details: Blueprint.jpeg, receipt from contracting company, budget breakdown, environmental checklist …..anyone can add whatever details they want, unless they are caught spamming

Feedback: Record number of cars passing over the bridge. It is a good investment if 30,000 cars save $1 of gas by not having to cross at the nearest bridge. …..like the plan itself, this can be edited and if people don’t like what the creator chooses, they can make their own legislation that does alternative feedback

Voting day: December 21, 2014 …..this cannot be edited by anyone and is set in stone so as not to conflict with other legislation posts besides edited versions of the legislation

Top five tags: bridge (1000), traffic (987), infrastructure (454), East Main St (323), river (102) …..anyone can tag any legislation however they want

Legislation number: 000000000000001 …..for simplicity in retrieval

2) People generally think weed should be legal

Everyone knows pot is healthier than alcohol and tobacco, but most people don’t know the US federal government considers possessing it a more punishable offense than possessing meth. I could get into why this is, but fuck that, let’s talk about Jack. He woke up one day realizing he could be the change he wanted to see in this world. He makes a National Legislation post that simply states “All forms of the plant cannabis sativa are legal to have in public and private.” Every citizen in the society would vote “yes” or “no” to the legislation. Don’t forget, laws in any society are nothing more than abstract rules for reality that everyone either agrees upon or is bullied into by police and politicians. When a police officer makes an arrest, if the only action the arrested individual was participating in was the possession of cannabis, the judge would look at the single sentence in the recently passed legislation and conclude that the arrested individual did in fact not participate in an illegal act. The market can figure out how selling it works. Doctors can put labels on the product. People can look around and see if it is causing problems. Parents can protect their children from harm. There doesn’t need to be any rule concerning it’s regulation in much the same way there don’t need to be any rules for hamburgers, which children sometimes also consume and which do more harm than cannabis.

On voting day, 200 million American citizens vote to pass this Legislation post, more than half the US population. Stoners are notorious for being good at signing online petitions. The people who actually give a shit about the state of personal freedom in America happen to be good at this as well. This makes national news by being all anyone talks about on twitter and the federal government is going to either prevent people from having weed via violence (force military/police to fire on American citizens) or acquiesce (demonstrating submission to D-2.0). Of course, if a D-2.0 representative is in office, he will instantly acquiesce to any legislation society thinks should be passed.

3) Obama gets rid of guns

Democracy 2.0 can be used by anyone. Anyone can be a leader, anyone can be a decision maker. This naturally includes the people who are already political leaders and citizens, such as Obama. Daily Show correspondent Jon Stewart just asked Obama on live TV: “Why don’t you pass some legislation directly to the American people using this new program? This is the perfect chance to demonstrate your competence!” So Obama writes up legislation for new gun laws, effectively making firearms illegal for police and citizens. This legislation is simply copy-pasted from what he was trying to pass through congress earlier but the republicans prevented him. No one edits it, but everyone upvotes it to the top. Come voting day and the people vote to remove all guns by a small margin. Most people are happy but many of the southern states begin passing their own legislation to secede from the nation-state of America. Individual farming towns start passing legislation to secede from their states. This may be worse for the economy of some of these places, but if you love something, let it go. You should never have a system that forces people to interact with each other against their will or forces smaller states to submit to bigger states. That is ethically wrong and a sounds strangely like an abusive rapist boyfriend.

Now that D-2.0 is in place however, these cities and states no longer need anything from a higher government authority. These smaller political entities are landlocked within larger ones. The border between cities and nations vanishes; they are simply different sized states with overlapping laws. The largest state is simply the area of the region with the most universally accepted legislation. These states still trade. They quickly legislate in new police forces and militaries. But over time it’s realized that military is too costly to maintain and they are scrapped with additional legislation. Sometimes criminals enter the gun-free parts and wreak havoc. So the gun-free zones hire security forces with guns to police their areas and the military still have people to shoot at, only less, and for better reason.

Name: Barack Obama
Location: Washington DC, USA
Community affected: Nation of United States of America
Money required: $0
Summary: Guns will be illegal for civilians and police but not military. Violent gun-wielding criminals will be executed by the military.
Details: Gundeathgraph.jpeg, othercountrygunviolence.jpeg, deadchildren.mkv, statistics
Feedback: Measure the number of total gun deaths from now to a year from now. Compare with previous years.
Voting day: January 24, 2015
Top five tags: guns (3523242), military (2324445), fuck no (1000002), children (999999), kids (999923)
Legislation number: 000000343037601

4) Here’s an example of legislation that has already been passed through congress in real life, converted into a form digestible for the D-2.0 system. Imagine this has been done with all legislation passed up to this point.

Name: Chris Van Holen
Location: Annapolis, Maryland, USA
Community affected: Nation of United States of America
Money required: None …..police may be necessary to enforce law however
Summary: To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and to redefine the term “independent expenditure” as an expenditure by a person that, when taken as a whole, expressly advocates the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate, or is the functional equivalent of express advocacy because it can be interpreted by a reasonable person only as advocating the election or defeat of a candidate, taking into account whether the communication involved mentions a candidacy, a political party, or a challenger to a candidate, or takes a position on a candidates, qualifications, or fitness for office.
Expands the period during which certain communications are treated as electioneering communications.
Prescribes (1) disclosure requirements for corporations, labor organizations, and certain other entities; and (2) disclaimer requirements for campaign-related disbursements and for certain communications.
Requires any communication transmitted through radio or television to include an individual or organizational disclosure statement, together with: (1) the Top Two Funders List of the persons providing the largest and second largest aggregate payments of $10,000 or more for a radio communication, and (2) the Top Five Funders List of the five persons providing the largest aggregate payments of $10,000 or more for a television communication.
Repeals the prohibition against political contributions by individuals age 17 or younger.
Requires a covered organization which submits regular, periodic reports to its shareholders, members, or donors on its finances or activities to include in each report, in a clear and conspicuous manner, the information included in the statements it has filed about campaign-related disbursements the organization has made during the period covered by the report.
Amends the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 to require semiannual reports on certain election campaign contributions filed with the Secretary of the Senate or the Clerk of the House of Representatives by registered lobbyists (or persons or organizations required to register as lobbyists) to contain: (1) the amount of any independent expenditure of $1,000 or more made by each such person or organization, along with the name of each candidate being supported or opposed and the amount spent supporting or opposing that candidate; and (2) the amount of any electioneering communication of $1,000 or more made by such person or organization, along with the name of the candidate referred to in the communication and whether the communication involved was in support of or in opposition to the candidate.
Details: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.148: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d113:1:./temp/~bssCsxN:@@@P
Feedback: Conduct a survey evaluating the general satisfaction with election media fairness.
Voting Date: July 1st, 2013
Top five tags: Federal Election Campaign (1025), political campaign (989), campaign reform (846), Lobbying Disclosure Act (525), political contribution reform (236)
Legislation number: 000000030000343