# A Democratic System I had been sitting on this document for a while, but was inspired by Audrey Tang and Glen Weyl's book [Plurality](https://www.plurality.net/) to post it to my blog. The link to [Restate goes to an unfinished hackmd doc](https://hackmd.io/ZXVnKh9HQrCChqlEtlBTRQ), but I think it's worth sharing as my goal for a forkable presentation of rights that can be used in contracts with people and governments. Any person or government can make their own presentations and choose to accept all or part of another person's. To me, empowerment means I can enumerate my own rights and start using them, and I want that power to be available to anyone. The link to [Aura goes to the gitbook for Aura](https://brightid.gitbook.io/aura). ## Problems National governments are poor examples of including people in democratic processes. Most citizens don't choose to be governed. They have few opportunities to influence policy. Local governments don't fare much better, being modeled after national governments. ## Principles A government should be forkable, meaning that if the governed think it could be improved, they should be able to launch their own version with the desired changes and be governed by the fork. People should be able to create their own presentations of rights to interact with other governments. See, for example, [Restate](https://hackmd.io/ZXVnKh9HQrCChqlEtlBTRQ). Governments should use direct democratic systems rather than elected representatives. ## Supra-governmental There are two higher level systems that must exist for governments to coexist and cooperate. * Governments should have access to courts that can resolve disputes between their constituents and those of other governments. * Governments should have a common way to decide the use of scarce resources. Once these are in place, forkable governments with direct democratic systems are possible. I can easily imagine an inter-governmental court system--the U.S. system of managing disputes between parties of different states comes to mind, but I think a system to decide the usage of scarce resource needs elaboration, since there are few examples. ### Scarce resources One way governments harm humanity is by legitimizing a system of monopolistic ownership of scarce resources. There is no inherent problem when people, corporations, and governments buy, sell, and transfer services and plentiful goods, but when dealing with a scarce resource, one party can hoard the resource--hoping for a better price--which prevents it from being put to its best use. The hoarder is rewarded for their detrimental behavior. Additionally, a bad actor or government can hold onto a scarce resource, making it difficult to fork or recover without hostility. Dealing with this issue is above the purview of a forkable government. When people disagree about how a scarce resource should be used, this can devolve into physical hostility, where might makes right. To prevent this, there must at the highest level be a way to compensate all of humanity for the use of a scarce resource. This is useful to assuage the loser in a dispute--at least they know that the winner must pay to use the resource. The winner doesn't pay the loser, because this might encourage spurious disputes; instead the winner pays humanity in the form of a dividend to every person. The method of paying everyone for the use of a scarce resource must be broadly accepted; [Aura](https://brightid.gitbook.io/aura) can identify unique humans, and is itself a forkable system. [Recommon](https://hackmd.io/1cvFqPjCTZakA5mkj1fRqA) is a use-case of Updraft that crowdsources the following functions: * identifying scarce resources * defining rules for their use * selecting stewards It generates crowdfunded rent that goes to a faucet from which everyone can collect dividends. ## Components for democratic systems A forkable government can use the same components needed by the higher-level framework used to govern scarce resources. Numerical answers are provided by [Median Vote](https://gist.github.com/adamstallard/3edda48e1424fee93389f0a339455f9b). Crowdsourced discovery of choices is provided by [Updraft](https://www.updraft.fund/). Expert evaluation is provided by [Aura](https://brightid.gitbook.io/aura). An essential part of a democratic system is that the entire system can be forked or rebuilt--possibly with different components--if some of its participants are unhappy with it. ### Expert evaluation with Aura Aura is a resilient framework for experts to identify each other and make evaluations in various domains. Like a good governmental system, Aura teams and leagues can be forked if humanity deems them to be dysfunctional. Anyone can join or start an Aura team or league. The success of a team depends on its adoption in a league and the success of a league depends on its adoption by humanity. As we've seen, an important domain of Aura is establishing who is a unique human for participation in democracy. Other government domains could evaluate the efficacy of procedures, rate job performances, and evaluate adherence to regulations.