Internet democracy

I support your think about "Or has the development of Interenet technology rendered previous methods of democratic organization and control obsolete".  I wouldn't say all of the previous methods of democratic organization and control obsolete, but I would say the evolution of open source principles has found some real implication for what it means to be "open". I think that "open" in the internet age has some unexpected implications.  An "open" information and management system requires a robust distributed (aka crowdsourced) organizational function to prevent "open" information from being buried and lost which makes it effectively innaccessible. Let me explain why. . .first some boring information about my experience with the subject. . . this is going to be a bit long, but hopefully interesting and is necessary to establish my credibility with you by demonstrating my understanding of your needs and the difficulties you experiece. While volunteering at code for american and code for sanfrancisco on various websites and public good IT projects I had some experience with radically open internet transparancy.  As part of the charter for civic volunteering at Code for America we get free food and wi-fi and a comfortable place to work and electricity to plug in our laptops.  One of the primary requirements is that ALL work must be open to the public and not for profit.  In practice this means we use github for code, all code must be open source, and all docuements such as planning and meeting minutes must be created using google docs with permissions set to be open to the public.  In practic this was free association with anyone potentially able to add comments to our google master docs or meeting minutes or roadmap for production of an app etc.  The arrangment seemed in practice more socialistic in the user experience than this website even, in some ways, because in this website I'm not a mod and I can't edit the moderator comments.  But in our team there was no moderator and anyone who wanted to be moderator could simply start acting as a moderator.  So it was essentially more leaderless and classless than this website which has a class of people called moderators with special priviledges built into the website infrastructure.  Our teams initial expectation was that control would be impossible since anyone could edit our organizational structure doc.  Literally, anyone in the world with the URL could go into our organizational doc and place themselves as "leader" of the team. I can give you the url if you want right now and you can make yourself project leader in the google doc.  there was a lot of resistance to the idea when we went from the "provionally allowed work" category to "officially sanctioned project category".  The code for san francisco chapter of code for america allows people just come in and eat off for any reason and they don't even have to be working on a project although their encouraged to join with others and work on something.  So anyone could walk in off the street and grab a glass of free beer from the tap and a dinner plate and just sit there working on some private project according to the rules as long as their work on the project was open to the public, not favorable or biased towards any political organization, and they weren't distruptive ot others. But, by filling out a project brief form describing the users of the our project, the goal of the project,  and a few other details any team could get branded an officially sanctioned project and recieve extra resources such as access to additional software valued at a subscription price of $59/month or access to the community user testing resources which was a way to find users who would volunteer to test our software and verify it met the needs of real users as well as not being buggy.  One of the advantages of real user testing is that it helps to quickly discover when the designed goals of the website or project were not representative of the actuall needs or goals of the users and too many projects get too many resources dedicated to them based on one persons idea of what the people (users, we call them) want from it.  So user testing isn't initialy about testing code it's about testing assumptions about the users needs and goals and wants.  the business assumptions tested were things like "people will find it worth their time to go our website and gladdly fill out a form to share and discuss how people in their neighborhood feel about a ballot issue".  Or, "people want a vigorous debate about political candidates before making an informed decision" or "people want the fastest way to make a voting decision and don't want to debate the individual issues because they prefer to spend their time seeking out a reliable advisor who's world view they agree with and then just accept what that advisor tells them to vote on"    The results of user testing often reveal that people are not willing to fill out a form with their own information first and leave the site, but they can be engaged by geo-locating their computer ip address and having a start page that shows relevant information before they identify themselves in any way or more importantly spend time filling out a form to see if the information is even what they're interested in and worth filling out a form to share their own information.  So one lesson is that user testing and feedback at certain specefic times was considered critical for optimal usage of resources and the team had an vested interest in qualifying for the comunity resources like user testing in order not to waste their time polishing and perfecting pretty graphics and technical features that the users would not benefit from.As it worked out their was no problem with people editing our organizational structure document to put themselves as leader on paper.  It just didn't happen.  What did happen was a couple of surprising things.  A lot of closed conversations outside the open doc system in violation of the code for america rules and charter. The informal communication network of conversations leaving the offices of code for america made the documents irrelevant.  We had a clear mission statement in the docs, but the leader ignored the mission statement and directed verbally team members and new team members towards activities that benefited his vested interest.  Control became fragmented and contentious with isolation of disenters being directed towards the open google doc and not acted upon. People were working at cross purposes because they had no unified roadmap for production they all agreed on.  the google doc road map was ignored and most people got their instructions or made plans with limited information.  Mockups were created based on google docs and availlable for review and consideration, but coders were writing and designing without mockups based on guidance from the code lead who spoke with the team leader privately. So the mockups were never coded and our volunteers who made the mockups became discouraged and disengaged and ceased contributing.  Mostly it seemed like the more power and authority a person had, the less they were willing to use a consensus built and open document for interacting with people.  People who used the open system were marginalized and real power of decision making was disorganized, fractious, and not open. There was one key complaint that seemed relevant and was used as an explanation by the leaders for ignoring the open source google planning documents.  They consistently claimed the Google docs were too detailed and they couldn't find what they wanted in them.  the project leaders argued that some things they wanted to keep secret and also that everyone knew what to do well enough without the documents using word of mouth.  from the leadership perspective an open document where people could suggest revisions to the mission statement or comment on the mission statement simply slowed them down from achieving what they knew was the true mission for the project.  Why debate something and open it up for comment when they knew the answer was promoted.  Also there was great concern among the leadership that some key contributors didn't want to go on record in any way with some of their ideas because outsiders might not approve of their decisions and resoning.  This was mostly a veiled reference to an astroturf non-profit organization that was promising potential financial sponship in return for setting the agenda to favor the the construction industry goals that they favored and represented.  However, the complaint about finding information in the large number of google docs was a recurrent one that was also echoed by non-leaders.  I did a quick user survey of team members and found that new team members appreciated the google docs for giving them access to information they needed and wanted, but there was little contribution to them from anyone but myself.  team members who had worked with the team for a while initially would contribute some small part to the open documents and then ignore them as irrelevant and unusable since few established team member or leaders would use them.  I hope this was helpfull information.  this was, of course, in america and in a capitalist neo-liberal society where the workers had no conception of socialist principles, so perhaps it's not relevant to your thoughts on the matter.  But the open, non-profit requirements of code for america policies seem similar to yours and socialistic in nature, so perhaps there's reason to compare SPGB with Code for America and lessons to be learned? 

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Also, on a completely different point. . . considering the interenet in general to be open the problem becomes finding accurate information in a sea of manufactured consent.  Marx, and Chomsky and everythign else is online, it's just finding it and knowing it's relevant and knowing it's trustworthy information that's hard.  It seems to be true that america doesn't censor information anymore but only because in the internet age it can't achieve complete censorship.  What america does instead is produce disinformation and manufacture of consent by burrying information.  I think a robust system for worker organization of material and labeling of material as good or bad would be a miniimum requirement for an open system in the interenet age.  Just putting your decision making arguments and reasoning online and available doesn't mean people can find it when it's relevant or that people distinguish your final meeting minutes from the other final meeting minutes. So organization and the ability to descriminate bewteen information sources and filter out information sources needs to be pretty robust in my opinon.  in  "previous methods of democratic organisation", the surplus of information problem was negligible, but with the internet and open information I think we might need much more advanced information tools like tagging and sorting built into the information landscape.  

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p.s. I'd like to plug my favorite communistic friendly OS for business and organization that attempts to resolve these surplus of information concerns. I found this as part of a 30+ hour bit of research on solutions to our organizational problems and think it would be a great fit for you.  It's free to try Holocracy and this is their quick mission statement of value. . . "Holacracy is a complete, packaged system for self-management in organizations. Holacracy replaces the traditional management hierarchy with a new peer-to-peer “operating system” that increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility.Through a transparent rule set and a tested meeting process, Holacracy allows businesses to distribute authority, empowering all employees to take a leadership role and make meaningful decisions."http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/ 

That's a pretty accurate representation you found.  the summits are a little different from day to day operations, but that sounds like an accurate statement of their published mission statement.  The entrapeneurs part is maybe a little misleading in that the projects are required to be non-profit and open to the public, but in San Francisco, there's lots of entrapeneurs who want to volunteer their time for various public good projects and show up looking to contribute. Some of the entrapeneurs leave when they find out they can't use Code for america to work on for-profit projects and they have to make their business plans and secret strategies open to the public. Other entrapenuers stick around just to look for poachable employee's they'll want to hire if they prove themselves on volunteer projects and that's actually encouraged as long as they don't decrease volunteer engagment or interfere with projects getting done. Probably about half of the attendees (about 50-100 for an average weekly hack night at the san francisco branch) just in it for the networking and chance to get a competetive edge in the job market or make some money inderectly by meeting people. The civic minded technologist are mostly just people out of code academies looking to do some good and get a chance to get something to put on their resume and practice their skills and build their portfolio's.  They could work as free interns at some company, but most free interns at tech companies don't get hired either, so they figure why not do some public good while building their portfoliio and making connections. But there's plenty of non coders who volunteer like the "bicycle san francisco" project is just a bunch of people sitting around coming up with ways to encourage bicycling in san francisco.  They started a google group and a project to find and promote people willing to give new san francisco residents a leader for their first few bicycling trips in the city and teach them how to ride a bike in san francisco busy streets.  A lot of the attendees are like SFGOV (the San Francisco City Government) reps have a legal madate to publish all their government data in anonymized forms.  So the database of every parking ticket and street cleaning route and how many housing permits and actually everything in their database is open to the public by law except for personally identifiable information.  BUT the legal requirement also specifies the data must be available in USABLE form so that's a grey area and the SFGOV employees on an individual level actually want the public to use the data to make more informed decision. they have a couple group projects going most all the time where volunteer hackers and coders are encouraged to brainstorm and find ways to use the massively overwhelming public data for some public good.  One of my favorite projects was the campaign financing reporting team.  It seems like all the data on campaign financing is in the database, but there's a lot of miss naming and shell donations with one donor to a campaign in a database using a slightly different name in another database or for another donation.  Anyway, the database of campaign donations is open in raw form, but that isn't usable to the public who want a nice table showing perhaps how much each neighborhood is responsible for republican vs democratic political donations.  So that team got excited and volunteered their time to make a website to show that kind of information.  Also, they aren't going to say they're socialist or communist in their practices or their PR.  This is america and socialism is a dirty word here.  They defend against charges they're communist and aren't communism cheerleaders if that's what you expected.  This is an organization of zero or negative value to commited communist who are against reform on principle or who argue the only solution is a worldwide scale political revolution. Attempts at political favoratism or promoting a specefic political viewpoint are strictly prohibited and it's enforced (mostly because Obama made it that way to get the funding passed and not get it rejected as partisan politics by the republicans). But regardless of what they call themselves, and their denail of communism, the fact remains that code for america operations and practices are more socialistic and more communist than any bulliten board system simply because they use google docs which offers more individual decision making freedom than any bulliten board system.   It's just bad PR to say you're a communist or socialist anything in the USA.  So Holocracy, for example might not want to do business with you because it would turn off capitalist business who might adopt their product.  Holocracy gets accused of being communist all the time and they always focus on pointing out they aren't communism.  Holocracies claim that they aren't communist isn't very convinciing to the capitalist who object to holocracy on the grounds it's unamerican and communist, but I'm sure a lot of the people here would reject holocracy as communism or communistic.  Then again a lot of people here would reject anything as communistic or communism and seem to have set the bar on communism so high the word only a theoretical meaning and some people here say there's never been communism on the planet ever.   as for competing objective and internal tensions.  Yep, every project has them.  Then again so does every communist project undertaken ever.  And every capitalist project ever undertaken.  Competing objectives and internal tensions are part of projects wheather you're communist or capitalist in philosophy.  Competing objectives are a failure point for a lot of projects at code for america just like they're a failure point for a lot of projects under communism or capitalism.  One important point though is that since everything is required to be open to the public and non-profit and open source the tools for resolving those conflicts aren't going to be money. Also there's nothign that says a code for america project can't use the tools in a capitalist way and a lot of groups do that.  In san francisco they discourage the use of terms like CEO or other capitalist centric terms not because they want to sound capitalist. quite the opposit, they'd like to sound like they support capitalism.  But they've found because of the free assoication and voluntarism and open to the public nature that they don't attract or retain volunteers if the projects don't have worker participation.  Groups with too much hierarchy and decisionmaking concentrated at the top tend to lose their free volunteer coders and designers who have little interest in volunteering their time on a project if they have no say in the goal and direction of the project.  The coders and volunteers are free to leave the project at any time and it's fairly routing to get a new member to a team that switched from another team because they didn't like what their old team was doing or how their previous volunteer project was run.  People don't enjoy working in a capitalistic fashion unless they're at the top of the hierachy so their's some groups who lose all their workers and are just entrapeneur managers sitting around waiting for a volunteer code worker or design worker for them to boss around.  Eventually those companies where someone wants to be CEO and tell everyone else what to do and why stall or fail.  The reasons for projects having to be non-profit are similarly not for the purpose of wanting communism.  They don't allow for-profit projects because when they tried that they got people eating their free food and using their wifi wile working on getting rich for themselves and not doing any public good.  the food and beer and electricity and office space comes partly from Obama's initiative funding and partly form big capitalist companies like microsoft who are willing to provide charity.  And they never advertise the free food and beer and wifi because it attracts the wrong kind of people who are just looking to free load some beer and dinner without contributing. the leadership team at code for america will even excommunicate a project if they start accepting money from a business or paying their volunteers because it attracts the kind of people who make projects fail and they don't want projects to fail.  they say people who come here to make a profit don't end up contributing much and negatively impact project success rates.  Again, they're not communist cheerleaders, they're just trying to get things done better and if that means acting like communist, then they act like communist and call it pragmatism while saying something bad about communism like "communism doesn't work because it takes away peoples incentives". But if you're skeptical about my commentary, then all my talk above won't help so here's a couple links that might earn your approval.  .Here's their statement of principles page. I've selected a few choice bits you might like, but if you look hard enough I'm sure you'll find something on any and every page of code for america that an ald school marxist communist will object to. . . 

https://www.codeforamerica.org/how. ..It's interesting to me that a lot of the criticisms leveled against code for america and problems experienced by code for america are similar to the ones communism gets.  One I experienced and upset me enough to leave the team was concentration of decision making by an elite few and secrecy of planning meetings where the real decisions were made.  Another common criticism is that gets leveled at code for america and volunteering in general or communism islands is that they're just enabling capitalism and I've seen groups where the participants leave because they decide this isn't a public good they want to volunteer for and it's just doing work the government or some business should be doing but isn't.  Nobody wants to volunteer to be free unpaid labor for some company that's going to make money from their efforts or for the benefit of some business group.  But yeah, there's a constant creeping effort by business and for profit interests to try to take advantage and steer projects to ways that will benefit them financially.  That's discouraged and technically a violation of the rules allowed under the rules of code for america, but it still happens and has caused the failure of many projects when their workers find out and stop contributing. I think it's kind of funny that a lot of this work ends up being done in a communistic way using communistic principles despite the fact that almost no one there wants to be associated with communism.  We have a saying that's resoundingly approved that "good tools and techniques and technology matter most".  the fact that those tools and techniques and techology and the non-profit, voluteer nature lead people to act like communist is quite a good argument a lot of poeple in this forum could learn from. here's some of the projects that have succeeded. Some of them (but not all) are  the same kind of projects communism or socialism would have to undertake. . . http://sandbox.codeforamerica.org/what/featured-storiesp.s  Holocracy is a lot closer to communism in it's work practices and communication rules than code for america even though it's intended to be used in for-profit companies.  Holocracy is probably the closest thing capitalism has produced to a functional version of communism.  did you look at the holocracy constitution.  workers get paid based on the reviews of their team mates and can fire the closest equivalent to a CEO that holocracy has.  I think it's amusing that holocracy uses almost the same phrases as some of the people on this website about you have to practice communism and be informed about class theory in order to be a good communist.  This is what Holocracy says about their constition.  

http://www.holacracy.org/constitution

that was my goal and thanks for the encouragment. 

There doesn't seem to be an interface.  In practice you can't tell the difference between the types of people.  Everyone is just a volunteer and has the same rights, priveledges, expectatons etc.  we all get free name badges where we can write, if we choose, our skill set.  the Government people are volunteers too and don't get paid by the city for their time, but since they spent all those hours and effort opening up the database, they want to see it get used so it's a personal decision on their part to give their paid work more meaning and impact.  There's probably some social hierarchy or tensions or interface on a one on one conversation, but definitely nothing enforceable or consistent. I doubt the tensions are qualitiatively different or that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet significantly more or less. Does SPGB qualify as a communist society?  you still have debates and dissatifaction here that seems from my perspective of similar quality and quantity as to similar sized organizations in a capitalist organization. here's an example from your board of a dispute over handing out flyers where you seem to disregard the public will  – http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/no-junk-mail .  So I would say in that situation you're organization is singing a differern hyme that the masses don't like. Actually my impression is that money in capitalist organizations seems to be a deciding factor so everyone agrees in order to get ahead personally financially.  I have definitely noticed a qualitative and quantitative increase in tensions of volunteer projects compared with for profit projects in my career experience as a user experience designer. People care more in volunteer organizations about the results of decisions.  In for profit organizations with hired staff, the problem is usually getting people to care about the decisions and they're frequently just doing whatever is easiest to get their paycheck.  That makes for profit organizations week at debates and with less sound decisions, but less tension. Some of the worst divisions and smuggling in of objectives I've noticed in my carrer was in working for a volunteer project to address the housing problems in san francisco.  Labor unions would block housing construction that was valuable to the public with fallacious environmental concerns if and only if those construction projects didn't use union labor.  Volunteer housing affordability advocacy agencies would hate labor unions for puting the labor union interests ahead of public housing interests.  Anti-evicition advocacy non-profits would not be on speaking terms with pro-construction non-profit advocates. etc.  Maybe that was just my experience and the housing shortage in san francisco is causing a lot of conflict?  but it seems to me all these vested interests would come up in a communist society.  You still need to remove tennants and demolish buildings to make new bigger better ones in a communist society and you still have a difference of interests between representatives of concrete for buildings and wood for buildings.  Or so it seems to me.  I'm not real confident about this and haven't thought about it much, so maybe it's just my first impression and not correct. 

I can confirm for you that there are lots of cases of conflicting motives that have nothing to do with volunteerism and open information and are ethically problematic.  I would describe Code for America as an interesting example of a labortory for understanding how those can be dealt with, but I wouldn't call it free of those problems. 

Ha, I wish statistics on internships were available.  that sort of information is most highly censored by the media or more accurately deliberately ignored and burried.  to begin with most internships aren't even legal because the law states that internships must be a benefit to the intern as a learning experience and NOT provide any financial benefit to the company.  The interpretaton is pretty clear and upheld in courts that if the company profits off of an unpaid internship than that internship is illegal, and if it's a paid internship it has to pay the minimum wage but can provide value ot the company, but most paid internships are below minimum wage.  unpaid internships in violation of the law have a 3 years statute of limitations and are classified as wage theft.  Wage theft in general is extremely common in the USA and cases are simply not prosecuted due to limited or non-existent resources availabe for prosecuters. When the company loses a case for wage theft the penalty is minimal and usually limited to double the lost wages.  as for getting the job offer, it's important to note that it's illegal to suggest or promise a job offer will result from an internship. Internships in the USA are a narrow exception to the minimum wage laws granted only for the purpose of providing education to the student. Internships are not to be confused with a free trial period for the empoyers consideration. but that's just the letter of the law and doesn't really matter because interns have no real access or ability to get those laws enforced.  According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, less than 40 percent of unpaid interns are offered a job by the time they graduate, compared to 63 percent of paid interns. BUT I should add these job offers are not comming from the companies they interned at which would possibly be illegal if promises were made to the employee of a job.  So most of those are companies that just figure if the student did the internship, it makes them a bettter hire even though the hiring company didn't have them as an intern. whatever your suspicioins about wage theft by employers in america, I assure you the reality is far worse.  Voluntary slavery in hopes of getting a paying job is the norm, not the exceptioin. that doesn't even count the routine misclassification of workers as managers or other occupations so that they don't get paid for overtime.  If you've ever noticed a lot of "managers" and "assistant managers" that seem to be just workers and thought that was to flatter the employees. . . well it's not to flatter the employees it's so the company doesn't have to pay them overtime.  The laws in the USA protecting labor have been completely sabotaged by business lobbyist and the abiity to enforce laws against a business is virtually non-existent without a lawyer.  Lawyers won't take a case with less than about $50,000 in wrongdoing and in the rare cases they do, the business always settles out of court so that nothing goes on their record to make other claims against them easier. I was a victim of wage theft by party city who misclassified me illegally and deliberately and have a lot of experience with this personally and I can tell you that busines is completely guilty of mass exploitation of workers and has subverted the intent and letter and practice of the law in the vast majority of situations. 

The freecyle network sound good to me, I don't know much about them.  I think they're another case of socialistic practices in a capitalist society and pooh poohed by the "we are not reformers" crowd.