TriPolitica

From Barbelith

A proposal for a model of online community that can self-control its own political structure.

BY TOM COATES

Imagine a message board with three clear identities, colour-schemes and names. Each has a generic set of basic initial forums on a clearly defined range of subjects (say - Politics / Science / Entertainment). Each forum starts with a certain structure - one Monarchic, one Parliamentary Democracy and one Distributed Anarchy. All the rules that it takes to run each community have been sufficiently abstracted so that they can be turned on or off at will BY the community concerned. Moreover, the rules are self-reflexive - ie. the community can also create structures to govern how those rules are changed. This would operate by a bill-like structure where an individual can propose a new rule or a change to an existing rule that then may or may not require one or more forms of ratification. There would be the ability to create a rule governing who could propose a new bill, how often and what areas it might be able to change or influence.

When a new user joins the community, s/he is presented the current political structure of each one and from that point chooses a board to be affiliated with. S/he is then part of the population of that community and can rise up through the ranks (if there are ranks) and participate in the functioning of that political community. This goes right down to the creation of different parts of that commnuity, how the various parts of the community inter-relate with one another and who can post what and when.

Each community will have its own strengths and weaknesses - some will no doubt go horribly politically wrong and have power seized by mad administrators, but hopefully others will find their own kind of political equilibrium after a while - and maybe that political equilibrium could be a good model for future built ones (ie. maybe an evolving board will accomplish more / better things than a created one?). It just has to be sufficiently politically abstracted that new arrangements could emerge that didn't initially occur to us.

Initial user types:

  • Junior Users
  • Normal Users
  • Moderators
  • Administrators

What follows is a list of the kinds of actions that people might want to be able to do on a board. By a series of user-permissions-like systems, the community could create types of user and then determine the kinds of activities that they should be able to undertake and how easily.

1) Things people should potentially be able to do with posts and threads (all potentially with ratification):

  • Create Post
  • Create (Start) Thread
  • Delete Post (with or without ratification)
  • Delete Thread (with or without ratification)
  • Lock Thread (with or without ratification)
  • Edit Post (with or without ratification)
  • Edit Title (with or without ratification)
  • Edit Abstract (with or without ratification)
  • Move Thread (with or without ratification)
  • Merge threads or move a post from one thread to another (with or without ratification)

2) Things people should potentially be able to do with users:

  • Block User (with or without ratification)
  • Unblock User (with or without ratification)
  • Change User's role (with or without ratification) - note - should this be further structured (ie. promote, demote, only let normal users demote moderators and administrators promote people)?
  • Change User's display name (with or without ratification)

3) Things people should potentially be able to do with forums/ groups of fora

  • Create Forum
  • Rename Forum
  • Edit Forum description
  • Reorder Fora
  • Delete Fora (deleting all messages or copying all messages into a pre-existing fora)

4) Things people should potentially be able to do with whole boards

  • Allow / Disallow users from other boards or the general public to read the board they're on at the moment.
  • Decide on criteria for Junior vs. Normal User
  • Allow anyone to join the community or close off all newcomers

5) Things people should potentially be able to do with Bills

  • Propose Bill


Who should be able to do things:

  • Nobody
  • The User Resonsible (ie. person who posted, the user themselves)
  • Administrators
  • Moderators
  • Normal Users
  • Junior Users
  • All Users

Who could ratify?

  • Administrators
  • Moderators
  • Normal Users
  • Junior Users
  • All Users

Types of ratification:

  • none required;
  • a set number of agreements / set number of required negative votes (?)
  • proportion (10% assent) within a time-period (12 hours / 24 hours / 1 week)

Some sample bills so far:

FORMAT: [USER TYPE] to [BE ABLE / NOT BE ABLE] TO [THINGFROMLIST1,2OR3ABOVE]. {IF ABLE Action will require [NUMBER OF RATIFICATIONS] from [ONE OR MORE USER TYPES]}

  • Anna PROPOSES A BILL: Junior members to NOT be able to create threads.
  • Bill PROPOSES A BILL: Administrators to NOT be able to change user roles.
  • Charles PROPOSES A BILL: Junior members to be able to create posts. Action will require ten ratifications from Moderators, Administrators, Normal Members. One disagreement can veto.
  • David PROPOSES A BILL: Moderators to be able to edit abstracts. Action will require three ratifications from Moderators or Administrators. Three disagreements will veto.
  • Edgar PROPOSES A BILL: The User Responsible to be able to change their own display name. Action will require no ratifications.
  • Fiona PROPOSES A BILL: Normal Users to be able to Unblock Users. Action will require 60% assent from Normal Users polled over 24 hours.
  • Gavin PROPOSES A BILL: Normal Users to NOT be able to propose bills. Action will require a 51% decision of All Users polled over a 6 hour period.

[thought - should we institutionalise heirarchy or not?]

[another thought - proposing bills should be an action just like creating posts etc. and permissions on bill proposition would be changeable by proposing a bill to do so. Maybe a safeguard would be needed to prevent stupid users from disallowing all user groups from proposing bills?]

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