Just randomly strolling through the interwebs today and came across this particularly interesting nugget of discourse among the Diaspora community, and wanted to share a couple of my thoughts and ideas I hope might add to the convo in some way.
For a while I’ve been thinking a lot about how ICT platforms can be crafted to enhance the development of political and social capital in local communities, especially geographically based communities.
The reason for my focus on geographically based communities (villages, regions and nations of the world) is because land and property is a super big deal that every human being is required to figure out how to manage with relation to each other. At the most fundamental level it is the great material challenge of life intrinsic to our very survival - and it is a challenge of great political import - no doubt everyone is aware of the great struggles for land and sovereignty that have plagued the entire world up to this very day - whether or not each of the actors involved are in the right or wrong I will refrain from saying, but I’m sure everyone can think of good examples of this issue, both locally and globally.
So what I’m getting at here is that since the turn of the Christian millennium heaps and heaps of awesome technologies have been realised into the world, and in the ICT sector, perhaps it is platforms like Diaspora, Loomio, The Full Circle Project, and Minds.com that seem to be at the leading edge of enabling communities to become empowered from within.
Loomio enables collective decision-making.
Diaspora is premised on enabling decentralised federalised community networks with customisable privacy
The Full Circle Project enables wise people to connect including a geographic implementation
However I’m trying to figure what is the next level need that remains to be realised.
And what I reckon is that if you integrate each of these aforementioned services together it creates the foundation needed for you to start making some next level shit that probably wouldn’t really be possible without combining all of the features that each of the mentioned platforms, and probably a few others, do separately.
The next level is to enable decentralised grassroot geo-community populations to federally and democratically organise with concentric/cellular tiers from subsets to a universally encompassing global superset. It would make for the generation of some intense social political capital, and perhaps even growing enough to eventually cause total change in the way the world does the whole ‘politicking’ game, from something grossly unethical and egotistically uninclusive, to something that is ethically optimised to such an extent that marginalising tendencies are minimised as much as possible and participatory access is almost universal.
Basically taking the desire for group, event, and market based features to the next level of desire.
- Development of an ethical and radically transformative electoral method that subversively enables incremental change by gradually overwriting the way ‘leaders’ are currently chosen in the mainstream.
Basically it would be a platform aligned to realising via ICT augmented enhancement of social reality, the ideals of libertarian municipalism and democratic confederalism and other theories that attempt to delineate the politics of ‘social ecology’.
This is the kind of thing I dream of in a social networking app, something that provides the means for the creation of a new world OS, the social network app as a digital settings access panel for every person as sovereign individuals to participate together in designing and creating the collectively preferred ideal system of law and order, and deeply articulating the ideal balance of public, private, and personal elements.
Every pleb will become liberated. Every person of privilege will be equalised.
I hope to begin making moves towards this idea some time this year, so I might begin spending a bit of time studying the Diaspora* framework at some point, and the other mentioned platforms.
- Math graduate, experienced community practitioner, and in my first year of a postgrad IT degree, looking to integrate all my prior learnings and experience into some kind of ICT platform.
