Some ideas on an experimental local group democracy --------------------------------------------------- I was talking with my sister and we developed some issues for a limited voter-group democracy experiment. 1. There must be given real power from the present Government over to the experimental government. People are adults and not little children who can be satisfied with a game of hide and seek and a lollypop, or a stick with bread and a fire. For the council to operate in a good way, it must be something real and not a toy of others. 2. The council to be formed should not be made smaller, it should at least remain between 40 to 60 people, because otherwise the formation of cliques occurs and people not fitting within the ruling streak will feel oppressed and may leave. By having the council be quite large different people will feel more welcome. 3. The people we are after to populate these councils are to begin with the women and good people, perhaps even feeble people. Who we don't want to crowd everyone out of these councils is cigarette smoking 40-60 aged big men who are laughing about each others jokes all the time and having found a place to pass the time. To have a larger council but perhaps even more importantly to have it be structured very precisely, regulated and protocolized very strictly, this will promote the wellbeing of the people in the council we need in these councils. 4. Because there may be macho people and criminal people in the population to some degree, the minimum voter-group sizes should be 10 or 15 or more, not about 5. To use voter-group sizes like 5 will allow too easy penetration by macho and criminal gang type people or who have such behaviors. To make the voter group larger makes it more heavy and this is typically more difficult for rough people to deal with. They find it harder to group with 10 or 15, while they find it very easy to group with 5. For the good people this should pose little to no problem, to group with 10 or 15 and more, provided it is all official and neatly done, transparent and well structured. These two size constraints would make a sensible experiment have at least 10 * 40 = 400 voters, which would be touching the low end of what is a reasonable experiment. Making it smaller risks altering it fundamentally. 5. One idea could be that the ordinary Government passes regular tasks like road maintenance decisions, cleaning, greenery services, routine police surveillance, to pass the political governance decisions about these tasks to such a local experimental council. 6. The people in that area could go on with paying their taxes as they did before (money always being the most heated of all topics). The local council could be given the money from the higher Government tax collecting agency equal to the budged the government is normally spending on these issues. The local council could then decide what is needed in the area, how to spend that budged, whether it needs to ask more money (if that is reasonable,) or to pay unused money back to all tax payers (in return of which that area may suffer a setback in services and maintenance.) In theory the local council could attempt to levy a local tax or a voluntary local tax, and so on and so forth; as the twin to the method of passing back unused money. 7. If the experiment is to be done it may work well to leave a long string of bad or problematic decisions stand and see a neighborhood deteriorate. We may not know why the council makes such bad decisions, it may be that the people wish to ascertain whether they really have the power and at what time if any the ordinary government would come back. By suffering/experiencing a reduced service or maintenance, the council and people could experience "learning through mistakes," and this may lead to a string of better decisions later. At which point the council would feel its actual responsibility, knowing what happens if it makes inferior decisions. 8. The risk is that the normal Government may view this experiment as a tool to increase its control over people by using the formed council as its tool. The normal government may grab the formed council, steer it, and use the voter group system to influence people on the individual level. To prevent that from happening the council should be given real responsibilities that the normal Government sheds off, and with that has to come hard decision power about allocating the budgets and actual payments. It is therefore probably a smart idea to keep the group council government system under its own control, which is how it is envisioned. So: voter groups establish themselves, the voter group housekeeper reports to the chair person of the council, and that's where the string ends. That's it. This way the local council is cut loose from infringement on it by the existing Government, to be itself and have its own mandate and process. If the normal Government proceeds in allocating people into voting groups and manipulates that process and is setting the tone and agenda and controls the budget and meeting places and controls what there is to control ... then the danger that this local council will reverse power seems much greater and it may much sooner become a ratification and control tool for the normal Government. An extension of its power, rather then a move of power from central semi-democratic Government to the people themselves. The people in the council government do well to realize they do have an actual democratic mandate behind them, they actually do represent people. If the coverage of votes and non-votes is strong, if many people participate and few not, then the mandate of this experimental council would logically outstrip the mandate of the normal Government in terms of democratic legitimacy. That means in natural terms: it is a stronger Government then the one it is replacing, in that area at least. Needless to say: with power comes responsibility and the risk of mistakes, even deaths. 9. I say it is a very good idea to have older people in the council. One idea is to say "nobody younger then 40." Another idea is "the council is invalid unless there are 3 old people or more." Or "unless there are 8 old people or more," etc. It is not important to have councils be made up of all ages, the preference is definitely on older people, provided of course they are and feel responsible for the whole.