Welcome to the Government 2.0 Wiki 

A Thought Experiment about Participant Democracy 

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What is this?

Technology enables new abstract structures for goverments to follow. The main benifits being that individuals can participate in the debate and decision making directly, and adapt structures in an open participation environment. With this new level of connectivity we can create a new type of democracy. Help us define it here.

Ongoing goals of the project

1. Create a governance system that empowers participants to achieve their stated goals

2. Leverage new social orchestration tools and methodologies to break down traditional social institutions in favor of organic collaboration

3. Enable participants to have real-time influence over the process while avoiding (as much as possible) bureaucracy, politics and committee thinking.

4. Break dogma to invent something thoroughly new and actually feasible

5. Create a universally applicable legal code that can be either implemented directly or guide decision makers in solid governing policies. 

Constitution 1

1. To support Maximal freedom of individuals

2. To be the defence of the constitution from other structures less free

3. To provide the structure for the education of individual to understand the constitution and to be able to perform independant study contribute to debate of governance.

4. To provide the structure for the socialisation of individuals into a civilised society capable of following rule of law.

5. To support the enforcement of justice, punishment and reward structure. 

Government Functions

1. Law Creation
2. Law Enforcement
3. Dispute Resolution
4. Tax collection (or some kind of community volunteer work as alternative)
5. Provision of Essential Services (i.e. garbage, water, sewage, public health, transit, social services, community housing)
6. Anything else?

Issues to Address

1. Commerce (Balanced economy with a self surficient core that reacts to local and national environment with the primary purpose of sustainability in all things)

2. Policy (Wiki policy making?)
3. Projects (Perhaps based on a generic version of this)
4. Voting (Real-time polling?)
5. Taxation/Contribution (Flat transaction tax? or a completely new way of defining tax all together?)
6. Checks and balances (Transparent Decision Making)
7. Lobbying (Blogs and social networks?)
8. Social Services (A framework for deciding on, providing and managing communal services)
9. Social Loafing
10. Negative socialisation from non government sources such as media, marketers, 

Each section is to be padded out with a guide for implementation

Related Media:

Two great TEDtalks on collaboration, which are well recommened viewing when consdering such a project.

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration

Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration 

Contributors

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Deprecated Content

These elements have been removed because they deal with implementing the model rather than designing it. 

From Goals 

5. Attempt to raise the baseline standard of living for all so that the highest possible ratio of citizens are able to set and pursue their own individual goals

6. To reduce the gap between effort, action and reward

7. Balancing the economy, social justice and environmental concerns