Power infrastructure in a favela, by andreasnilsson1976
Charles from Trampoline Systems organized a workshop on emergent democracy last week in Shoreditch. It was kind of interesting. I thought I'd post some quick notes.
First of all here's a rough definition of the phenomenon of emergence: A synergistic property or behaviour of a system that cannot be explained solely by the sum of its component parts; when the organization of a system exhibits dynamic behavioural properties that exist on a macro level in relation to its component parts. Systems that arise out of emergent phenomena are said to be complex.
One example of emergence is the development of the human foetus from the division of a single cell, through further division and specialization, into a complex human body. See Johnson's book Emergence for more examples.
Throughout the discussions it was clear there was a lack of clarity on the difference between strategies for refining democratic participation and a truly emergent system of governance. Emergence resists strategization because by definition it cannot be governed. In an emergent system it is precisely the lack of governance of the whole that allows complexity to arise from the behaviour of individual components reacting to particular constraints (governance at the component level).
This creates an interesting paradox of the expression emergent democracy. The question that the expression raises is this - what changes in participation and organisation will it take for democracy to produce a truly complex system of governance?
Let's take the complex system that arises out of traffic flows in a metropolis as an example of governing complexity. Individual agents (car drivers) are free within a set of constraints (the rules of the road, the placement of traffic lights, one-way streets etc) to make a set of choices about what route to take, how fast to drive, where to stop off and what time to travel. Car drivers really have a lot of freedoms in this system. Traffic flow is a complex system which urban planners try desperately to govern - with differing levels of success, because they don't often have good enough tools to predict the resulting behaviour of 100K+ car drivers. Because the simple rules governing the constraints on drivers mentioned above are increasingly not enough to deal with congestion in cities, governments begin adopting much more holistic governance rules (e.g. a congestion charge).
Admittedly, this is a field seeing a lot of research as a result, but it's an example of how complex systems and governance are often in tension. The rulesets that define cell replication and the instructions encoded in DNA do not attempt to govern the whole that is the human body. If you attempt to govern emergent behaviour with any top-down strategy, you eliminate the free agency of the component parts in the system. The analogy in the traffic flow example would be for urban planners to ban cars and allow people to only use public transport. Like this the level of governance would be such (the governance of routes and schedules so regulated) that the resulting traffic system may not exhibit properties of a complex system at all. What you've done is eliminate the free agents from the system. So it's difficult to imagine how you can successfully 'govern' emergent behaviour (by any accepted notion of governance) without extinguishing complexity; you probably have to re-define political 'governance' in order for it to be plausible.
In a truly emergent democracy, governance would play a role at the component level, in the rulesets that dictate how the individual citizen can participate, but would have to refrain from dictating, regulating or containing the emergent decision making patterns and structures that arise.
Charles highlighted a single change in the nature of voting that may drive emergent democracy: technology will force a shift from fixed place/time voting to continous voting in the near future. He backs this up with various historical reference points as to how technology has affected politics throughout human history. I'm inclined to agree with Charles, and this shift leads to all kinds of questions around representation and participation. Various other people contributed to an interesting discussion on the night:
Mako from Selectricity demonstrated their online polling system which has come out of research into civic technology at MIT; it supports several voting strategies (including preferential, condorcet and borda) and provides a wide variety of feedback on results. You can try out a quickvote for free or contact them for access to more advanced tools.
Sennse from Wikia provided an insight into arbitration and power dynamics at Wikipedia (which she worked at). Interestingly, Wikipedia takes the time to point out it's not an experiment in democracy or any other political system.
Edward from Involve also talked about their collaboration with local government in citizen engagement.
If you want to explore further try Joi Ito's essay on the subject.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Joichi was an early investor in Last.fm, whom I work for.
