readings
While I fail to sleep, some readings:
Is it time for a Fifth International?, by Michael Albert. I've always respected Albert's work on parecon. He's a very smart and principled fellow. It's also equally clear that someone else will have to be the one to implement his ideas.
Permaculture for renters, and emergent urbanism. Via the ever-inspiring Federico.
Last year I went on a Jane Austen kick. Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, all these, check. Only two more savory delights left! Oh, Mr. Darcy!
My current reading is the fascinating The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome. It's a little hard to get a hold of, but I highly recommend it. Parenti is a great storyteller, and it's great to hear him rip a hole in Cicero. It's also eerie how the struggles of Roman times echo our own.
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Hi, thought I'd mention that I've been working on a democratic group decision-making system (provisionally called "fluid democracy", a rather silly name that i may replace if i can think of a better one). It incorporates hierarchical representation, like the council system in parecon, and small discussion groups with near-consensus based decision-making, but also direct democracy and at-large representatives elected by the whole legislature (however, unlike parecon, fluid democracy is just a organizational structure and decision-making procedure, not a blueprint for society -- it is the same type of thing as Robert's Rules, a different sort of thing from capitalism or communism or parecon).
You mentioned in your other post that the FSF is slowly reorganizing; I'm hoping it that my system is suited to decision-making for that sort of thing (where the "electorate" would be contributors to FSF and GNU). although it gives everyone a voice, and although it has (imo) stronger checks-and-balances than present-day democratic systems, i think it would also be suited to making decisons rather rapidly.
http://bayleshanks.com/wiki.pl?ideas-groupDecisionMaking-fluidDemocracy-overview
If it is desired that the people thought to be more skilled or more committed to the project (e.g. RMS) should get more voting power than others, I have another scheme that could be used as a "preprocessor" to allocate voting power unequally based on a trust metric system.
someday i'll implement these systems in software. until then it's just ideas.