You assign another person as your ongoing Proxy (Representative). Whenever you don't vote, your Representative votes for you. The Representative's vote simply counts double (one vote for you and one vote for the Representative). If your Representative also fails to vote, then your Representative's Proxy votes for all three of you.
In this example diagram, everyone to the right of the dotted blue line voted directly on some issue. Everyone else voted by proxy. The numbers show how many people each Representative represents (including the Representative). Notice that everyone's voice is counted, whether or not they vote directly - one person one vote.
You are a direct "constituent" of your Representative and an indirect constituent of your Representative's Proxy, and so forth. A popular and trusted Representative may vote on behalf of many constituents.
The most trusted Representatives (those having the most constituents) meet in person to research and debate issues, as our current elected representatives do. In common good banks, however, these trusted Representatives do not decide issues directly. They oversee the public discussions, choose the wording for questions to be voted on, and assure that all the operations of the bank advance the greater good of all.
Even the concept of running the bank democratically was questioned: “If Joe has enough friends to vote funding for Joe’s business which will eventually fail, what good does for the community” or “Democracy is good as an oversight mechanism but operationally… how would be the army to operate democratically?”
The democratic process maybe can be changed from an active involvement, which is also very time consuming, to a passive way. I am thinking to ask members to allocate their money over a given set of areas of lending as they join. They can change the allocation as they want but at their own convenience thus avoiding a periodic voting process that can be very counter productive. The actual lending decisions will be left for lending professionals, trained to the bank rules.
We do not plan to make business (operational) decisions democratically. Depositors will set lending priorities, but will not decide on individual loans.
Depositors always have the choice whether or not to be actively involved in decisions that are in their domain. Taking away that choice would decrease democracy with no benefit to the depositors. It is important that SOMEONE think again about the lending priorities from time to time, because the situation in the community is always changing. The depositors should be allowed a voice in those discussions and decisions.
Post edited 8:21 pm - February 22, 2010 by wspademan
Ted Millich said:You need to find out about Dynamic Governance, or Sociocracy.
Sociocracy is a great way to govern an organization and we expect to incorporate principles of sociocracy in running the bank business. Depositors, on the other hand, will not be making decisions about an organization but rather about funding the common good; so some features of sociocracy would be unnecessarily cumbersome. Still, we expect that communities will use, in their in-person discussions, many principles of sociocracy and other disciplines such as varieties of Consensus, Deep Democracy, etc.
Philip Beard said:It's unclear how the multiple-choice preference example given (A+ABCDFNo) relates to the Condorcet paired-preference method. Aren't you conflating the two here?
Multiple choice grading is a way of expressing preferences. Condorcet is a way of analyzing data and calculating results.There is no conflict between them.
If someone grades option #1 "A" and option #2 "C", for example, it is clear that the person prefers option #1 to option #2. Similarly, if the person grades two options the same, then we can infer that the person has no preference between the two options. This is all the information that is required for Condorcet calculation.
Grading gives more information with less effort, than having to compare each pair of options individually.
It's unclear how the multiple-choice preference example given (A+ABCDFNo) relates to the Condorcet paired-preference method. Aren't you conflating the two here?
You need to find out about Dynamic Governance, or Sociocracy. It is a governance method that has been designed over many years using trial and error, and knowledge of technical disciplines like cybernetics, chaos theory, electronics, etc. The most amazing thing about this method is it keeps people equivalent in power. It works well and you can find out more about it at http://www.beyonddemocracythefilm.com
Please reply to me if you're from Common Good Finance.
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