The Citizendium's political principles

[Larry Sanger]

Comments requested.  This is a draft.  The final version, with a governance proposal, will be posted on Citizendium-L.

Dear Citizens,

Let me explain why I want to develop the Citizendium's governance system next.

The Citizendium project needs to expand its leadership.  We need to add leadership to editorial workgroups, start new necessary functions such as interviews of "topic informants," do fundraising, and (possibly) start completely new Citizendium projects.  In short, the Citizendium project needs effective project governance mechanisms.  Executive Committee members are already put upon with their own specific tasks, and besides, they were never meant to serve as a deliberative body.  Moreover, I have neither the time to "rule by fiat," nor the inclination to do so even at this early stage, for the simple reason that doing so inevitably results in inadequate legitimacy and poorly motivated participants.  My experience has taught me that people are motivated to contribute to a collectively-managed projects by being given responsibility in such projects.

So, while leadership is necessary if anything is going to happen at all, it is actually quite important that I do not take too much responsibility upon myself.  This is a reason, perhaps the main reason, that I have not elaborated or insisted upon many points in the CZ Policy Outline.  Appropriate and respected bodies and leaders, who together share authority in the project, are absolutely necessary to secure the all-important sense of legitimacy needed to organize the largest and most highly motivated groups of intellectuals online.

It is one thing to have hundreds of editors and authors declare that they are interested in contributing.  It is quite another thing actually to motivate them to contribute.  We have, I think, a quorum of editors and authors now; what we need now is to organize ourselves into a sort of community.  So we need to develop an actual governance system.

Think now of what that means.  If the Citizendium succeeds as we want it to, then we will have created the largest and most credible encyclopedia in history, the first source for reference on virtually anything.  Put that way, it seems unlikely that we will succeed, for the simple reason that excellent and difficult things are very rare (as Spinoza said).  But we're on our way, and there are some reasons to think we will succeed.  Now, if we were to succeed, then as a single source of information, our project would wield considerable power.  That power would be in the hands of project's governance mechanisms; it is essential, therefore, that we think systematically about how that power should be used.

What I will do in the following is to describe briefly and abstractly what our governance mechanisms needs to accomplish; then propose several principles and constraints on the choice of such mechanisms; then actually make a proposal about the shape of our governance mechanisms.


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What Citizendium governance mechanisms should do
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Project governance means, roughly, actions that tend to establish or enforce--in a formalized way, attributable to those tasked with the general direction of the project--general rules or standards, and broad initiatives.

CZ governance mechanisms should, therefore, provide us a way to create "legitimized" rules or standards, and to start broad initiatives according to established mechanisms.


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Theoretical meta-principles
===========================

I begin with some quite theoretical meta-principles:

(i) One central aim of CZ is to create the greatest possible general information resource.  That requires that we collect the largest possible body of intellectuals from the world over.  This means we must strive toward openness and democracy in some sense, because many intellectuals will not participate in something over which they personally do not, at least potentially and partially, have some control.

(ii) In its own decisionmaking and other governance, CZ must always follow the rule of law, as opposed to the arbitrary rule of persons.  In other words, persons in authority in the project must act according to pre-established rules that have themselves been adopted according to a regular, legitimate process.  As a legal rule, not only is this essential to justice, it serves as a guarantee that the project will continue on according to certain fundamental principles.

(iii) While generally people should be free to work at their own pleasure--so that everyone in the project enjoys a great latitude of action--the power to make consequential decisions should not be concentrated in the hands of any small or permanent group of people.  One well-recognized way to "spread authority around" is the "separation of powers."  This involves distinguishing the powers (a) of rule enforcement, (b) of rule adoption, and (c) of the execution of new and enhanced projects.  It is also important to spread authority out among many people of the same role.

(iv) Both positions of authority, and the mechanisms for governance that persons in those positions follow, should be defined ultimately--if not in detail--by a community charter.  The reason for this is that various competing "powers" must have some document that they agree contains the descriptions of their roles and relationships.  Without such a fundamental document, as many legal theorists believe, it is more difficult to follow a rule of law; instead, without declared "rules of the game," decisions are made by the force of various competing personalities, which inevitably leads to intractable conflict.

(v) The Citizendium is to be a neutral source of information, and as such, it is extremely important to avoid, as much as possible, acrimonous conflicts, both political and personal, among participants.  Collaboration is difficult in the fact of conflict, and so in a collaborative project, conflict demands a resolution.  But resolutions of conflict, if one-sided, have a tendency to concentrate power in the hands of the victorious party and subsequently to produce a successful "party line" in the victorious factions.  Such a party line could then bias the content of the Citizendium.  The method of resolving disputes, therefore, must tend as much as possible to defuse situations rather than to declare victors, and the governance mechanisms of the Citizendium should be established as much as possible to avoid conflict in the first place.

(vi) The opportunity before us is not merely to create an encyclopedia, but to give gentle expert guidance to an encyclopedia project that is as nearly as dynamic as Wikipedia.  But governing bureaucracies, if unchecked, might make the project the opposite of dynamic.  For this reason, the bodies and processes employed to govern the Citizendium should be the most efficient possible, and should not throw up roadblocks to efficient development on the wiki.


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Constraints on governance
=========================

It is on the grounds of such meta-principles that I propose several constraints on governance roles and mechanisms.  In other words, what follows are some rules that we ought to follow in designing the Citizendium project's governance mechanisms.

(1a) Openness.  Deliberation on rules and initiatives must be done out in the open, available to observe and, to an extent consistent with the objective requirements of efficient deliberation, participate in.  Democracy and the rule of law both require openness.

(1b) Privacy in an open project.  Therefore, we should balance the privacy requirements of our participants and of potential partner organizations against our own collaborative and democratic requirement of openness.  Matters that affect individuals exclusively may remain private.  But generally speaking, no important decision, affecting indefinite numbers of project members (or of members of the public), should be made privately except by duly appointed and responsible representatives, and then only if a potential external partner expects privacy during initial deliberations; and no decision that affects the nature, or fundamental principles and directions, of the project should ever be made privately.  Our partners must be comfortable with their employees working in an open project, insofar as they are working with us.

(2a) Independence of governments, corporations, and other organizations.  There must be no entanglements with governments, which, even more than powerful corporations, have the authority to require changes to and even to destroy our project, which has its own sovereign constraints.  The project should never become dependent upon grants that would subject it to special oversight by any government body, or indeed any external body.

(2b) Ideological independence.  To be as acceptable as possible to the greatest number of intellectuals from around the world, the Citizendium as an organization must not issue any political, religious, other other ideological statements or resolutions, nor should any such statements be made by Citizendium representatives when they are acting in an official capacity.

(3a) Conflict of interest in general.  Generally, persons tasked with making important decisions must avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest, i.e., where their own interests are served or undermined by the outcome of a decision that ought to be made on behalf of the project as a whole.

(3b) Conflict of interest regarding wiki work.  Since the actual work of the Citizendium takes place on a wiki, and since wiki work by persons in authority can have the tendency be perceived as making decisions and setting rules--in the same way that a speeding police cruiser can set a de facto speed limit on a stretch of highway--there must be a clear distinction made, for persons in authority, between "official" work and work done as a rank-and-file member.  In other words, persons in authority will have no special rights to "throw their weight around"; any special authority with which they are entrusted will be specific and clearly delimited.  Furthermore, it will be forbidden that a person in authority make decisions about disputes in which they have participated as a rank-and-file member.

(4) Sortition.  Actual positions of responsibility are to be filled, first, by any willing and qualified participants, and then, when there are more willing participants than positions, by some well-defined process of sortition--i.e., "drawing straws" among qualified candidates.  This should include the position of Editor-in-Chief.  Of course, there are many ways to draw straws; one that reduces politicking while maximizing the likelihood of high competence will be the best.  Fuller argument may be found below.

(5) Term limits.  Furthermore, positions of authority--other than those shared by very large numbers of people, such as the position of editor--should be limited by term.  This should include the position of Editor-in-Chief.  This should, like sortition, tend to reduce the amount of politicking and ideological warfare that might threaten the neutrality of the Citizendium.

(6) Soft security.  In many online communities, and wikis in particular, rights to participate are given out fairly freely, on the "honor principle," with rule-breaking being strongly discouraged by the community at large, and with rule-breakers reined in after the fact.  This practice, called "soft security," ensures that the registration process is efficient, not a bottleneck to project growth.

(7) Non-perfectionism.  Individuals working alone may be perfectionists; many collaborators cannot, not without huge inefficiencies.  Individuals may work for an indefinite period on works and create something that they think is virtually perfect.  But in collaborative work, such perfectionism is something that could be achieved only through elaborate and time-consuming bureaucratic processes.  Such processes, and thus perfectionism itself, are incompatible with the efficient, dynamic content production systems we wish to develop for the Citizendium.

[Larry Sanger]

Comments requested.  This is a draft.  The final version, with a governance proposal, will be posted on Citizendium-L.

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A defense of sortition
======================

In choosing leaders, we have, perhaps, two main goals, which are closely related: first, wise decisionmaking, or governing well; second, avoiding the abuse of authority.  Democracy, as a method of choosing leaders, is favored in Western societies in large part not because people believe voting is the best way to choose a leader who will govern well, but because this is the only method of choosing leaders that the people believe will not abuse their authority.  Due to the risks inherent in authoritarianism generally, it is often regarded as more important to avoid the worst evils of bad government than to secure the possibility of the greatest benefits of good government.

Sortition takes this democratic tendency to accept modest aims one step further than voting (i.e., than casting ballots for different choices).  Sortition is any process of choosing leaders by "drawing lots."  It has been of some interest among online innovators as a way to manage online communities.  One essay describes some of its advantages this way:

"By its objectivity, sortition avoids the engagement of passions and interests. ... The quietness of the process gives it dignity; the absence of manipulation confers legitimacy on it. Thus, sortition is especially apposite for selecting one among equals for the distinctly unequal position of holding the right to command others." 

See: http://www.constitution.org/elec/sortition_knag.htm

There is good reason to believe that if we Citizens were to vote on candidates for leadership positions of the Citizendium, some indirect outcomes might turn out to be quite undesirable.  We may make all the rules we like regarding neutrality, but if politicking is a permitted means of securing editorship, or more generally, if the system can be gamed, it may not matter what the rules are: persons of a particular outlook may come into power, solidify that power, and proceed to use the Citizendium as an influential platform for their ideology.  Given the radicalization both of much of politics today and of very many academics, it is merely a matter of how quickly the Citizendium would become beholden to certain ideological views.  Balloting may be an appropriate way to select leaders of a democratic republic--we need take no position on that question here--but due to the high risk of politicking and thus bias, it seems to be a suboptimal way to select leaders of a neutral, credible information resource.

The assumption I am making with this argument is, of course, that persons who go to the trouble of running for an office would be more apt to use their authority to advance their ideology, and otherwise to abuse their authority, than persons who are randomly chosen and who serve out of a sense of civic duty, or even involuntarily (as in the case of the American jury system).  But this is surely the case.  Persons are frequently attracted to influential positions of political power and editorial authority from motives of a desire to "change the world"--to change it, of course, in the direction of their personal ideology.  Persons motivated to serve in public office because they have a laudable desire for good government in some generic sense, or simply because they want facts reported accurately, are very rare indeed.

A successful Citizendium would place its leadership in precisely the positions of authority coveted by ideologically-motivated journalists, educators, and politicians.  After all, encyclopedia articles, freely available to all and written in order to be as accessible as possible, would be very influential; the ability to control what information those articles contain is tantamount to controlling what general background beliefs the uninformed will have about a subject.  This is indeed why some people can get quite upset about whatever they perceive as false in Wikipedia articles.  Moreover, this is why Wikipedia has attracted all sorts of ideologues who "squat" on articles, ensuring that they speak with a particular bias.

Sortition, by contrast, would create temporary leaders, many of whom are not too excited about their leadership roles, and who are more apt to conceive of their role as one of responsible stewardship, rather than of a sought-for opportunity for manipulation.  The judgments to come out of such a situation are not so apt to be, at least, motivated by self-interest or by a desire to reshape the world according to a political philosophy or religion or other ideology.

Perhaps the strongest and most obvious argument against sortition is that random selection will inevitably result in mediocre leadership, or less-prepared leadership, anyway, than what voters would choose.  Voters tend to choose well-qualified people, even if those people are indeed *also* ideologically motivated to run for office.  But just as there are many systems of voting, there are many possible systems of sortition.  And there are ways to set up a system of sortition that does a sort of pre-selection based on objective criteria, or based on a preliminary poll that includes all of an eligible class who have not specifically declined an assignment in advance.

There is a related, practical objection.  In a relatively small group (and, in the beginning, we are sure to have many small groups), there might be some one or two persons who are *clearly* more qualified than any other person for the job.  Surely it would be ridiculous--someone might say--for a second-rate scholar to be chief subject editor of a discipline (say), when there is some first-rate, perfectly suitable (and willing) scholar available.  The danger here is that, in walks of life where seniority and status are so important, it may be quite off-putting if positions of authority are not made matters of seniority and status.

Here again I think it is possible for there to be enough of a process of sortition to avoid the advent of politicking, while (for some positions, particularly editorial management positions) there be some way to limit leadership roles to the most clearly qualified candidates.  For straightforward representative positions, however, high minimum benchmarks are clearly inappropriate.

Of course, the option that many nonprofit organizations choose is to appoint all important positions "from the top" and forget any democratic pretenses.  There are two serious difficulties with this, however, either one of which would be enough to make it inappropriate for the Citizendium project.  (1) As a strongly collaborative content creation project, the Citizendium will benefit deeply from, and its success may actually require, the perception (and perhaps the reality as well) that the project is ultimately in the hands of its committed participants.  This will help to secure the maximum number of collaborators; and failure of such "rule by participants" might actually mean the project never reaches critical mass in the first place--which is the fate of very many nonprofit and educational projects, after all.  (2) Appointments by a Board would enjoy far less legitimacy among the community than a system of sortition or some other democratic system.  Lack of legitimacy threatens not just to bring in fewer collaborators, by alienating many influential people, it threatens the survival of the project itself.

The conclusion I have come to, then, is that some kind of sortition is the preferable method of choosing leaders for the Citizendium project.  As you can see, I have given this some thought, but which remains tentative in my mind, because I'm very much aware that I am not an expert on these matters, and perhaps there are contrary arguments of which I have not fully seen the force.

[Perry Spiller]

A Couple of Points

The word "Intellectuals"

I have some concerns about the use of the word
"intellectual," where such gives the impression of exclusion
of others.

On my office wall I have a home-made beatitude:

Blessed are the practical, for they shall give substance to the
visions of the dreamers.

I think we need visionaries, intellectuals and eminently
practical people, all inclusive.

Disputes Resolution

Differences of opinion will occur. If some resolution process
is defined, please, please, may the referees/adjudicators/
whatever group have a majority membership and chair-person
drawn from people outside the project.

[Duncan Spence]

Perry,

I would have no hesitation describing myself as an intellectual ... this is simply what I am, to deny it would be like saying that water is not wet ... but I am most certainly not an academic. It is the word "academic" that is haunted by impressions of exclusion.

Why should disputes be resolved? Surely it would be appropriate in some cases to actually highlight disputes. There are always matters upon which intellectuals will dispute without resolution.

[Larry Sanger]

I have some concerns about the use of the word
"intellectual," where such gives the impression of exclusion
of others.

I shall endeavor to make my language more inclusive!

Why should disputes be resolved? Surely it would be appropriate in some cases to actually highlight disputes. There are always matters upon which intellectuals will dispute without resolution.

I think Perry is right that we need a dispute resolution process and he was right to observe that I didn't include one.  Disputes need to be resolved because they are disruptive.  Presumably there can be disputes about many other things than how an article should be biased.  If we agree with neutrality as a bedrock principle, we also agree that disputes about how an article should be biased should never be permitted, because articles should never officially favor even strongly majority views.  But there will be other sorts of disputes.  We will dispute about whether a claim is neutral or not, whether a person deserves to be an editor, whether someone should continue to be allowed to be on the wiki at all, etc.  Many, many opportunities for dispute, which need peaceful means of resolution in order to keep everybody as happy as possible.

[lyle]

Hi All,

First off I'm very happy to have caught up with this new project this morning as independently I have been working on a citizen journalism project. Here is where I am at and I'd really appreciate some feedback as to where this may fit in with the Citizendium project:

Citizen Journalism
This project was influenced by the report We Media: http://www.mediacenter.org/pages/mc/research/we_media/
and owes a deep gratitude to Steve Outing’s work on Poynter.org, in particular, his blog on 11 layers of Citizen Journalism: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=83126

and discussions on how to finance a citizen journalism venture: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=96917

This proposes a Cooperative Media project involving two legal entities. A Non-profit public educational charity and a Cooperative of Citizen Journalists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism. 

The proposal is for the formation of a Federation of Citizen Journalists organized co-operatively in which membership is open to all that agree with the aims of the co-operative and pay a nominal membership fee. The aim of the project is to encourage quality news reporting and blogging and the networking of citizen journalists and citizen bloggers. Some would argue this project to be a part of Social Media and Web 2.0 but see the criticisms (both of which this project attempts to disarm) of these concepts here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

This project is unique in the sense that it can be distinguished from myspace.com, youtube.com and wiki news because it will not be privately owned or anonymous as in wiki news. The members of the cooperative would control the organization democratically.

A membership fee would entitle people to have voice and vote in the cooperative. One member One Vote. The cooperative enterprise of journalists would fund itself through membership dues. Membership fees set so as not to discourage people from becoming engaged. Minorities underrepresented in current media encouraged to join.

An Editorial Board would be made up of members of the Cooperative. Small size all members editors. At a certain size members of the editorial board would be elected.

The project would hope to learn from recent failures in this area: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/20/those_missing_media_voices.php
http://www.markcarey.com/blogcoop/paper.html
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/17/23933/5831
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2006/12/21/lobbyists-journalists-and-bloggers-boundaries-blur-at-the-wall-street-journal/
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/12/by_some_measure.html
http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1348
http://www.participate.net/node/1358
http://bayosphere.com/aboutcitizenjournalism

And, of course, successes:
http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/002226.php
http://www.newassignment.net/
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/
http://www.mediabloggers.org/
http://www.ireporter.org/ http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/061216_Bentley/
http://www.biofuels.coop/
http://www.innercitypress.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03glover.html?ex=1167541200&en=42fd68b0e834d891&ei=5070
http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles]http://www.blogher.org/
[url]http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles
http://www.rsf.org/
http://www.opensecrets.org
http://www.cpn.org/
http://www.ourmedia.org


The following domain names have been purchased for this project:

CITIZENSJOURNALISM.ORG
CITIZENSJOURNALISTS.COM
CITIZENSJOURNALIST.COM
CITIZENSJOURNALISTS.ORG
CITIZENJOURNALIST.ORG
CITIZENJOURNALISTS.ORG
CITIZENSJOURNALISTS.NET
CITIZENSJOURNALIST.ORG
CITIZENBLOG.ORG
CITIZENSBLOG.ORG
CITIZENSBLOGS.COM
CITIZENSBLOGS.ORG
CITIZENBLOGS.ORG
CITIZENSNEWS.ORG

The details concerning each website would be a part of further work as support for the idea is garnered but initial ideas are to have a different aspect of Citizen Journalism on each domain name as mentioned in Steve Outing’s 11 layers of Citizen Journalism. The best stories would be chosen by the board of editors and posted on http://www.citizensnews.org 


Further research into the exact nature of a supporting charitable organization would be undertaken. Initial thoughts are that donations would be accepted from the reading general public and other sympathetic organizations. The charitable mission being public education about citizen journalism. 


Who might be interested:

The general public.

Creative Commons Licensing http://www.creativecommons.org

News Feeds

News services that collate stories online such as http://www.commondreams.org

News organizations

Schools and Universities in citizenship programmes

Journalism schools especially online http://www.ojr.org/
http://poynter.org/

Public radio and TV

Other Cooperatives.

Photojournalists. http://www.magnumphotos.com
 
Filmakers. http://www.film-makerscoop.com/

Any advice, thoughts or feedback greatly appreciated,

Thanking you in advance,

Lyle Mitchell

[Larry Sanger]

Lyle, all I can say is "best of luck" in this new venture!  In connection to this board's topic, it would be interesting to hear more ideas about the project's governance.

[lyle]

Thanks Larry. Should my post then be put in the journalism section do you think? I do realise you are setting Citizendium up as a non-profit. Did you think of setting up citizendia as a cooperative?

[Larry Sanger]

Thanks Larry. Should my post then be put in the journalism section do you think? I do realise you are setting Citizendium up as a non-profit. Did you think of setting up citizendia as a cooperative?

You could advertise the project in the journalism section, sure.  Please see my earlier posts about CZ's governance.  Does that count as a "cooperative" or not?

[Pat_Palmer]

Three sections really caught my interest.

(v) ...it is extremely important to avoid, as much as possible, acrimonous conflicts, both political and personal, among participants.  Collaboration is difficult in the fact of conflict, and so in a collaborative project, conflict demands a resolution.  But resolutions of conflict, if one-sided, have a tendency to concentrate power in the hands of the victorious party and subsequently to produce a successful "party line" in the victorious factions.  Such a party line could then bias the content of the Citizendium. The method of resolving disputes, therefore, must tend as much as possible to defuse situations rather than to declare victors, and the governance mechanisms of the Citizendium should be established as much as possible to avoid conflict in the first place.

Based on my 25 years in the computer industry (as a woman, and it's still somewhat of a man's world in terms of communications style--probably a genderist thing to say, for which I apologize in advance), the above is so apt as to make me want to weep.  I find this to be a "value" that we should advertise and embrace whenever possible.

(5) Term limits.  Furthermore, positions of authority--other than those shared by very large numbers of people, such as the position of editor--should be limited by term.  This should include the position of Editor-in-Chief.  This should, like sortition, tend to reduce the amount of politicking and ideological warfare that might threaten the neutrality of the Citizendium.

I have been a member of a local community group for more than twenty years; it is a "true democracy", in that no one person has any actual authority.  It is governed by a "benevolent board" elected by the membership at large.  We did have a period where a very controlling person, who happened to discourage many volunteers by dent of over-perfectionism, kept being re-elected to the board and in fact, managed to get term limits disabled by a vote of the uncaring masses.  When things got bad enough, long-time friends of this person finally rallied in secret to gracefully find a less controlling role for that person.  The removal of this one roadblock took 2 years or more.  Just a little object lesson in what can happen without term limits, to help ease the pain when a widely liked performer is forced to step aside because of them.

(7) Non-perfectionism.  Individuals working alone may be perfectionists; many collaborators cannot, not without huge inefficiencies.  Individuals may work for an indefinite period on works and create something that they think is virtually perfect.  But in collaborative work, such perfectionism is something that could be achieved only through elaborate and time-consuming bureaucratic processes.  Such processes, and thus perfectionism itself, are incompatible with the efficient, dynamic content production systems we wish to develop for the Citizendium.

This is the one part where I simply feel, well, conflict I guess.  I understand the dangers both of perfectionism and giving in on matters that really matter.  This is where deep expertise, either in writing and presentation styles, or in the subject at hand, or both, can come in conflict with democratic ideals.  As a longtime writer of manuals and technical manuals, I've found that about 75% of all suggestions for changes from others are beneficial.

But sometimes I really don't like the suggestions or changes.  I've school myself to override my basic instincts and accept the vast majority of suggestions for change from others in the interest of preserving good working relationships, but I do occasionally have to draw a line in the sand.

At that point, if the party or parties who disagree also draw a line in the sand (or worse yet, simply aren't really listening), it's necessary to fall back on neutral arbitration, which in Citizendium would be (I think) first an Editor or Editors, and if still not satisfied, perhaps the Constabulary.  Did I get that right?

I think I'm confusing myself here :-(  Better stop for now!

- Pat