[top-politics] Re: Definition of TOP - need to finish our goal (parlement)

13/09/06 15:39 <Markus Schatten>

[top-politics] Re: Definition of TOP - Systematization

Dear group members,

In a phone conversation Gale and me agreed that I should create a systematization of the discusion about the definition of TOP to see which parts are essentially important to us.
Since we agreed on two things (if I understood right) about the way how should the definition be achieved: (1) Strategic planning (Where we are now?, Where we want to be? How we plan to get there?) and (2) Autopoietic (OpenSource) approach through editing and adding content to the definition we have on the wiki (http://top.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main/TOP). Also we agreed (correct me if I am wrong) on the answers to the first two questions of strategic planning (Where we are now and Where we want to be) where the answers were that we are in a position where we don’t have a good definition of TOP and we want a definition behind which we will stand 100%. This answers are only part I know, but let me elaborate further. Now, lets see how we can achieve the stated in the first two questions (e.g. get the answer to the third question).
First let me try to state which essential parts came into play during disscussion.

In the threads “First goal: Definition of
TOP” (http://groups.google.com/group/top-politics/browse_thread/thread/4a54bfb6539f7049/#), “Definition of TOP” (http://groups.google.com/group/top-politics/browse_thread/thread/2601aa9e132fd542/#), “What can 4 of us actually do? / What does TOP mean to you?” (http://groups.google.com/group/top-politics/browse_frm/thread/01463d9906483418?tvc=1) and “Definition of TOP – need to finish our
goal” (http://groups.google.com/group/top-politics/browse_thread/thread/303d810256bedea6/36be706d548fff27#36be706d548fff27) the following issues came to attention which I try to systemize and on which should be decided:

I. Document elements: -———————————

The opinion that internet and politics will integrate with one another in some ways

ii. Gaining some political importance and attract attention

iii. Change the way information in political processes is shared

iv. Change the way people can enter in politics

v. How politics should be held on the internet, or using the internet

vi. Set of rules person/organsation had to carry out if it wants to act in TOP manner

vii. Transparent action includes publishing, explaining and documenting appropriate documents of its vision, mission and goal statements of action including plans and strategies on how to accomplish them. This documents also include discussion templates, results, conclusions etc.

viii. The main goal of transparent action is a elaborated, total and integral decision making process transparent and available to the public.

ix. A person, organization or option should have a public forum where the public can comment the persons, organizations or options action. This forum must have a fully non censored public part which is continuously and in a line on-line available. Information on this forum should be public and allways available for later references e.g. it should be replicable.

x. Open action is such action on which the public has influence i.e. action which can be changed by the public under the condition that the result of such a change is open again.

xi. Open action gives every person, option or organization the opportunity of process involvement.

xii. If some person, option or organization wants to act open, it has to insure continuous contact and discussion with the public. This is in accordance with the concept of a forum where the public has the opportunity to discus and where every single individual is involved through a clearly distinguishable criteria.

xiii. Every document created through transparent and public action is thus openstanding.

xiv. Every person, option or organization should take every meaningful critique, suggestion, comment and idea of the public, discus it and, if they find it usefull, include it an the appropriate document.

xv. Public action is such action which is available to the public, allways and at will and which is oriented towards the public.

xvi. If a person, option or organization wants to act public it has to insure continuous public availability of information about their action.

xvii. Public available information is information which is publicly available in a clearly articulated form. This information should be available to everyone interested in it over the Internet. This information can be available through other mediae but the Internet is obligatory.

xviii. Any official action should be documented in the appropriate document.

xix. A person, option or organization is TOP and can thus become a certificate if its action is transparent, open and public according to the definition of TOP and has an elaborated integral decision making process.

xx. TOP is the acronym for Transparent, Open and Public in reference to the governance of the country or in the conduct of public business.

xxi. What is open and public in governance will make it transparent as well.

xxii. TOP clearly does not apply to private exchanges on private matters among the public officials or on public matters among private individuals.

xxiii. Apart from the discussion process, the discussion minutes and other documents and records should be available online to anyone who wants access to them, especially those who are participating or interested in the discussions.

xxv. Transparent means that every decision and/or project fullfiled by a political organization, individual or initiative should be fully documented so every interested individual can follow the reasons any decision was made.Transparent means to me that every decision and/or project fullfiled by a political organization, individual or initiative should be fully documented so every interested individual can follow the reasons any decision was made.

xxvi. Open means open in the sense of OpenSource. Every project and/or decision fullfiled by a political organization, individual and/or initiative should be open for participation for every interested individual. This means that every person who wants to can and should participate.

xxvii. Public means that every decision and/or project fullfiled by a political organization, individual and/or initiative should be public available and oriented towards the public.

xxviii. TOP are principles that define how politics should evolve in the coming times. They apply on the processes themselves, the electronic processes. It’s a basis of democracy on the net.

xxix. There is one test which would validate the application of transparency => replicability. Anybody should be able to copy in real time a political process that applies the transparency principles. Replicability is a test proving this state of fact.

xxx. Open participation is to allow anybody to enter in the process. No barrier to entry.

xxxi. There are exceptions to TOP:

a personal password or PGP private key can be kept private
participating in an electoral process does not imply to be counted (or that would allow easy cheating on a large scale using electronic persona)
the relationship between a physical identity and a persona can be kept secret
national security, “raison d’état” That last point is highly dubious, machiavel did say that everything in the state was a matter of “raison d’état”. Thus it should be very strictly circumvented.

xxxii. There is one test that could be useful: everything recorded has to be made public.

xxxiii. All important decisions must be fully transparent. The whole process should be open and public with sufficient media coverage including the internet. At this point of time, public participation should be welcome and encouraged wherever practical, especially online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and with elected or appointed discussion leaders.

xxxiv. There shall be no prohibition of public employees from having private discussion on any public matter.

xxxv. All government recorded information should be made public.

xxxvi. All democratic processes should be made so transparent that they can be replicated in real time

xxxvii. Transparent, open and public principles supplement each other in defining the fundamental standards of a genuinely democratic organization.

xxxviii. A transparent organization must ensure full, accurate, and timely disclosure of actions and information. Its actions and their justifications must remain intelligible and clear. Users are able to fully audit any decision, information, process or other feature of the organization. It therefore implies keeping a record of discussions, decisions, documents and any other supporting material in an accessible format. An elaborated, total and integral decision making process must be defined in accordance with TOP principles. Practically, one who doesn’t know anything about the organization should be able to gain full knowledge of it, to the point that the organization and its information could be duplicated should one wish to do so.

xxxix. An open organization, process, action or otherwise can be changed by any person or entity under the condition that the result of such a change remains open. Open action gives every person or entity the opportunity to get involved in the process and propose alterations. This implies that any open system must be opensource. Furthermore, discussions, processes, deliberations, documents and any other feature must remain openstanding.

xl. A public organization, its processes, information and actions must be accessible without censorship or restrictions to any member of the public. Accessibility must be ensured at all times over the internet. Information must be organized so as to allow quick and effective access. Public information should be available in a clearly articulated form so as to be accessible to non-specialists. An uncensored public forum must be made available for comments on the organization itself. This forum must be maintained so that it remains transparent, open and public according to the definitions in this document.

xli. An entity is TOP and can thus become a certificate if it demonstrates it functions in accordance with transparent, open and public principles according to this document and has an elaborated integral decision making process.

II. Document structure: -———————————- i. Different aspects of TOP (political, sociological, psychological, organizational, philosophical etc.)

ii. Three essential parts of TOP transparency, openness and publicity.

III. Important issues to consider:

The definition needs to be clear and catchy in order to penetrate easily

ii. A good definition of TOP is an important start. Decisionmaking should be the next step.

iii. The definition should guide our future actions

iv. All of us should stand behind the definition 100%

v. The categories of transparent, open and public action are interconnected, they supplement each other since none of them embraces the whole field needed by this idea

vi. There is an obvious need, especially in the early stages, for non-public discussions or consultations among colleagues working on a public issue, matter or project. Perhaps, once when the official papers are finalized and presented to the appropriate authority for consideration and eventual approval, the whole process should be open and public with sufficient media coverage including the internet.

vii. Are there any exceptions to the TOP Principles? Perhaps: 1 The Secrecy of the Vote; 2 National security and state secrets; and 3 Any other matter where the body or authority responsible consider it a necessity in the national interests not to be open and public. For Points 2 and 3, there has to be an elected or appointed independent body to review the decisions or recommendations not to be open and public, and the decision of this independent body should be make public and published in the media and the internet. In the context of true democracy, the exceptions will be subject to the final say of the citizens through the use of the Citizens’ Initiative or Referendum (I&R), if any citizen disagrees with the decision of the independent body.

viii. Informal consultations could be very harmful to the later stages since what’s concluded and decided in such closed halls could put a totally wrong agenda when it comes to public opinion and participation. Shortly spoken: The privilege of problem formulae should not be kept by the inner circles.

ix. We should set up standards that can easily distinct initiatives that enable public participation from those that do not.

x. articulation of individuals who set some policies. More info we have, more people can support such policies with no fear of loosing of public support. If there are some “mystery” issues that individuals do not find appropriate due to any reason to public, the way to realize them is putting their word, their reputation on probation. So, it is up to the public should they legitimate those mystery ones, or those fully transparent.

xi. Silence majority concept leads to schizophrenia of power, making the whole process being declarative, not real one. If we want to create system be fully legitimated, it needs to mediate the power as clear as possible in order to preserve its status. If it is not being done, power disharmony tends to destroy legitimacy of such a system.

xii. TOP as a framework for political action. TOP should be the reason that will allow good people to behave good and reward them for being good (by saying good I mean it in the broadest sense of the word).

xiii. Decision making for setting policies has to be TOP. What about running operational processes, here comes the question. I suppose it is up to the body. If the body is some public object, we might not care about what is being done inside it if it does not want to be runned publicly. If it wants, I suppose we should support it also.

xiv. TOP must disable opportunistic behavior in order to succeed.

xv. An important issue about information control is that it is decentralized, dissabling creation of the centers that are obviously superior to those who are not informed.

xvi. The idea of an infrastructure which would allow “closing inside openness”. To “close” organizations/individuals/initiatives (oii’s) there should be something like a licence which would allow the use of TOP information only by TOP certified oii’s. Thus the infrastructure consists of a licence, a standard and a certificate as elaborated some time ago on this group. In this way TOP oii’s would be in some way protected against nonTOP oii’s. How to articulate such a standard and such a licence is another issue. If I remember well once as I was analyzing GPL licences I saw that people of the FSF are often willing to support the development of new licenses, so maybe we should contact them and ask for support?

xvii. A criteria to determine if an organization is strongly transparent => if it publishes enough data so as to be able to setup a duplicate organization of itself. This is particularly useful in democratic settings, where a duplicability criteria would help in order to audit any process and its data.

xviii. One average person should be able to verify is some organization is TOP or not

xix. Public, why should anybody on this planet have any right on a TOP organization just because he is part of the “public”? Why not limit it to “its public”? (or participants)

As you can see I tried to shorten down the whole communication about the definition of TOP concentrating on Elements, Structure and Issues to be considered (if I missed any important thing please bring it to my attention). The definition we have (the one on the wiki) is still not satisfactory (even Serge did a great job in editing it) since some issues weren’t considered and are still not included in the definition. Maybe a good way to approach the definition would be to imagine todays politicians and political organizations (in a broad sense) and try to see if this definition excludes non-democratic and non-TOP entities. IMHO it doesn’t. Another issue which hasn’t been included are concrete steps which an organization or individual must make in order to be TOP.
Since only a little has been proposed about structure I think this should be our first focus, e.g. how should the definition look like and what should it cover?
If we create structure we can easily fill the elements of the definition in. One proposal is to create structure according to different aspects of TOP e.g. political, sociological, psychological, organizational, philosophical etc.), maybe this is a start. Or we can focus on the structure we have now (Introduction, Transparent, Open, Public, Conclusion, References). Any other proposals?

Best regards

— Markus Schatten, dipl. inf.
e-mail: markus.schatten@foi.hr
http://www.tiaktiv.hr

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12/09/06 14:35 <illegale>

+1 !

PS. This is step forward IMO indeed. Yet, I hope that in one of the next definitions we will explain some other functional parts that are not involved in this very moment (for an example – idea od certificate is centralised idea in this very moment. One average person should (and i belive can) be able to verify is some org. TOP or not , use of TOP definition etc..)

ATB,
Gale

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13/09/06 14:03 <echarp>

Transparency I appreciate.

That an open organisation allow its public to modify it, not only that, but that everything must remain openstanding, seem most interesting.

Public, why should anybody on this planet have any right on a TOP organisation just because he is part of the “public”? Why not limit it to “its public”? (or participants)

+1

echarp – http://leparlement.org/irc

On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 11:53:04AM ~~0000, Serge wrote:~~

Hey,Modified the wiki over the weekend, tried to keep the elements whileadding some and making it more concise overall. Any comments orreaction?

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13/09/06 15:49 <Serge>

Hi,

Good to see that you think this is going in the right direction.

As to the question of why an open forum, it has several uses. Since we all agree that deliberation can’t involve everyone on the planet otherwise it gets smothered by the sheer volume of information present, and that a degree of delegation of the “right to speak” is desirable, an open forum would act as a direct deliberation tool for these who may feel their views aren’t being heard within the deliberative forum. Should there be a consensus coming out of a public forum in parallel to a deliberation, it is certainly something that should be accounted for in the deliberation.
An open forum would not in any way be a major feature of the deliberative process of an organisation based on TOP principles but should be viewed as a guarantee of openness. Its very existence would probably discourage most attempts at hijacking or manipulating a debate. One could conceive such a forum as being part of the organization, yet with independant administrators from these handling regular info/deliberation/voting, so as to ensure that such an open forum would be an effective “check and balance”.

This is however only my understanding of a concept that was on the page beforehand, and Gale or Markus may have quite different views on why an open forum may be needed.

Regards,

Serge

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- 13/09/06 16:36 <echarp>
  
  On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 01:49:25PM -0000, Serge wrote:
  Good to see that you think this is going in the right direction.
  It’s brief and understandable. I definitely like that :)
  
  As to the question of why an open forum, it has several uses….An open forum would not in any way be a major feature of thedeliberative process of an organisation based on TOP principles butshould be viewed as a guarantee of openness….This is however only my understanding of a concept that was on the pagebeforehand, and Gale or Markus may have quite different views on why anopen forum may be needed.
  
  That was also my understanding. Yet I don’t see the interest in a society with a free flow of informations. Anybody can set up and administer any forum on any subject.
  
  Why then require a forum of someone?
  
  echarp – http://leparlement.org
  
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13/09/06 13:10 <Markus Schatten>

+1

Very good corrections indeed ;-)

Best regards

— Markus Schatten, dipl. inf.
e-mail: markus.schatten@foi.hr
http://www.tiaktiv.hr

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12/09/06 14:35 <illegale>

+1 !

PS. This is step forward IMO indeed. Yet, I hope that in one of the next definitions we will explain some other functional parts that are not involved in this very moment (for an example – idea od certificate is centralised idea in this very moment. One average person should (and i belive can) be able to verify is some org. TOP or not , use of TOP definition etc..)

ATB,
Gale

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[top-politics] Re: Definition of TOP - need to finish our goal

[top-politics] Re: Definition of TOP - Systematization