An Open Source Country

An improvement I can think right now is that only citizens, with no 2nd+ citizenship, and only while they are inside the borders of the country, should be able to participate in the process, and this should also be a hard rule 😀

Fascinating idea.

Could be tried initially on a smaller-scale, like in a medium-size city or town. Or even an organization, like the United States Chess Federation.

Hey, makes sense. One problem I have with testing it in a smaller scale, especially when you would already need a multi-disciplinary group, for a city for example, is the loss of the collective intelligence that a large group of people bring to open source projects. But maybe it would just slow it down, and the end solution could still be a very good one 😀

Another potential problem that might arise in bigger, more diverse groups, is that whatever ends up being the chosen set of laws, will always be the will of the majority. Not sure if there is a way around this, but somehow I still believe that this way would be less problematic than relying on politicians with authority to make the laws. But I have no way to prove this, and I might be 100% wrong.

Someone could also say that, if besides being a specialist in economics, foreign relatons, law, you would also have to be very computer savvy, this would reduce the participation and lead to a dictatorship, a technocracy, or whatever. I disagree. In this system, any person really willing to participate, can participate, and will participate. They just have to put the effort and the intellect to learn and then just do it. E.g. the lawyers responsible for the justice system would also have to learn to a reasonably high standard computer science, same for economists etc.

Maybe a bigger weakness would be that, at least at the beginning, you need one person, or a small group of highly motivated ones, to do the first version. Think Linus Torvalds with Linux, Satoshi Nakamoto for Bitcoin etc.

By the way, yes, I think we need to rely on computers for this. What I was thinking would use blockchain for example.

Anyway, I am talking too much LOL. Still curious how many people think this would work (with improvements), how many think it's the stupidest thing you ever read on the internet,...

Cheers!

Well you need maintainers who would decide what gets merged into the code base. Maybe call them a "House" because for a country you'd need a good number. But maybe you should also have a group of reviewers called them the "Senate" and then we actually only update the code if the House and the Senate agree. But maybe you want some checks and balances on the system and so better have a group, let's call them the Judicial Branch, who makes sure the House and Senate are passing code updates consistent with a shared set of values that can of course be updated but not in an easy or flippant way. But there is some risk to the system of external attacks better have one guy at least focused on interactions with open source systems outside the project who might try to attack, let's call her the President.

You can have all those structures in a decentralized way. In a way that would be more open, fully transparent. Little to no gatekeeping. Anyone can assume any of those roles at any time, with the only barrier being knowledge, not money or connections. As long as all the structures get truly decentralized, I don't think lobbying would really be a thing. No capital city. Looks like a very direct form of democracy to me, to be fully honest.

But I get that looking at the structure, it's still similar with a system we already know 😀

How do you set up the rules for making rules before the rules exist?

Seems a lot like direct democracy. So you still have the problem of protecting human rights and liberties from the tyranny of the majority and coming up with majority thresholds like 51%, 67%, etc. Plus the law is a ton more nuanced than JS.

You got me 😀

Thinking about it, this is a problem that is addressed by the constitution, so the constitution is the first thing that should come, and in this country it will be the set of hard rules. You need actual people, like in pretty much any newly independent country, to make this document.

In the case of this particular country, the only viable way (?) would be for this constitution to be set once, and it would never change afterwards. Only the laws will change.

Agree. This looks like the biggest, most problematic issue with a system like that. I have no solution.

The idea might work if it’s treated as an additional layer on top of the current system, not a replacement for it.

1. Constitutional layer – The Constitution stays the foundation. It protects rights and keeps separation of powers, enforced by courts like the Supreme Court.

2. Representative layer – Laws are still passed by Congress.

3. Citizen “open-source” layer – Citizens could propose ideas, comment on draft legislation, and trigger hearings if proposals reach a support threshold.

That wouldn’t require changing the Constitution. Absolutely would require changing Congress to pass it though.

Where does the Scrum Master go?

Your proposal is civil law on steroids. Instead of legal precedent, you envision legal code as the basis for decision-making, with the addition of technology and political system that makes the legal code derive from direct democracy. Essentially, it is a democracy without a legislative assembly, merely the people, the executive and the judicial branch.

Of course, it is hazy on the details. Which is fine, but a lot of the interesting debate exists in what is missing. How is authority chosen or appointed? How does judicial decisions work? How is the judiciary appointed or chosen?

For any political system, whenever you introduce authority into the mix, you always end up with complex issue. Authority comes with the political luxury of interpretation and allocating resources. Basically, authority gets to choose how to interpret a legal or political code, but they also get to choose how much effort (if any) they put into actually enforcing violations of said code.

That can be a matter of practicality: This would be the case where there are too many laws, too many crimes or too little resources to enforce everything. It can also be a matter of corruption: This would be the case where there are laws and the resources to handle them, but the government chooses not to for its own gain or personal gain.

Violence is also a difficult issue to handle in hypothetical political systems. Will you monopolize violence? If so, where is the limit between freedom and tyranny and who decides it? Will you not monopolize violence, if so where is the limit between self defense and assault, and who decides it? The voluntaryist (actually not a spelling error) approach has generally been to say that violence shall not exist, but you do not need to be a particularly skilled student of history to see that this approach raises some concerns.

If we go less deep and simply see it more as a technological approach to organizing an already well-functioning society, then sure - the technology makes it feasible. However, there are still issues that are tricky to resolve. A technological approach makes it difficult to see coercion: You can manage to be reasonably certain of who logged on, but that does not mean it is the same person doing the activity - a debate that also plagues issues such as digital voting or voting by mail. The digital technology (I assume it is digital) required for your proposal is also vulnerable to attack and disruption, and will exist in the same war between defender and attacker that plagues other activities where identity is important.

And ultimately, the success of any political system hinges on culture and norms. It takes a lot of history and generations to make people trust power structures, but it can erode fast.

OP why not write a Science Fiction book about your idea? It would help you flesh out the details, and if it goes well you might write a best seller! You could call it "Gulliver in Agile Land"! 😀