A Community Vision for Political and Economic Participation

Synopsis: A Civic Internet is a proposed community-structure to concentrate the combined influence of average people. Its purpose is to shift the balance-of-power in order to establish a more fair and sustainable distribution of political decisions and economic resources.

The concept of a Civic Internet is a network of online communities that interconnect  through a Shared Protocol. This protocol will guide how people interact with one another, make decisions and take actions. The idea comes from an essay called The Realism Manifesto: A Vision to Reclaim the American Dream which proposes a new political and economic reality for people with non-preferential influence.

Structure: The structure of a Civic Internet will connect many small groups of people to form an extended network of communities. These core groups are called Social Blocks, and they will become the building blocks of a Civic Internet. Social Blocks comprise maybe six to ten households or about one to two dozen people, large enough to create meaningful groups yet small enough to maintain personal relationships. A primary function of these Social Blocks will be to imbue a strong sense of community throughout the Civic Internet. Social Blocks will form around such things as shared personal relationships (family, friends), shared interests and activities (hunting, fishing, etc.), shared beliefs, (churches, etc.) and shared work (employers, professions, etc.). To nurture strong personal relationships between members, blocks will participate in various social activities and interactions. For example, they’ll regularly interact to discuss issues relevant to them, or engage in group activities. In this way, members will develop a stronger sense of social identity toward their respective blocks. Building a Civic Internet on a foundation of Social Blocks, instead of individual memberships, will result in a more cohesive and collaborative community.

Blocks will then interconnect to form larger groups. For example, a network of say 10-20 blocks could become a neighborhood of roughly 250-500 people. Groups of 10-20 neighborhoods could form boroughs, resulting in communities of 2,500 to 5,000. Groups of boroughs could merge into municipalities approximating actual cities and towns. Municipalities might then combine within county boundaries, thus lining up with county-wide issues & elections. County groups could re-form themselves into Districts that elect Representatives to the U.S. House. Districts would then combine into state-wide communities that impact state-level positions such as Governor and state-wide issues, as well as the election of US Senators. The final level is to form state-level communities into a nationwide community network.

Shared Protocol: To enable blocks to collaborate around common objectives, participants in a Civic Internet will interact by means of a Shared Protocol. The protocol will define the necessary behaviors, inputs and outputs for various tasks and initiatives. It will function as an organizational framework that defines and moderates the block structure, enables blocks to interact and communicate, enforces block compliance, and enables the community to collectively make decisions, take actions, aggregate political and economic resources, and define shared by-laws, platforms and missions.

This organizational mechanism – the Shared Protocol – will coordinate many inputs, processes and outputs in order to execute large, complex projects over extended periods of time. This is in contrast to other social communities such as Facebook that consist of many independent “actors” performing uncoordinated actions.

Community Power: In order to leverage community power, a Civic Internet will form itself into a series of Community Platforms. These Community Platforms will concentrate political and economic power by aggregating the influence of many blocks. For example, there could be Community Platforms that aggregate and coordinate voting to influence legislative outcomes, or coordinate activism in such areas as research, media and campaigning. Another major role for Community Platforms will relate to the economic interests of community participants. This is because a primary function of Community Platforms will be to concentrate the community’s economic power. By funneling a portion of member incomes through these platforms a Civic Internet will function as a big co-op. Then, by coordinating the purchases of many participating households, the network will leverage its aggregate purchasing power to negotiate enhanced value, discounts, affiliate fees, etc. This economic influence will expand as network effects generate more and more incremental value, which will in turn benefit the community and its participants, and also attract future participants.

These economic platforms might also acquire stakes in the economy; ownership that benefits community participants instead of corporate shareholders. For example, there could be economic platforms that acquire intellectual property, such as patents for medicine, technology or disease resistant plants. There could be economic platforms that aggregate individual savings to acquire large blocks of shares sufficient to impact corporate governance. There could even be economic platforms that provide employment support and economic buffers to unemployed and lower-income community members.

What makes this vision viable is the enormous power of personal consumption, which represents about two-thirds of economic activity. By redirecting a portion of these expenditures society might transform the way economic decisions are made. For example, consider that the average household income is approximately $75,000/year. If only 10% of household consumption were directed through a Civic Internet, say for things such as telecommunications services, insurance and household items, each one-million participating households would direct over $7.5 billion in consumption through this channel. As there are over 120 million households in the US, the combined potential buying power is huge. Here’s how it might work.

Products sold through the community will each include some amount of Community Benefits. Community Benefits are the portion of product purchases that are retained by the Civic Internet. These benefits represent the incremental value captured by the scale and influence of the community. When consumers make purchases they may retain or assign these benefits. Assignments might be made to political campaigns or non-profits, as well as other individuals, saving accounts, online payments, or retained by participants. Part of each benefit would revert to the community to fund its activities.

As this concentrated buying power could become enormous, so will the community’s capacity to form business relationships and entities that benefit members. For example, if the community decided that it couldn’t find an acceptable insurance provider it could, with enough participation, become its own insurance company. In fact, with enough buying power a large economic community could form various enterprises. It might, for example, create open source equivalents for expensive prescription drugs and other high-value goods, services and intellectual property. Sharing these community assets across many members would drive down the cost to each member, potentially below the cost born by traditional supplier capitalism. By spreading economic decisions and ownership across more people, a Civic Internet could leverage its purchasing power to reshape economic decisions. This will allow more people to gain greater access to economic opportunity and mobility.

Community Ownership:  A Civic Internet, including its physical and intangible assets, would be a public trust that’s owned by member participants. But this ownership must be unlike traditional ownership where people own private property that they can sell or transfer. Rather, ownership would be measured by participation that spans political, economic and social activities. By tying ownership to participation, people will be motivated to engage across a range of issues. This is important because social participation correlates with greater personal responsibility, opportunity and contentment. So members who participate more will receive more influence as measured by voting privileges and member benefits. Likewise, less participation will mean less voting influence and less access to benefits. The result is that participation determines voting rights, with those who participate more having relatively greater influence in community decisions.

But participation can never be bought. There must never be a way to substitute money for participation; votes cannot be for sale. Voting rights must also be temporary, existing only as long as participants remain engaged. Changing the status of participation will change the votes of the respective members. Leaving or ceasing to participate will void a person’s votes.

In addition, the types of votes will vary. For example, participants who are more active and hold positions of greater responsibility might vote on both political activities and community operation. But casual participants might only be allowed to vote on limited issues. In this way, representation, influence and economic benefit will be based on participation; not money, not connections, not seniority, not politics, but participation. This will be critical to protect the community from the subversive influence of concentrated power structures.

Motivation: So what will persuade people to take part at the scale proposed? Although each participant will have his or her own personal reasons, there are a few key motivations. The first will be social participation. For not only do social groups fulfill the universal need for human contact, but they give us support, security, and validation.

A second source of motivation will be the political power of a large, active community. In a conventional political paradigm, individual voters are powerless against special interests that block access to political rights and economic resources. But the collective political strength of a Civic Internet will show people that their voices and their votes make a tangible difference, which give them more reasons to participate in political decisions.

A third, and likely most important, motivation will be the economic value inherent in organizing and leveraging mass consumption. This is because a Civic Internet will empower consumers to negotiate better value and give them access to economies-of-scale otherwise only available to large, supply-side entities. By aggregating the consumption of many households, participants will receive economic benefits that allow them to live better lives and build futures of greater promise and security. This will be a unique and powerful motivator to attract participants and keep them engaged. It will also form the basis of community self-moderation, because participants and groups not in compliance risk losing these benefits.

When people can see that their participation makes a real difference, either to them individually or to the groups they belong to, it will motivate them to participate more. This increased participation will allow members to receive greater value, thereby further motivating them. For when people feel that they make a difference to themselves, their families and their communities then they experience a sense of purpose, which is among the most important aspirations of the human experience.

Formation: A Civic Internet must be primarily crowd-sourced and crowd-funded. This grassroots approach is the only way to create a community structure that represents voters with average and below average political power. Because any entity that purports to speak for the interests of average people, but then keeps them separated from ownership and decision-making, will find it difficult to represent the constituents who enabled its power-base. And since people are the ultimate source of political and economic power, isolating them results in their interests being under-represented.

In order to enable fair and relevant representation, including equitable participation in the economy, society needs a civic community that directly includes many average people in the political decision-making process. The model of a Civic Internet proposes just such an approach.

A condensed version of the essay is here. You may also download the full essay here.

Contact: For further information contact Rod Watkins at  rod@realismnow.com.