2020 Vision: Democracy Task Force
Inspired by the IETF: a Democracy Engineering Task Force
The miracle of the 2020 Pandemic is the Internet, an autocrat-free, collaboratively-crafted set of agreements and descriptions that automatically route around unpredictable failures, even if predicted.
If we learn nothing else from our Great Pandemic, it is that traditional Command and Control political structures enshrine a single point of failure as the dominant feature of their architectures, elevating narcissists and autocrats who can’t manage themselves, nor allow themselves to be managed.
Inspired by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), we have formed the Democracy Engineering Task Force, DETF, to give every country the proven, reproducible governance methods that keep the Internet running.
“We” are a self-organizing, unmanaged working group of optimistic policy and tech experts, welcoming any citizen of Earth who wants to join us. We’re inspired by the loosely organized ARPANET group that, a half-century ago, developed the ideas that evolved into the Internet. When they were satisfied with their first version, they didn’t tell everybody else what they were required to do to use it. They simply published a Request For Comments, RFC1.
Working groups of the IETF limit their work to drafting sets of agreements and comments — specifically NOT centralized directives — describing how billions of inert devices come alive and resolve their complex hierarchy of needs when connected together by billions of different owners and providers, funded by billions of different utility bills, requiring no top-down coordination.
No other set of methods is sufficient for a country to govern itself and route around autocrats. Fortunately:
The Internet’s standards are text-based.
Every country’s laws are text-based.
Representatives of both sets of stakeholders create new text modules the same way: constituents’ representatives in legislative committees, and representatives of Internet users in IETF working groups: collaborating to draft, edit, and agree on blocks of arcane text (“modules” or “laws”). When added to an existing code base, they have real effects in the real world.
The Internet’s coders immediately start to fix their flawed code, but lawmakers do not. The DETF aims to fix that distinction, starting with the United States. We’re optimistic because the IETF is such an excellent governance model, so well suited to democracy’s needs.
In past crises, America has leveraged similarly unique competitive advantages. Imagine if, mobilizing for World War II, America had failed to employ its mastery of mass production to build the war machines that saved the world.
“In our governance crisis, ignoring the IETF’s proven methods would be a comparable failure. The day after the 117th Congress is sworn in, the Democracy Engineering Task Force will be ready for citizens to start guiding its committees’ inputs and outputs.”
Inspiration: Steve Crocker, upon admission to Internet Hall of Fame
It was instantly clear from the very beginning that there was an overlay on top of all of this which was the human component. One of our early slogans was “Networks bring people together.” and so, in rooms much smaller than this, with collections of people that fit in half of one row here, we sat around the table and tried to imagine what would happen.
I get asked as many of us do, “Did you understand? How much of what’s happening now could you envision?” My standard answer is everything’s happening exactly on schedule.
It’s what we couldn’t see and — most importantly — what we knew we couldn’t see, the knowledge that we could not tell everything that was going to happen and therefore it was absolutely essential to leave room for the next generation and the next generation of the next generation of people and processes and everything. So we designed both the architecture and the processes surrounding the architecture, our social processes, to be open as opposed to closed architecture:
1️⃣ Thin layers that were there as a helpmate if you needed them and you could go around them if you wanted to build something else.
2️⃣ Open publication of design notes that we tried not to take too seriously and hence the little linguistic device of calling them Requests For Comments.
3️⃣ Deliberately making them available absolutely for free around the world anytime for anybody.
4️⃣ Processes by which anybody could contribute with no restrictions and that tradition has progressed essentially unbroken for the entire 40+ year period.We now have the internet Engineering Task Force and people try to find what the admission criteria is and what the enfranchisement criteria is and it’s hard to understand there’s no voting, there’s no membership, there’s no fees. You’ve got to pay for the cookies when you come but it’s completely open.
A personal, slightly emotional insight: in 1994 I made my first trip to India and gave a talk at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and I was introduced to a graduate student who was building some interesting software. He told me all about it and it was indeed a fairly complex project and I was impressed that he was able to put together so much technology.
I asked, “How did you do that?” He said, “All I did was read the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Requests For Comments RFCs and implemented. That choked me up then as it’s doing a little bit now.
It’s that process which came about because we were just fortunate to be at the right place at the right time and it’s been one hell of a ride.
Thank you.
