Interview with Jerry Michalski on Small 'g' governance

I'm home in Noe Valley, close to downtown SF.

Hi Jim,

Wikipedia's internally evolved governance system is one. Another is the series of Asambleas Populares that arose in Argentina during the 2001 crisis to take back power.

At a larger scale, the compliance certification movement that NGOs are spearheading is a form of self-governance, too. See Branded! for more details.

For an inspiring scan of this space, view the Everyday Democracy video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR45-VFcVyg

Hi Brian,

The work we used to think had to be done by big news organizations at newspapers or TV networks is what I think is migrating off to investigative reporters and editors. They need a very stable base of revenue that can't be threatened, like endowments.

I'd love to have an infrastructure where those larger groups plus independent citizen journalists could be rewarded for their efforts. A business idea I had five years ago I call "Grassroots MacArthurs," with the working premise: if the MacArthur people can give genius grants, why can't you and I?

Citizen journalists are extremely important.

Hi Jim,

Yes, I think we're in one of those phase changes like the shift from feifs to Church, then Church to States, then States to Corporations. All these roles are being remixed now (including the Fourth Estate, per my answer about citizen journalism).

I can't really predict how it all turns out, especially because there are always these unexpected big detours in any "obvious" trend, but I'd love to see people wake up and begin to take power back themselves.

Back in 19th Century England, the central Government began to usurp local power for the new highways they were building. Once they'd started that, they worked their way through other domains, including education.

Now we have a chance to rebalance the whole, discovering new ways of (dis)solving problems without huge centralized (corruption-attracting) Government projects. It's a future that liberals, libertarians and conservatives might actually all like -- if they thought through their goals and principles.

Hi Dave,

Like the neural connections that carry signals inside individual brains, we're now weaving simple, "dendritic" connections between people around the world.

Every seemingly low-value act of "friending," blogging, linking and even email forwarding builds these connections. At first, they're just weak links, but over time, these become the trusted channels for recommendations (what to buy, how to vote, whom else to trust) and new relationships.

The result looks a bit like Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a Noosphere, or other folks' beliefs about conscious evolution. It's a pretty neat future, and I think we're heading toward it.

Hi Ellen,

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200: read Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody. That's a great start.

After that, you can go in a zillion directions. Two other recommendations:

Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, an international relations prof at Georgetown who mentored Bill Clinton. Way interesting view of history.

The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain (Tiffany's Dad!), an even more out there view of history -- with very useful insights about the role of written language versus images.

Hi Allison :)

Online and on-land can intersect and enrich one another. By following what we each write and link, we can know better what to talk about when we meet. By linking up across social networks and making our locations visible, we can cross other people's real-world paths more often and get to know them.

Place is super important. F2F likewise. So much gets communicated in person that doesn't make it through the Intertubes. Yet the skinnyness of the Intertubes is often a virtue. It helps mask aspects of self that might sometimes cause people to avoid one another. Thus the Israeli and Palestinian kids become friends playing online games (first-person shooters? yikes!), then realize they come from different "sides."

Familiarity dispels fear.

Josh, what's amazing is that much of the interesting stuff I've seen started with populations under a lot of stress, like Argentines in 2001, or Brazil trying to figure out what to do to keep their country from imploding, or Estonia trying to figure out how to build a Government after their liberation from the Soviet sphere. And also at very small, local, neighborhood levels.

The most obvious need I can see is just to get word of these capabilities to underserved communities, then to get them access. "Word" doesn't mean curriculum, just stories. The access does the magic.

Governments could take many many steps to enable self-governance to thrive, but in most cases this would mean cutting back their power, their jurisdiction and their budgets. Who's going to do that?

It would also mean learning a lot about what dynamics cause collective action to thrive, and what dynamics cause it to crash. And having the confidence to let communities go sort things out themselves.

Finally, many in Government are convinced that they've discovered the theoretic basis for building the right institutions, from education to transportation to taxes and more. I see all those as deeply, deeply flawed. So how do we hit "undo" on all that?

For that last reason especially, I think the best self-governance efforts will stay below the radar.

Dave, super difficult to put a number on this. I'd love to say 90 percent.

My old Wharton prof Russ Ackoff used to talk about "lowerarchies" rather than "hierarchies." In a lowerarchy, issues would only fall to "lower" levels if the participants at a current level couldn't successfully resolve issues on their own. They'd all self-manage and seek help from others "lower" only after trying hard themselves.

I don't know yet whether I hew more to Libertarian values (Govt only for police, courts, rights) or to another model. I'm still working that out.

I just know that we've stifled a tremendous amount of innovation and problem-solving by taking away people's responsibility for solving their own issues, as well as their ability to act to solve them.

Lotsa questions, Micah! :)

In the original one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion), a huge variety of new organisms appeared, mostly complex animals. Existing organisms also diversified and adapted.

By analogy, I see many many new tools for and forms of collective action appearing. Rather than there being a few, cookie-cutter "right" ways of doing things, groups are evolving their own practices, innovating like crazy.

And the Net's persistence now lets us all read up on what others are learning (or watch it, or listen to it...), share new ways to learn or analyze stuff, etc. The power of all this collective learning and recombining is immense.

Next: there's always the possibility that we're going through a nervous breakdown. In fact, many periods will feel that chaotic and dangerous. But I think that our collective desire for order and connectedness can outweigh the forces of chaos.

On Mark's talk: I thought he harshed too much on Wikipedia, which has set its own norms for what I think are very good reasons. I agree that the superempowered individual is now on the loose, but I don't think we're wired to stay in perpetual war with one another. I think we're wired the other way entirely. (I'd also like to take another listen to Mark's talk.)

I just finished a bunch of conference travel and don't have that many good ones coming up. One I very much recommend is www.ncdd.org in Austin this October. Forget politics: this is where governance is being learned.

You know, the Government hurts more than it helps here.

The FCC was created to protect the nascent radio industry. Dividing up rights to the electromagnetic spectrum by frequency bands, as if it were all scarce beach real estate, is insane. Yet that's what they did.

All the WiFi stuff is happening in the incredibly thin slivers of unregulated bandwidth.

All the regulations that were supposed to break up AT&T and give us competition have just led to a duopoly that people now rightly suspect may try to change fundamentally the nature of the Net, killing off its openness. It happened before to other media.

So I'd rather see the regulations taken away so that we can actually have the naturally inexpensive infrastructure we could all enjoy, rather than the mess we now live with. It would still be a great entrepreneurial opportunity, just not the present unfair oligopoly.

Thanks, Dave

Great questions. Thank you so much for a chance to discuss these things in public.