Golden Rule the World

Bernard d’Agesci (1757-1828), La Justice. Holds scales in one hand and in the other hand a book with “Dieu, la Loi, et le Roi” on one page and the Golden rule on the other page. (Photo credit: Wikipedia. Click image for larger versions)

Some friends of the delightful and brilliant  Karen Armstrong recently started a website called Charter for Compassion. The charter is based on the Golden Rule (See Karen’s Ted Talk video at the end of this page). This got me to thinking about the Golden Rule in more detail than usual…

The version most familiar to me is this:

So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you,  for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.  (Matthew 7:12)

The Golden Rule is the simplest expression of two primal axioms of sociality, empathy and reciprocity. This is the basis of all that we call justice and morality. All that has been written on justice and morality over the ages almost seems to obfuscate those issues when compared directly with the Golden Rule. Maybe that’s why Jesus is quoted as saying  this single sentence “sums up the Law and the Profits.”

Without empathy, there could be no kindness or compassion. Empathy, kindness, and compassion are far more primal than religion, philosophy and ethics. Empathy has its own type of brain cell, called the mirror neuron, which is also found in other animals. This suggests that the evolution of empathy preceded human beings.

“The feeling of compassion is the beginning of humanity.”

— Mencius, 372 – 289 BCE

But the Golden Rule doesn’t stop at empathy. It also includes reciprocity. Like empathy, reciprocity has its roots in pre-human evolution. It is involved in the process of natural selection. Empathy and reciprocity are the biological and  instinctive forces that make animals social and from which all complex human sociality evolved.

Somewhat like the principles on which it is based, the Golden Rule predates recorded history. It was around long before Christianity or Judaism or even religion. It may even predate language. Of course, it would. It is in our DNA — literally.

The Golden Problem

In practice there may be a bit of a rub to the Golden Rule. What if someone doesn’t want to be treated the way I might want to be treated, but the way in which they wish to be treated is perfectly reasonable and agreeable to me? Then perhaps I should do unto them the way I would want them to do unto me if I were them.  This would make the rule somewhat recursive.

Then, what if the way some people wish to be treated is bad for them? All responsible parents and guardians face this problem. The recursive property doesn’t help in this case. Nor can the parent necessarily treat the child the way the parent might wish to be treated if she is perfectly honest with herself. We are all a little too childish and selfish ourselves to follow the Golden Rule to the letter without indulging each other far too much. Another modification is needed.

“The Golden Rule” mosaic (Photo credit: Wikipedia. Click image for larger version)

Golden Solution: Enlightenment

A certain amount of indulgence is good for us, especially as children, but enough is enough and too much is bad for the character (and often for the waistline, too). Responsible parents sometimes attempt to treat their children the way an enlightened person would want to be treated, hoping that such patterning helps a child to develop into that enlightened person. We can apply this to everybody, really, since all of us can stand to become a little more enlightened.

But what is enlightenment? Who is enlightened? What does an enlightened person want? How would they wish to be treated? I guess this is what all the books on justice and morality are about–maybe this is why we need them. They are trying to tell us what enlightened people should believe, what they should want, or how they should behave; and they are written (broadly speaking) by our best and brightest (i.e. most enlightened) minds.

But what good is the Golden Rule if we are still thrown back into this quagmire of disputed and contradictory theories of right and wrong? Is there no simple rule for enlightenment?

According to Emmanuel Kant, the Golden Rule could be formulated in a broad, general way that he called a categorical imperative. It is intended to minimize the subjective variations in what different people consider good behavior by removing the relative advantage of acting selfishly in the pursuit of one’s own personal good:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

In other words, don’t do anything you aren’t willing for  everyone else to do right back at you. I don’t think it solves any of the above problems, though. Kant’s deontology still turns upon consequences. What are rules of behavior but after-the-fact consequentialism? Any practical kind of deontology or consequentialism must be derived from experience. What else could we base either one upon, unless we want to base or morality on legend, myth, or superstition; fictions which like Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy are more suitable for ignorant children than responsible adults.

Corollaries of the Golden Rule

I will propose several corollaries to the Golden Rule, which I hope will fill in some of the blanks and answer some of the questions left hanging by the Rule. To qualify they must be consistent with (if not directly implied by) the Rule, and they must share its simplicity of expression in plain language. The aim of this short list of corollaries is nothing less than to dispense with the rest of the Prophets and the Philosophers of law, which the Golden Rule failed to do on its own.

Utility – the greatest good for the greatest number

This corollary helps to answer some of the questions about enlightenment I asked above. I will do unto you what I would have you do unto me if it is also in your best interest and (as much as possible) for the greatest good of  the greatest number.

Enlightened self-interest

This is the principle that persons “do well by doing good.” This meansthat acting to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serves one’s own self-interest.

Turn the other cheek

When possible, respond to an aggressor without violence. The phrase originates from the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament:

38 ¶ Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. 41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. (Matthew 5:38–5:42 KJV)

In the Gospel of Luke, as part of his command to “love your enemies“, Jesus says:

27 ¶ But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. 29 And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. 30 Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. 31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. (Luke 6:27–31 KJV)

Note that in Luke 6:31 above, the doctrine of turning the other cheek is directly related to the Golden Rule. This principle, in less absolute or categorical terms, may also be the basis for certain versions of the legal doctrine of proportionality. But unlike the “eye for an eye” kind of proportionality, the New Testament kind of proportionality favors the least severe response necessary to satisfy a compassionate and forgiving standard of  justice and to maintain peace.

“A soft word turneth away wrath…” (Proverbs 15:1 KJV)

BTW, by using bible quotes (familiar to many of my tribe) to illustrate some of my corollaries I don’t mean to imply that they depend on any religious authority. No. They have numerous secular expressions.

Walk a mile in my shoes

“Hey, before you abuse, criticize and accuse, walk a mile in my shoes” (Joe South).

I recommend the full lyric and the video.

“Side B” for this this corollary is “Before you accuse me (take a look at yourself)” by Mr. Bo Diddly. (The Eric Clapton version is pretty sweet, too.)

Or, to put this another way, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” again from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1). Saint Matthew goes on to say:

³ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ⁴ Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? ⁵ Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

This is all about empathy and reciprocity, the foundations of the Golden Rule. But lest you doubt me, does Matthew 7:12 sound vaguely familiar:

^“All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them: for this is the law and the prophets.”

Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!

Literally translated, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”  This is the phrasing of Karl Marx, but the first known description of the principle was given by Étienne-Gabriel Morelly (1717 – ?) a French utopian thinker and novelist, but an otherwise “obscure tax official.” (Wikipedia) Morelly proposed in his 1755 Code of Nature :

• Every citizen will be a public man, sustained by, supported by, and occupied at the public expense.
• Every citizen will make his particular contribution to the activities of the community according to his capacity, his talent and his age; it is on this basis that his duties will be determined, in conformity with the distributive laws. (Wikipedia)

I don’t know (or care) much about Communism, but I think I know the Golden Rule when I see it. Who would not want to be treated in such a fashion, from each according to ability and to each according to need, unless they had previously been brainwashed by some cruel and perverse ideology (I won’t mention any names)?

Subsidiarity

This one is a little more technical, but its not complicated. Decisions and authority should be vested at the lowest practical level of an organization or institution. This is a clear “do unto others” corollary — do you want to maintain your human dignity in your place of work or your community?

Subsidiarity is the idea that decisions are better made where they have immediate effect. The idea is a key because it enables people to make decisions for themselves. Human Dignity demands more than becoming a cog in a wheel.”  (Solidarity With Salisbury)

subsidiarity [səbˌsɪdɪˈærɪtɪ]

1. (Christianity / Roman Catholic Church) a principle of social doctrine that all social bodies exist for the sake of the individual so that what individuals are able to do, society should not take over, and what small societies can do, larger societies should not take over

2. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) the principle of devolving decisions to the lowest practical level

Solidarity

“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.” – Aurora Levins Morales

Community

“Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

I’m going to stop on that note, but please suggest any other corollaries to the Golden Rule that you think should not be left out. The goal is not to include everything but the kitchen sink, but to include essential corollaries that keep the Golden Rule from being overly ambiguous, or from being too silent on important social issues..

Poor Richard

Karen Armstrong: Let’s Revive The Golden Rule

Related PRA 2010 Posts

• The 99% Solution
• The Origins of Human Nature
• Social evolution: An ounce of allegory vs a pound of theory
• The value of unimportance
• Age of Enlightenment emerges from birth canal
• Fighting Evil

Related Articles

• 

• Karen Armstrong: Let’s Revive The Golden Rule
• Several Short Sentences About Empathy  Dave Pollard, How to Save the World blog
• The Great Big Opportunity (Solidarity With Salisbury – Papal Economics)
• The Golden Rule (dogmomesquire.com)
• The Modified Golden Rule. What do you think? (seplerblog.wordpress.com)
• What Penguins Know about the Business World (psychologytoday.com)

RSA Animate – 21st century enlightenment

P2P

Photo copyright Ian McCalister

What is peer-to-peer (P2P)  culture?

P2P culture is a post-capitalist socioeconomic framework which includes but transcends capitalism. It encompasses many varieties of open and closed, public and private, for-profit and not-for-profit, hierarchical and egalitarian associations (and hybrids of these).

I call P2P a “post-capitalist framework” because many of us are quite happy to abandon capitalism’s euphemisms and reductio ad absurdum altogether. However, other 99%-ers still consider it a major factor in lifting millions from poverty. They would rather reform and adapt it to humanitarian and ecological ends than to abandon it for something novel. I think it is entirely possible to craft forms of capitalism which “do no harm”, and I think there is ample room in the p2p community for such “diversity of tactics.”

Early P2P theory drew from experience gained in creating distributed computer networks and distributed organizations that developed open source computer software. These distributed systems of computers and programmers emphasized the role of individual peers–network nodes or people of roughly similar capability–which coordinated or negotiated their activity among themselves with little or no central authority or control. From those information system origins the application of P2P principles expanded to include many other kinds of distributed teams, organizations and activities.

P2P principles emphasize cooperation, openness, fairness, transparency, information symmetry, sustainability, subsidiarity, accountability, quality, and innovation motivated by a variety of human needs and values negotiated among peers.

IMO P2P principles and relations can operate in almost any economic or political theater if two specific rules are respected. P2P Capitalism, P2P Marxism, P2P Anarchy, or P2P whatever, must make every effort to respect:

1. the moral and legal equity of every peer
2. the fully informed consent of every peer

The relative degree to which these fundamental principles are followed is the relative degree of P2P-correctness, regardless of any other characteristics of a P2P model.

However, the simplicity of these two rules is deceptive because they have many corollaries and implications. And they don’t solve the problem of competing or conflicting rights and interests among peers–we must still have some form of contract, due process, conflict resolution, etc. for that.

In an ideology-agnostic nutshell, you might say the P2P framework is about cooperative individualism (this is precisely how Michel Bauwens describes peerism in “The Political Economy of Peer Production“).

Along with Thomas Jefferson, “I have sworn … eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Peers are interdependent but retain a self-identity, dignity, and an intellectual and moral agency. Any system which diminishes that diminishes itself.

A P2P peer is a self-directed individual, voluntarily consenting to various cooperative social contracts or arrangements. Whether cooperation is one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many, all cooperators are peers. If they are not peers, the enterprise probably should not be called cooperation. Instead it would be some variety of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation.

A person’s success at being a peer and engaging with others as peers may depend largely on how well they absorb the ideas of intersubjectivity and enlightened self-interest.

individual -v- group (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The mixture of individuality (selfishness) and sociality (cooperation) in each person reflects the multilevel interaction of individual and group selection in evolution. This often carries a level of social conflict and cognitive dissonance that each peer and peer group must grapple with.

Be sure to check out our Facebook P2P Group,  Michel Bauwens’ Facebook page, and the Foundation for P2P Alternatives website for many more P2P related topics.

Poor Richard

Related PRA 2.0 posts:

• The 99% Solution
  
• The Origins of Human Nature
• Organizing P2P organizations

Related articles

• Occupy, the peer-to-peer movement and Marxism (thefutureofoccupy.org)
• “Together we know everything….  And together we have everything.” (p2pfoundation.net)
• Essay of the Day: Peer-to-Peer Relationality (p2pfoundation.net)

The 99% Solution

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Sign of the Four opens with an alarming scene:

“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.   With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks.  Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”

A little later in the story Holmes states, 

“It is cocaine,” he said, “a seven-per-cent solution.  Would you care to try it?”

Limitation of classical social movements

Classical social movements have often been limited by tunnel vision, cooptation,  astroturfing, diversion, attrition, intimidation, repression, legal injunction, corruption, constraints of philanthropy, etc. Meanwhile, today, the 1% (the looter elite), are attacking the 99% on every side,  capturing every institution of society, and privatizing every resource on the planet.

“America is in financial ruin. Europe and Asia are on the brink of self-annihilation. Chaos reigns. But like I’ve always said, there is opportunity in chaos.” (Xander Drax, The Phantom)

What cultural transformation has lacked is an organic form, an embodiment tailored to chaos: a stigmergic swarm, or a slime-mold for example.

“When food is abundant a slime mold exists as a single-celled organism, but when food is in short supply, slime molds congregate and start moving as a single body.” (Wikipedia)

A Slime mold growing on a beer can (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 99% Solution

• The 99% Solution is not a “mob”. It is a self-organizing organism, a “complex adaptive system“.
• The 99% Solution is an emergent cultural slime mold that can engulf countless separate islands of class, political identity, and single-issue activism.
• The 99% Solution has the potential to initiate and sustain a fundamental cultural phase transition.
• The 99% Solution can assimilate (but does not require) leaders, agendas, advisers, critics, and philanthropists. It only requires active participants.

“You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”

(Star Trek)

Poor Richard

Related articles

• The Co-Intelligence Institute works to further the understanding and development of co-intelligence. It focuses on catalyzing co-intelligence in the realms of politics, governance, economics and conscious evolution of ourselves and our social systems. We research, network, advocate, and help organize leading-edge experiments and conversations in order to weave what is possible into new, wiser forms of civilization.

• Christian Garland • Logics of Resistance : Autonomous Social Movements in Theory and Practise
• If the Interstate System Were Designed by a Slime Mold (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• Organizing P2P organizations (section on bio-mimetics)    (PRA 2010)

Videos

• Mesh Network CAS model? (brief video)
• Modeling Complex Adaptive Systems

Atheism 2.0

Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion

Alain de Botton is a philosopher with some very constructive suggestions for improving secular society by selectively plucking  useful heirlooms from the traditions, practices and organizations of religion while leaving the rest. He surveys the cultural and social capital of three major religions– Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism– and suggests some assets worth salvaging.

(credit: Wikipedia)

Botton isn’t asking atheists and agnostics to kiss and make up with religion. He is a non-believer. He may not be the confrontational type, but he’s no double agent with a secret religious agenda, as some atheists might fear. His mission is to initiate a humanistic renaissance in secular society that will bring us up to speed in some areas where religions may have superior social and cultural know-how.

“The starting point of all religions is that humans are weak and vulnerable and needing direction, but as I look at secular society, I see how we’ve been abandoned to make our own way through life and how challenging that is.”

“Religion has a lot to say about how to live and love, caring for others, handling suffering, dealing with death and all the other universal experiences that make us human.”

“The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed.”

– – – –

Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religion, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from it—because the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.(Amazon.com)

– – – –

Religion for Atheists

“It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.”

Note: I have not read the book (so it could be awesome or awful), but based on the interviews and articles below, I like this guy. I think he is measured, pragmatic, and non-polemical; and he has one of the most constructive arguments I’ve heard in a very long time.  It strikes me that the approach taken by Botton could go a long way towards ratcheting down the hostility between atheists, agnostics, and our superstitious brothers and sisters :). It is the kind of thing that might be a useful balm for folks in the Occupy and 99% movements who struggle to maintain solidarity with each other despite differences that are sometimes deeply rooted.

Interviews

My favorite interview is from C-SPAN’s Book TV. You can view the whole 58-minute  After Words interview with Chris Hedges here or watch a ten-minute segment below, followed by other interviews from You Tube.

BookTV: Alain de Botton and Chris Hedges

Alain de Botton on atheism 2.0 and what secular ideologies can learn from religion

Alain de Botton: Religion for Atheists

Philosopher and author Alain de Botton says non-believers can learn a lot from religion – without believing in God.

Related articles

• A Review of Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists (patheos.com)
• Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, Humanism and the Role of the Public Intellectual (literaturesalon.wordpress.com)

• The People’s Bishop

  Monday, 07 May 2012 10:12 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

1. Believers 2. Religion 3. Atheists 4. Science

 

ALEC envy

click for image credit

Lately I’ve been experiencing ALEC envy.

As we know, ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, a shady organization that mass-produces canned legislation in service to the corporate neofeudalist agenda.

Friends, brothers, and sisters . . . I come not to bury ALEC but to praise it — not for its deeds, but for its design.

We often confuse the evil men do with the tools and logistics used. I don’t think many progressives yet see the potential for good and for actually promoting direct democracy hidden in the ALEC model because of how it has been abused. I think that’s why things like ALICE  (ALEC’s non-evil, progressive twin) aren’t getting more support.

When I look under the hood of the ALEC machine with a system analyst’s eye I see some things that I like. If the 1% plutocons had not invented the ALEC model, the 99% would need to do it. ALEC is to politics as genetic engineering is to old-fashioned selective breeding. It takes the process of creating legislation from being an art to being a science and technology. And as destructive as such political engineering can be in the wrong hands, its technical innovations are potentially a good thing for participatory democracy.

“ALEC’s astonishing influence exposes the progressive Achilles’ heel: a lack of a similarly entrenched, nationwide infrastructure of state and local policymakers and advocates that can create and support lasting change.” (Katrina vanden Heuval, Deepening the progressive bench, via The Democratic Startegist)

In politics, liberals are still bringing protest signs to what has become, in the era of ALEC and other authoritarian political innovations, a gun fight (sometimes literally). It’s hard not to envy the 1% such a big, swinging tool.

Of course the ALEC model, as implemented by the 1%, violates tax and lobbying laws. We need to bust them HARD on that. Common Cause is calling for a tax fraud investigation. Meanwhile, we need to copy, hack, and re-mix parts of the ALEC model into a new model that is a venue for creating public interest open source legislation.  The right-wing ALEC is run like a criminal conspiracy. A citizens’ Open Legislative Exchange Council (OLEC) can be run like a democratic cooperative. The old ALEC is sick in the original sense of the word but a new public-interest OLEC could be sick in a street way, yo?

Why bother? Many state legislatures still have part-time and/or unpaid lawmakers with small or shared staffs. This makes them very susceptible to lobbyists who will hand them ready-made bills on a platter (not that corporate-sponsored national legislators aren’t, too). And we still want to think that legislators should be regular people, 99% people, who need not be professional career politicians, insiders, or technocrats who are independently wealthy and technically capable of writing good legislation in their spare time.

Transparency vs Secrecy

What ALEC prefers to do with as much secrecy as possible, the 99% can do in full daylight. An open version of the ALEC model can give all stakeholders in the 99% community a fair place at the legislative drafting table and every stakeholder can have a  position on the people’s “open legislative assembly line”. Our legacy political institutions often failed to do that even before they were captured by 1%  money.

OWS and open-source legislation

Part of the Occupy Wall Street movement could undertake to re-engineer the ALEC model to be consistent with 99% values and methods such as crowd-sourcing and open source collaboration. I think such adaptations would actually increase the tactical power of the model. A green ALEC could research, engineer, and promote legislative projects that would implement much of the OWS 99% agenda through well-crafted, enlightened and responsible species of open-source legislation. Instead of being governed by and catering to profit-motivated corporations, Citizens’ OLECs would be  governed by and accountable to public interest groups and activists across the 99% spectrum.

Reddit community crowd-sources “Free Internet Act“

“On January 18th, we saw a day of online protest that at least for now killed SOPA and Protect IP. The Reddit community was one of many that played a huge role in pressuring not only businesses like GoDaddy to change their stance, but also members of Congress like Paul Ryan. Now, the community has come up with a proposed plan to create a piece of legislation, called the Free Internet Act, Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian explains.”

e-democracy

The U.S. congress’s attempts at e-democracy have been a “baby step compared to what others have done around the world,” says Matt Lira, the digital communication director for Congressman Eric Cantor. For Lira, there are some key reasons why he’s had difficulty pressuring Congress to become more digitally savvy. He contends that the political party in power has little incentive to give up authority to an experimental process that may tip the balance of power. Congress’s two most significant e-initiatives have been launched by Republicans — America Speaking Out, an aggregation platform where users list and prioritize various social issues, and YouCut, an SMS-based voting system to select which programs a few Republican congressman will attempt to cut.  (mashable.com)

The Republicans may be slow to adopt e-democracy, but it seems they are way ahead of the 99%! Other countries, including Brazil, are ahead of us, too. We will need to elect more progressive legislators and get money out of the political process before we can make democracy much more participatory. But a tool like a citizens’ Open Legislative Exchange Council should be invaluable to a new class of 99% citizen-legislators and voters.

Poor Richard

Related:

• ALICE, the progressive counterpart to ALEC American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE), your public library of progressive state and local law.
• The Future of Governance is In the Cloud

• Bitcongress – Law Creation, Voting, Debate, Community Budgeting, Decision Making

• Reddit site for participating in creating the Free Internet Act (reddit.com) The “Free Internet Act,” is open-source legislation, debated and hammered into shape by volunteer contributors on Reddit’s r/fia sub-forum, standing in as volunteer representatives for the rest of us.
• The Freedom of Internet Act (formerly Free Internet Act) is an act aimed to legislate the Internet and its uses worldwide, as an alternative to SOPA and PIPA (Wikipedia)
• Iceland crowdsourcing its constitution, (CNN Video) Iceland officials are turning to the web, Twitter and Facebook for advice on how to rewrite the country’s constitution.
• Iceland’s President on Democracy and Social Media (CNN.com) “Social media is more powerful than government. I can’t see any chance for traditional institutions to keep up.”
• Direct Democracy in Switzerland (vote.org) By Gregory A. Fossedal, Chairman, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. “More than half its [the Swiss Constitution’s] provisions, as of the late 20th century, were derived from popular ballot initiatives or referenda voted on directly by the people.”
• The Guardian: Blueprint for Democratic Participation, (video, fora.tv) Yochai Benkler, co-director, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The SOPA/PIPA debate provides the first example of how the Networked Public Sphere was able to shift the debate, and the outcome, on a piece of critical legislation… Combining network analysis, text analysis, human coding, and interviews, new research offers a unique insight into the dynamics of what the future of democratic participation could become.
• Open States Projetct, We’re gathering legislative data directly from the states and making it available in a common format through a RESTful API and regular bulk downloads. Join our Google Group to get involved. Now you can also get Open States on your iPhone or iPad.
• Peer production of public policy (p2pfoundation.net)
• Can We Harness the Internet to Collaboratively Write Better Laws? (The Atlantic)
• Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum…Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. (The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University)
• How Brazil is Blazing a Trail for Electronic Democracy (mashable.com)
• Open source legislation and digital civil rights (arstechnica.com)
• The General Will,  a project from Occupy Boston to facilitate the massive analysis, rewriting and creation of legislative documents. You can import existing bills from Congress and edit with other users using a wikipedia/reddit-like interface.
• Technology & Direct Democracy (Google Doc)
• Open Assembly /Open Source Democracy/ is an Online Consensus Engine that allows groups to make decisions over the internet.
• Liquid Feedback / Interactive Democracy (open software platform) “Anyone can select his own way ranging from pure democracy on the one hand to representative democracy on the other. Basically one participates in what one is interested in  but for all other areas gives their vote to somebody acting in their interest.”
• OpenCongress  brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more. OpenCongress is a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan public resource website. OpenCongress is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to encourage civic engagement. The Sunlight Foundation is our Founding and Primary Supporter.
• The Internet Party (wikipedia)
• e-democracy (wikipedia)
• Scaling Influence: Campaign Finance, Small Money and Large Numbers (culturalengineer.blogspot.com) Microtransactions & crowdfunding for political finance
• Institute for the Future, Re-constitutional Convention
• Governance Futures Lab on Youtube

Know the enemy and steal the advantage:

知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” (Sun_Tzu, The Art of War)

• ALEC Explained in 5 Minutes (video)

• ALEC Exposed.org

Addendum for techies What kind of technology platform do we need for open, crowd sourced legislation development? I hate to say it, but we probably need at least the same caliber of development tool-set used to build things like Linux or other huge software projects. It would be a highly integrated and graphical development environment with ungodly enterprise-class content management and project management capability. Last but not least you’d want a great semantic “legislation debugger”. After all, legislation is a hell of a lot like a giant  code repository. There would be a very large “legislation developer” community with different skill sets. It might take a half dozen different user interfaces for different classes of participants and different client devices (notebooks, tablets, smart phones, etc.) I think the shortest path might be integrating and customizing some of the open source enterprise-class applications out there like Eclipse and whatever the biggest CMS might be. Wikis have the scalability but not the ease of use necessary for all classes of users. It all has to run as web services so users only need a browser. I think we’re talking a chunk of change and a very good team to build something like that.  Any feedback would be nice.