It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness – Old Adage
One thing I should have made clearer last time is that agents are not like politicians – they don't get a choice in the votes they cast. These are decided by their clients rather than by themselves. Agents are constrained by law to vote on every issue according to their clients' wishes – they have no power to change that.
The word agenda has acquired some negative connotations over the past few decades, as in hidden agenda, but we want nothing hidden here. The agenda is the series of laws and regulations on which the panocracy will be asked to vote. As we said the last time the agenda will be set by everyone.
Our model for producing laws and regulations is our old friend the internet which has grown from its early beginnings in the 1960s as a minor US defence project to the world-wide standardised high speed communications system of today. A tablet in Sydney, Australia can communicate in milliseconds with a server in Paris, France and receive data fast enough to show a video. This technical miracle has been achieved by the application of engineering principles and competent distributed management.
Contrast that with what has happened in the same period in politics where the same old parties fight the same old battles in ever more vitriolic pantomime. As a result, the working man has seen his real income stagnate over the period. In real terms – allowing for inflation - the income of a US worker is barely more now ($22.65/hr) than it was in 1964 ($20.27/hr in buying power) when arpanet was first mooted. . If the internet had made that amount of progress we'd still be using room sized computers, card readers (ask your grandad) and we couldn't even share data with someone in the next town. Video phones? No chance.
So we're going to propose modelling the administration of the panocracy on that of the internet rather than on our current political shenanigans.
The internet is managed and run by several loosely coupled but interconnected bodies
The Internet Society (ISOC) – the umbrella group
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) – edits the RFC documents (more about these in a minute)
The Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) – resolves technical issues
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers ICANN) – assigns unique IP numbers, etc.
W3C - does the blue-sky thinking when it comes to future development
Each of the bodies has its own part to play. Here's a comparison with the institutions of current jurisdictions and a first cut at their equivalents in the panocracy
Overall management and umbrella group (ISOC) = The government = The Panocracy Society (PSOC)
blue sky thinking (W3C) = white papers =The citizenry - you and me
detailed policy proposals (IAB) = Parliamentary Drafters = The Panocracy Architecture Board (PAB)
technical problem resolution and corrective action (IETF) = the government never gets anything wrong = The Panocracy Engineering Board (PEB)
administration such as assigning IP numbers, making sure names are unique and so on (ICANN) = the civil service = The Panocracy Administration Board (PAB)
In the panocracy, the Panocracy Society will take on the role of coordinating the other bodies and setting the agenda. Its powers will be limited to deciding the order of the agenda, not its contents.
Blue sky thinking will be done by you and me - the citizenry - in the form of submissions to the Panocracy Architecture Board (PAB). The main requirements for a submission should include hard evidence, consistency, clearly stated intentions and success/failure criteria, as well as the proposers' affiliations. Such submissions would be the analogue of the RFC (Request For Comments) documents that circulate widely and are carefully debated by internet engineers before being accepted. Facilities for online public participation in politics already exist (such as online petitions) but the RFC system would be much more interactive. The process of refining submissions would be managed by the PAB and include the to and fro between the proposers and their critics. If and when a proposal reaches a suitable standard, the PAB will cast it into a form suitable for a vote and it will be added to the agenda.
All the work of all of these bodies is, almost by definition, open to public scrutiny and their activities are proscribed. There shouldn't be much room for insider deals, placemen or lobbying. This won't stop it happening of course and a continual effort will be necessary to minimise the negative effect of all that.
One important role that we don't have at the moment in our democracies is that of policy problem identification, resolution and corrective action. When something goes wrong in an engineering context – a bridge collapses or an aeroplane crashes – a lot of effort is put into determining the cause. The resulting report is used to inform the corrective action needed to stop something similar happening again and is usually incorporated in revisions to the design principles and rules. In contrast, when policy failures are significant, governments and their acolytes put considerable effort into hiding the consequences and gaslighting anyone who points them out. They are aided and abetted in this by lazy journalists and feeble oppositions. The monitoring of policy outcomes and its testing against the success and failure criteria would be taken on by the Panocracy Engineering Board – and of course the citizenry. If the PEB was unhappy at how some law or regulation was working, the outcome would be a proposal to modify or remove it and this would be developed and voted in the panarchy in the usual way.
A key feature of the panocracy is that none of these bodies would be responsible for 'self-improvement'. It is citizens who propose and approve changes to the system via RFCs so any changes would have to go through the standard process. Of course, members of these particular bodies are citizens themselves but any potential self-interest or political or commercial bias in their RFC would be obvious as a result of their affiliations. This should apply in general to any public institution created under the panocracy – to avoid the kind of takeovers that we have witnessed in our public institutions over the past few decades.
Here's an example to clarify what we've said so far. Someone comes up with an RFC to ban abortion under all circumstances. There is a lot of public debate on this issue and interest groups attempt to sway opinion one way or the other. However, the panocracy by its nature has a lot of inertia built into it so opinions for and against the proposal are less swayed by hysterical voices and bad actors than they are in our present system. Eventually, perhaps after some modifications, the proposal is formalised by the PAB to include all the salient details, submitted to the PSOC who schedule the vote. The agents cast their clients' votes, or those citizens who feel strongly enough cast their own.
Let's say the abortion ban is passed (although it's not at all obvious that it would be). Let's also assume that it leads to a sharp rise in backstreet abortions. The PEB collates statistics, and facts and figures are accumulated by interest groups, which are then taken up by various commentators and public opinion shifts away from a total ban. More nuanced proposals emerge, the process is repeated and a more balanced approach is enacted.
OK, this is obviously a gross oversimplification of a very difficult human problem. But it's one which our current systems have had great difficulty with. The benefit of the panocracy is that progress can be made to the 'best' solution because policy failures can be corrected and new ideas incorporated. And that can happen because responsibility for them can't be shirked and there are good people out there who can make a real contribution.
Next, it will be about time for an interlude to all this serious stuff and to remind ourselves what it is we're trying to achieve. It’s easy to lose sight of the goals and get bogged down in the detail (and it happens always and everywhere). Alligators and swamps come to mind.