ActiveInstitution

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This is a paper I (LynHeadley) just wrote during Q1 of 2002. It points out a new type of emerging institution which carries out collective actions reached by group consensus (An example is VeniVidiVoti). In the process it offers general definitions of the terms institution, collective action, and government.

Here's the abstract from the paper.

I define institutions as rule-bound processes which carry out collective actions upon reaching group consensus. Then I introduce the active institution, a new type of institution which acts on collective decisions immediately and automatically, without intervention from human agents. To compare the new active instution to existing common institutions I describe several hypothetical spending institutions, in order to argue that the final hypothetical active institution, the spending pool, could motivate people to come together and result in the satisfying attainment of valuable ends. If this happened, I claim that the institution would become a continuous, powerful and semi-autonomous being in the world. Hence the importance of self-government.

It's available here: http://www.enoc.com.mx/writing/active-institutions.html

Why is consensus so important? VeniVidiVoti is designed against consensus, as its dominant model is voting. It's considered an management AntiPattern to ForceConsensus?. If your thesis is that we should encode our relationships, is consensus a prerequisite to the charter, or merely one of the many types of relationships we can encode? -- SunirShah

Certain types of actions are intrinsically collective and hence require consensus. I cannot buy something from you without your agreement. Indeed, electronic markets and auction houses are active institutions since they act collectively in the sense of the paper. Another example is authoring a trade agreement. The active institution concept is meant to apply to the agents which carry out these actions. Since no single member actually commits these actions, it makes sense to say that the institution does the acting. This becomes literally, concretely true when the institution is a computer and not just a social construction. --LynHeadley

As you half point out, you only need consensus when it's necessary that each party agrees, say if each party contributes a resource that the others need. But in your shared pool example, the parties have already given away their money, and consequently they could give away their power. This can be more efficient. For instance, you could have a subgroup that are experts on rainforest protection that the whole group implicitly trusts to make detailed decisions on behalf of the whole group. Sure there must be consensus in the first place to create such an environment, but that's not the daily consensus you're talking about here.

I think any consensual environment naturally degrades into a non-consensual environment unless people ForceConsensus?. -- SunirShah

You say that institutions are so important. I don't disagree completely, but I would point out the growing post-modern belief that social problems are intractable, and the institutions we create to deal with them become intractable problems in and of themselves. In terms of software, no one understands the global telephone system, for instance. It only works through local interactions, which are tractable.

The Modernist believed he could create a rational institution to preserve order against the unfaltering degeneracy of society. Some hold that this ultimately created WWII and the Cold War.

What I see as potential is that the institutions you are creating are personal institutions, not global institutions. But note that you are drawing support from Modernists for these new ideas which are abhorrent to the Modernist. I think this comes from an equivocation of the word institution. Do you mean something more along the lines of TheCollective? -- SunirShah

It is true that I use the word institution in a special sense, as an ongoing processes of collective action. I will stand by my usage for now though, since I believe it identifies the essence of what institutional economists like ThorsteinVeblen? and democratic institutional tinkerers like RobertoUnger? mean when they talk about institutions. There is surely much overlap with TheCollective. TheCollective term is more general and hence encompasses active institutions. You might say that an active institution is an example of CollectiveIntelligence which arises out of the resolution of a concrete situation through collective action. In the course of resolving the situation, we can expect to generate many CollectiveIdea""s.

As for the postmodernist charge that it is impossible to create powerful institutions without becoming enslaved by them, I can only reply with faith. Thomas Jefferson said it quite well: "I have no fear, but that the result of our experiment will be, that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude either that there is no God, or that He is a malevolent being."

~+FROM MY OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE+~ I've discovered collectivism in my written works since about 1994 when I first started filing my work on the computer. I filed all of my text at the expense of spending time with photos or other nonsense because I thought, hey, someday somebody might want to read me. It turned out that somehow everything worked out and I have something of a body of work. You can find me here or www.ncpink.com or in the creative commons, but that is only secondary. What I would like to express is that once you find your way into this level of consciousness things begin to change, you begin to wonder about the "Versions" of things even within the collections that pre-exist. Why would there be a Service Pack 2 if there was no need to fundamentally change Windows? Why would I find myself re-writing my own blogs, much less, re-writing other people's blogs.

~~~~ChrisBradley

ActiveInstitution

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