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ReadMe for Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy by Audrey Tang, E. Glen Weyl and the Plurality Community

Welcome to Plurality, an open, git-based collaborative book project that aims to offer a vision for the future of technology focused around empowering and bridging social difference. While we have outlined the substance of the book elsewhere (see https://www.plurality.net), the purpose of this ReadMe is to provide an overview of the collaboration that will help create the book aimed at those who will participate in doing so.

Overview

The initial maintainers of this project are Audrey Tang (Taiwan's 1st Digital Minister, see https://digitalminister.one) and E. Glen Weyl (see https://www.glenweyl.com). However, we plan to progressively decentralize control of the project using a new git-native formal governance protocol using blockchain-like affordances called Gov4Git (see https://github.com/gov4git/gov4git). We plan to transition to full community control when we print physical copies of the book. All material here is CC0 and we hope that speakers of languages other than English and from other sub-linguistic cultures (e.g. religious communities, academic disciplines that we are less familiar with, etc.) will fork this repo and build their own versions, governed according to the same principles. In what follows we discuss each of these points and provide further links to relevant materials.

Copyright

All materials in this repo and in all other parts of this project (unless explicitly stated otherwise) are in the public domain; a CC0 license appears in this repo and most of the related software has a GPL. We strongly encourage translations, both to other languages and to other cultural genres, whether in terms of formatting (fiction, journalism, etc.) or to different communities (religious, ethnic, disciplinary, etc.). While these "forks" can do whatever they wish with this public domain material, we plan to link to and "recognize" only a smaller group of projects that align to the root in terms of content, values, management style and copyrights. We hope this link and roots will remain relevant and respected because of the legitimacy this community will achieve through its principles and writing.

Citation

To cite this text, you can use this bibtex as a sample

@online{plurality2023,
  title={Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy},
  author={Weyl, E. Glen and Tang, Audrey and {the Plurality Community}},
  year={2023},
  url={https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/main/contents/english},
  publisher={GitHub},
}

Identity and credit

While this project will begin as a traditional open source community, we eventually hope to provide more formal governance, participation, control rights and recognition of contributions than has been customary in such projects. We believe such features are important for open source projects like this one to sustainably scale while staying true to their values. As such, a primary goal of our management of this project will be to clearly and (for the most part) publicly recognize contributions with both qualitative (viz. what kind of contribution was made) and quantitative (viz. how important was the contribution) tokens. However, these tokens cannot be traded/transferred directly across users; they are relevant only to governance of and participation in this community and are not intended to have any external financial value, except through the value of the community as a whole. As is discussed further below, as well as in the book, we may raise some funds to support the community and the community will govern these funds. However, credit is a marker of contribution and entitlement to governance, not to direct external financial gain.

Contributions will be of many kinds. While we cannot hope to anticipate them all types of contributions, here is a short sampling that provides a sense for the range we expect:

  • Translations of the book to other languages and subcultures.
  • Research assistance for and editing of the root text.
  • Thoughtful and accurate prioritization of issues and pull requests.
  • Contributing to or helping maintain the website interface for the book.
  • Graphical design of elements of the book, including visual contributions and figures.
  • Managing data engines and data visualization.
  • Project management of interaction of these elements
  • Contributing to the tools and platforms that support the collaborative process.

Quality of contributions and thus quantity of recognition will largely (with some exceptions discussed below) begin as a discretionary choice of the maintainers. However, we eventually hope to transition an increasing range of the mechanisms through which we give out such recognition to formal community governance, as part of the governance and progressive decentralization below.

All identity roles and credit will initially be public (possibly pseudonymous, but with no internal privacy controls). We hope to introduce some innovative privacy features consistent with the ideas in the book (such as designated verifier signatures) in the future.

Editing and pull requests

While there will be many types of contributions, arguably the focal and most common one will be editing of the root book. This will happen through the standard git issue-fork-pull request-merge process which we will not discuss further here, as it is well documented in many places online. As such, several central sources of credit and contribution will be related to this process and they are worth discussing in a bit greater detail here.

In writing this book, we aim to create a new vision for the future of technology that can help inspire a community to pursue and help create it. We do not aim primarily at a statement of fact or consensus, though we hope to help surface facts and promote cooperation across difference. As such, we will strive to mostly maintain a coherent argument and authorial voice, rather than combining together separate contributions from distinct authors. However, we believe such a goal is consistent with a wide range of participation and input and that, ultimately, our ideas will only succeed if they eventually become a reflection of common sense of a community that pursues them. As such we hope that the community helping us build this book will contribute a range of edits from the small (e.g. copyedits) to the large (e.g. building blocks of text that help us flesh out an application or restate a principle). The more significant these contributions, the greater they will be recognized. We also seek to embrace technological advancements in all our work and thus welcome the use of a range of digital assistive tools, such as generative foundation models, in creating contributions.

At the same time, we expect there to be far more engagement than any small group of maintainers can realistically manage in any project on these terms, especially one as ours that has natural adversaries. Thus the editorial and maintenance role will be at least as important for us to share with the community as the contribution role. We plan to do this by asking the community to help prioritize issues and PRs and to reward accurate prioritization, ones that end up being accepted/acted upon. The precise mechanisms we will use for this will evolve over time and we will shortly link to live explanatory documents. However, we will always endeavor to use creative approaches grounded in the principles described in the book, for example using a mixture of prediction markets and various forms of plural voting.

Governance and progressive decentralization

All governance functions will harness both the qualitative and quantitative tokens discussed above. Governance will harness a range of approaches, from formal voting to informal discussions. We will aim to harness as many of the tools we describe in the book as possible, to show as well as tell the book's message. Governance will address the full range of issues in the project's development: the evolution of all repositories, decisions about the physical publication process, etc. Initially, community input will be advisory and this will remain the case in final decisions until the book is physically printed.

However, we aim to harness Gov4Git to turn the process over to full and direct community control after the printing of the first edition of the physical books. While this milestone marks a point at which we aim to make the formal transition, we hope for this process to be gradual: we hope that over time we rely more and more on the community to guide every decision and that our oversight becomes more of a formalism. We plan to incorporate additional governance elements to aid this transition over time, such as signals from the community of the value of various contributions which we can then approve. To get a sense of the kinds of governance structures we hope to employ, please visit the RadicalxChange website (http://www.radicalxchange.org). We will include more details linked here as we have a clearer sense of precisely how we will use these elements.

Financial goals

We have no aspiration to earn any financial return on any aspect of the project, and in fact are spending some personal resources to make it possible. However, there are elements of the project that may require financial support (e.g. promotion and distribution of the physical book) and many of the volunteers in the community may decide it is appropriate they be compensated for some part of the time they devote to the work. We are committed to putting all base materials into the public domain and it is core to this project to avoid it becoming financialized or speculative. At the same time, we believe that there are ways that are not only consistent with our values but illustrative of them to help raise funds to the extent they become relevant. We welcome ideas from the community on this; some preliminary thoughts of ours include:

  1. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are issued along with physical copies of the book and allow the book to sell at a premium despite the lack of copyright.
  2. Raising funds through a Quadratic Funding grant on platforms such as GitCoin.
  3. Using partial common ownership/Harberger tokens to gate access to scarce associated resources (like Glen's consulting and speaking time).
  4. Issuing credentials and SoulBound Tokens to both direct financial contributors and those who fund the project through GitCoin.

We plan to pursue these approaches and to put any funds raised into the collective control of the community, after any necessary expenditures to ensure physical printing and distribution of the book are completed. We understand this will require appropriate legal steps to ensure compliance with organizational forms and standard in relevant jurisdictions and we plan to undertake these in the coming months, possibly with the assistance of the Open Collective Foundation.

Official Translation Repositories

We encourage different communities to help us translate the content in various languages for more accessibility around the world, anyone should feel free to fork the repository to initiate their translation work. We aim to allow communities to contribute in scalable and decentralized ways while granting official status upon approval.

Here's a simple onboarding guide. Please feel free to join the Discord to coordinate with the team on getting your fork approved and listed here, your translation work reflected on the website, and join our contributor community to give any feedback on how to improve the process!

Note: Note: Traditional Mandarin and English are both considered root languages and are hosted in this repository, while each fork is maintained by individual community members.

Active translation communities and repositories

Summary and next steps

We look forward to collaborating with all of you on this exciting project. Please reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions that you cannot convey through our collaboration channels.