Collaborative Solution Discovery

Grass-Roots Governance

What is grassroots governance?

It is from the base, bottom-up.  “Of the people, for the people, by the people.”  The prototype is the New England town meeting where the people are all in the same room,  everyone has a voice, and measures are enacted by a vote of everyone present.

Scaling Up

Can grassroots governance be scaled up to serve a community that doesn’t fit in a room, numbering many hundreds, thousands, or millions.

That needs a process that leads the large populace through a stepwise path from identifying and defining the issue to settling on the solution and how to implement it.  CSD is that process.  It follows the typical process phases: booting up the process including forming the process core team and recruiting necessary expertise, setting up the solution-discovery process for the issue at hand, and executing solution-discovery to resolve the issue.  It provides a comfortable home for all the process procedures, methods and tools as necessary to do the job

Large-scale grassroots governance also needs a method for processing the inputs from limitless numbers of participating stakeholders to converge on a consensus answer to whatever questions are raised by the process.  An Artificial Intelligence tool is envisioned for that.

In the 21st century, means are available for true grassroots governance at the necessary scale.  It is an amalgam of…

  • 21st century technology that enables creative stakeholder engagement at any scale from village to nation
  • 21st century expertise that navigates issues of any complexity
  • Done within the framework of a competent solution-discovery process.

Explore this visionary concept in the branches stemming from this one– why it can be so, how it can be done, the benefits it can bring and the dangers it can avoid.

The Vision of Grass-Roots Governance

Grass-roots governance invests problem-solving and decision-making initiative, activity and authority at the lowest level possible in the community of those who are governed.  This is governance operating bottom-up in direct response to the needs and ideas of the broad population, as contrasted with the usual top-down mode that we currently depend on.

Until now, logistical practicalities have made grass-root governance impractical in any organization larger than a small village.  However, Collaborative Solution-Discovery augmented with state-of-the-art communications and data-processing technology now makes grass-root governance possible and effective in any organization, even of massive size (as will be explained).  It returns to the principles and ideals as envisioned at the founding or our nation: governance of, for and by the people.

The New Supersedes the Old.

For the new paradigm to prevail, to supersede the existing paradigm of adversarial power politics that is fueled by big money and operates top-down for the benefit of a powerful elite, there is no need for a struggle against the existing paradigm.  The old paradigm is simply bypassed.  The new meme is established in the minds of progressive-thinking people.  The platform to support the business of governance is constructed at and by the grass roots using means commonly available to anyone.  The process is set free in the public domain for universal application at any level from the local neighborhood to the entire nation, and eventually, the world.

The new governance paradigm is really a return to the ideals of the town meeting, with two important augmentations that bring it into the 21st century.  One is the application of the process structure of CSD as described on other branches of this site.  That enables the discussion to proceed efficiently, avoiding the aimless wandering, wheel-spinning and perhaps acrimony of unstructured public discourse.  The other augmentation is the use of the Internet and Artificial Intelligence technology to expand the span of participation from the number of people who can gather in a meeting hall to the entire population numbering in the millions.

The power and authority of the new paradigm derive from two characteristics.

  • Stemming from the diverse grassroots, it enjoys a broad consensus of support which the established political regime would find hard to deny.
  • Base as it is on CSD, the solution it creates will be more effective than any solution coming from the incompetent adversarial power politics paradigm.

A Hybrid of Republic and Participative Democracy

Technically, the United States is a republic, not a democracy.  That is necessary because, even in colonial times and especially now, it is logistically impossible to engage the entire population in grass-roots participative democracy without the 21st century augmentations.  Currently the business of governance is conducted (supposedly) in our interest by elected officials.  We hold those officials accountable by voting for them (or not) in periodic elections, and communicating with them by various means between elections.  That will remain so under the new collaborative paradigm for most issues which are in the category of every-day management of society to maintain good order and function.  None of us have the time or interest to be involved in all the every-day issues of governance, and is is perfectly acceptable to delegate those issues to duly elected and appointed officials whose competence and good faith we can hope to trust.

However, for the big, important, and contentious issues, grass-roots governance empowered by CSD is the tool of choice.   The reasons for that are discussed elsewhere on the “Why is it necessary?” branch.

Open Questions

That leaves two kinds of questions, as addressed in the branches from this page.

  • What is the infrastructure to support grass-roots governance?  What are the features of that infrastructure which, with confidence, we know how to build?  What questions about making that infrastructure work still need answers?  Who could do the work of setting it up?
  • With this infrastructure in place, what would an issue-resolution project look like?  How do we get issue-resolution to converge on a solution with consensus support?  If the masses are engaged, how do we avoid devolving to the banal group-think solution, and instead allow the creative solutions from the fringes to have a go?  How do we avoid the tyranny of the mob, preserving the benefits of diversity and the rights of small groups among the large?