[MG] Civil

[Steve Coffman]

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Looks like they intend to have some sort of crowdsourced policy-making platform.

https://joincivil.com

The Civil Constitution

Civil is founded on the principle that a free and open press is an essential element of the foundation of a free, fair, and just society; and in the belief that global change in technology, economics, and politics have altered the basic conditions that provide for its fulfillment of that purpose.

Civil’s platform is intended to be operated and governed by its participants—citizens and journalists alike—while protecting Civil’s core values and purpose. Civil is a community with a specific purpose and an ethical position—these establish the side-constraints on the operational and governing power of the community over individuals and groups within it. Therefore the Civil Journalism Ethics Guideline, a constitution that lays out Civil’s core values and purpose.

Specific interpretations of the core values and purpose will be the work of the community, operating according to a transparent governing framework. That framework will include provisions for the community to change this document as needed to better promote the core values and purpose of Civil.

[Scott Raney]

Post by Steve Coffman
It will be interesting to see how this develops. Looks like they intend to
have some sort of crowdsourced policy-making platform.
https://joincivil.com

Argh: More blockchain hammers looking for nails.

I do agree that they've accurately identified one of the core problems
of modern civilization: Advertizing as funding model is inefficient,
ineffective, too susceptible to corruption, and IMHO immoral because
it relies on amateur social engineers whose job it is to manipulate
people without supervision, regulation, or even any sort of ethical
standards. But what they've proposed instead is just to turn
journalism into another type of charity which just makes the core
funding problem even worse.

My proposed solution is a government budgeting system that has the
ability to fund *all* types of organizations that The People decide
provide a community benefit. Journalism would of course be one of
these, but you don't need any baroque blockchain system to ensure that
the good ones get supported and the bad ones fade away, you just need
to have all of them shown in a list and have The People (and of course
in my system just a small subset of them) just pick those they want
some of their tax dollars to go to. This gets around the underfunded
charity problem because we will collectively decide what percentage of
the government budget goes to each class of charity and popularity and
*individual* citizen evaluation will be used to divvy up the pie. Sure
this means that some of your tax dollars are going to be going to
organizations that have an ideological slant that might differ from
yours, but at least you'll know that your fellow citizens are deciding
that and that its not just some oligarchs or activerts who have
figured out how to game the system. Plus it doesn't require all
existing organizations to change their entire operations to fit a new
model: All they have to do is fire their advertising/fundraising
departments...

It's also too bad that they cite Wikipedia as model of good
governance. My experience has been quite the opposite: IMHO overt
corruption and bias is a fundamental component of Wikipedia precisely
because there *is* no public input into the process and so it ends up
being the same kind of "government by the activerts" that I think has
been convincingly shown (by misrepresentative democracy) to not work.
Regards,
Scott