Difference between revisions of "Digital Governance"

Revision as of 21:45, 18 March 2025

Full Title or Meme

An environment or process by which governments and other organizations can create and enforce Governance Frameworks as digital certificates are deployed.

Context

• Governance is a concept with many meanings. In this wiki it shall be limited to the collaborative process of creating Governance Frameworks for use in transactions among digital Entities and the resulting User Experience. The expected participants in Governance creation will be sovereign states, professional organizations, consortia, universities and similar. ^[1]
• Governance online is much like governance in the real-world, a constant balancing act between order and freedom. Each person, each society is constantly seeking the optimal balance between these two concepts.

Centralization

Centralization can be used to establish a hierarchy of trusted nodes. But a fully centralized deployment can be very prone to disruption if outages occur. A decentralized deployment with cached trust decisions can survive when disaster strikes multiple nodes. The most resilient network are self-organized at the lowest level possible.

Problems

• The core problem is that the proper operation of a distribute common good, line the Internet, is dependent on the goodwill of the human beings that both use and maintain the common resources that we all depend upon. Since we cannot depend on every member operating with goodwill, some rules are required to avoid The Tragedy of the Commons.
• There are a lot of books and articles that seem to espouse one or the other of Order and Freedom, but none that try to take an even-handed review of both. Below are the various ways that these are approached.
• For a different view of Digital Governance as a cloak hiding the reality of what developers build see the views of Nagy & Neff^[2]

  "We argue that the conjuration of algorithms allows the tech industry to forge vivid, overly positive, and deterministic narratives that make it challenging for their critics to call attention to the very real harms that algorithmic systems pose to users. We call for discourses of reality instead of magic, as a way to support responsible technology design, development, use, and governance."

Order

• Security and Privacy of the people using the web are continuously bemoaned by users and experts alike. Most solutions take the form of more laws and regulations that stifle the freedom of entities trying to take advantage of the resources of the Internet as a whole and of the web as the most accessible part of the Internet.

Freedom

• Information wants to be free.
• A generative Internet will harness the contributions of all users to make the internet both great and useful.

Technology Harms

The high-speed introduction of Artificial Intelligence has raised concern that society, and perhaps humankind, may be at risk if we do not create a Digital Governance framework to constrain it before it is made widely available. But it is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things of science and technology and not found because they are useful; they are found when it is possible to find them.

References

1. ↑ Urs Gasser and Virginia Almeida, Futures of Digital Governance 'CACM 65 No 3 (2022-03) p 30ff
2. ↑ Peter Nagy & Gina Neff, Conjuring Algorithms: Understanding the Tech Industry as Stage Magicians 2024 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241251789

Other Materials

• See wiki page on Machine Readable Governance.
• See wiki page on Governance Framework.