
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6: Prioritizing Trustworthiness in the book Holy War for True Democracy.
We need a formal organization to manage and administer the overall effort to bring true democracy to the world, including the first initiative outlined in this chapter – Trustworthy Internet Identities. Let’s call the organization Democracy Guardians (DG).
Because DG is all about trustworthiness and true democracy:
- It will be a nonprofit – it can’t have even the hint of financial conflict of interest
- It will be operated as a true democracy – it will eat its own dog food
- The board of directors will be voted on by the members, using weighted votes where the votes of people with the highest trustworthiness scores will count more than people with low scores
- The board will choose an executive team, which in turn will hire employees
- Anyone in the world can become a member, but note that a person’s influence on DG decisions will depend on the person’s trustworthiness score, which will initially be the equivalent of zero
- Members can build a trustworthiness score by either posting about government and politics (and thereby getting judged by others) or by participating in DG activities such as taking training courses and then submitting trustworthiness judgments on others (all judgments will be reviewed by more senior members of DG)
- DG will be open and transparent in everything – every bit of communication among DG board and staff will be posted on the Web, every vote will be public, every line of computer code will be public open source except encryption keys and other administrative secrets