Mobilizing Human Thought into Global Action

MOBILIZING HUMAN THOUGHT INTO GLOBAL ACTION 1

Mobilizing Human Thought into

Global Action

Austin T Tamutus

Interdisciplinary Honors Thesis

A thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements

of the

Interdisciplinary Honors Thesis

Written under the direction of

Dr. Matt Matsuda

Department of History

and

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson

Department of Management and Global Business

School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University

2014-2015


Special thanks to those who encouraged me throughout the

process of writing this thesis.

Direct correspondence to Austin Tamutus,

[email protected]


Table of Contents

Abstract..................................................

Mobilizing Human Thought into Global Action...............

1. Foundation.............................................

Challenges of the Coming Century....................5

Solving Big Problems................................8

Approach............................................9

Personal Motivation................................11

2. Effectiveness.........................................

Thinking Global....................................14

Model of Resolving Problems........................16

Impetus for Maximizing Participation...............18

3. Objectives............................................

Education..........................................19

Deliberation.......................................22

Direct Participation.............................23

Building Consensus...............................27

Community Guidelines.............................30


Metrics for Projects...............................30

Task Delegation....................................31

4. Synthesis.............................................

Superstructure.....................................33

Community Curated Primers..........................33

Consensus Builder..................................34

Action Portal......................................36

Scenario...........................................37

5. Conclusion............................................

Figures..................................................

References...............................................


Abstract

Solidifying a support system for civic engagement is

paramount to systematically avoiding further global

catastrophe. The most powerful civic structures of today

typically depend on decisions made by small numbers of

people, failing to capitalize on humanity’s greatest

resource—the minds of the billions of people who are already

being affected by global adversity. Safeguarding our future

requires a civic action platform (CAP) that empowers the

aware and gives all willing citizens the opportunity to

change the world through world-wide collaboration. Instead

of suggesting how existing structures can be refined, I

propose a set of specific parameters for a new CAP that

ensures a comprehensive approach to global risks, pointing

to areas of research that should inform its construction.

This platform should be designed to facilitate conscientious

participation by providing tools for designing public action

plans to address global concerns. It should include a space

for participants to caucus and determine which plan[s] to

move forward. I posit CAP design elements that will augment


the ability of participants to design plans that will

positively impact the community. Finally, I outline how

these characteristics can be synthesized into a CAP that

organizes direct action rather than supplication to

representatives.

Keywords: anarcho-syndicalism, civic engagement, civic

action platform, direct democracy, representative democracy,

social preference, voting, web applications


Mobilizing Human Thought into

Global Action

1. Foundation

Challenges of the Coming Century

The human species has the power to make great changes

to our planet. Our race has already had profound effects on

our home world. We have cultivated vast surfaces of the

planet with agriculture, using 32% of Earth’s non-ice

landmass for crops and livestock grazing (Ramankutty 2008).

We have constructed mountain-sized skyscrapers like Burj

Khalifa, the height of 450 humans. We created the Internet,

a virtually real-time communication network that spans the

globe. Moreover, there seem to be no limits to what

unpredictable possibilities we will actualize in the coming

centuries. We may soon see an era of almost unlimited

abundance of virtually all material goods, made possible by

industrialized, atomically precise manufacturing (Drexler

2013). Computer intelligence seems poised to revolutionize

the efficiency and potential of numerous industries (Martin

2006, Urban 2015). Each year, we produce over 200 million


tonnes of plastics (Jambeck 2015), a type of substance never

seen on Earth before the twentieth century.

Humanity’s great power does not come without danger.

We possess the technology to create cataclysmic change that

could decimate civilization as we know it. At a time when

humanity’s reach is arguably beginning to exceed its grasp,

it is paramount that we become far more deliberate about

what we do as a species.

Martin (2006) illustrates how a number of global

systems are “metastable” and susceptible to immense and

irreversible change in the next century. As any system of

variables is changed, the direction of the change can often

be intuited by simply looking at its symptoms. In a

metastable system, there are stabilizing factors that keep

the system within certain boundaries. There may also be

positive feedback mechanisms that overwhelm these

stabilizing forces after certain thresholds are reached.

After surpassing those thresholds, which are not always

immediately apparent or simple, a number of factors will

start pulling the system towards a point further from the


norm, a different point of metastability. The task of

returning to a previous point of metastability is more

complicated than counteracting the work it initially took to

reach that threshold, because the positive feedback

mechanisms that followed must also be overcome.

Allowing global systems to surpass thresholds for

metastability will imprison us in those exacerbated

conditions until we can counteract both our own changes to

those systems and their natural feedback mechanisms. The

consequences of such huge shifts in conditions will be

devastating to the people living under them. A concrete

example of this danger is found in runaway climate change:

the effects of global temperature rise are already

devastating ecosystems around the world and taking away

dozens of species every day (Chivian 2008). Still, these

symptomatic losses are far easier to stomach than what could

happen to our planet after the polar ice caps melt and

oxygenating forests around the world are destroyed (McCarthy

2002). Currently, the ice caps reflect sunlight away from

our planet, keeping it cool and acting as a stabilizing


force on the global temperature; widespread forests keep our

own greenhouse gas emissions in check, and similarly act as

a stabilizing force. If natural climate stabilizers like

these disappear, our global temperature will rise even

further. This positive feedback would augment the changes

we are implementing, which could lead to widespread

agricultural shortages in developing or under-developed

regions of the world (Challinor 2001), causing famine where

food is already scarce.

In this example, if we allow processes to reach the

point of no return, then resolving the issue becomes more

difficult than merely reducing our carbon emissions. We

would have to either drastically change our way of living or

launch an organized and far-reaching program of reversing

the changes that we have caused. Either we have to hasten

the pace of our proactive measures, or we will be forced to

devote large amounts of resources into counteractive

measures. Whichever the case may be, the response of the

human race will have to be massive in scale. To counteract

the escalating dangers we have set into motion on the global


scale, we must effect processes that work in reverse on a

global scale.

The global climate is not the only system in danger of

being pushed beyond its boundaries for stability. Many

doomsday scenarios are rapidly becoming more feasible with

the development of powerful technologies. Urban (2015)

explains how the development of self-evolving artificial

intelligence could wipe out all life on Earth within moments

of its creation, and how most experts believe true AI might

be programmed within a few generations. Martin (2006)

illustrates more possible apocalypses: in a massively

global society with frequent transportation between

continents, a deadly synthetic pathogen with a long

incubation period and high infection rate could be created

in a laboratory, then wipe out huge chunks of society.

Another possible world future is the amplification of

international tensions, leading to a nuclear winter far more

devastating than what was technologically possible with the

weapons available during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.


Solving Big Problems

Of course it is possible that none of these predictions

may come to pass. Listing hypothetical doomsday scenarios

would be nothing more than cherry picking if they were being

used as evidence that calamity is surely ahead of us,

because there are just as many alternative scenarios where

extant global powers guide us towards a future brighter than

today. There are already transnational entities,

influential national organizations, and grassroots movements

making great strides in solving important problems. But

these world powers only incorporate the opinions and labor

of a small handful of the world’s population. Ultimately,

they must perform a sort of triage on global risks,

addressing those which are most salient and which they are

politically capable of addressing.

That triage leaves open gaps in the agendas of global

powers. And as there is so far no institution capable of

categorically assessing and mitigating global risks, there

are also gaps between organizations in what they

collectively accomplish. In those gaps, some monumental


risks are ignored. For instance, despite the dangerous

possibilities of an ill-conceived self-evolving artificial

intelligence, researching AI security is not a priority

among world governments. AI security is only one of the

more sensationalized topics that civic structures are not

set up to handle.

A system in which the most powerful problem-solving

entities each take on some subset of global challenges

presumes that those problems can be clearly divided. This

assumption is often false; many global systems are

interdependent, and the problems that arise in one are often

inextricably linked to the trends of another. The Global

Risks 2015 report of the World Economic Forum, which

attempts to exhaustively outline the major risks to great

populations and to civilization itself, underlines these

relationships as crucial context for any solutions to global

problems:

“Rising socio-economic inequality, weak economic

growth, food price volatility and food insecurity,

unemployment, large-scale migration and the growing


heterogeneity and interdependence of societies are

among the key drivers of social fragility. Growing

social polarization, isolationism and nationalism in

turn have the potential to trigger geopolitical

conflicts” (Hanouz 2015).

As our world becomes more technologically advanced, as

socioeconomic inequality evolves, and as different regions

become increasingly interconnected by globalization, the

problems facing large populations will become more complex.

The way that we solve problems must adapt to this

complexity. Only an approach that somehow unifies these

challenges under the umbrella of “global risks” can be sure

to react to problems arising from the intersections of these

complicated issues.

As immense as some of this generation’s challenges may

be, humanity has proven its capacity to make planet-wide

changes and overcome similarly immense problems. Many of

these accomplishments, however, seem to be shaped more by

market pressures than a collective desire to deliberately


change the world. The power of humanity has not yet been

coupled to decision-making at the planetary level.

Approach

When I began working on this thesis, my goal was

initially to comprehensively identify the characteristics

ideal for a civic action platform (CAP) that empowers

humanity to solve problems more effectively. I hoped to do

this by looking at the ways people address global issues,

identifying in each platform the design elements that make

it successful or that hold it back, and researching how to

best implement the most successful design elements. This

was an enormous and misguided undertaking. After doing an

extensive survey of many of the topics that I intended to

draw from, I realized that the number of questions was

simply too vast to address in the scope of a single

expositional text. There exists a wealth of research on

democratic education, collaboration, organizational

optimization, and the various other topics that are integral

to the design of a CAP. Even so, the research that has been

done seems to be aimed specifically at refining existing


paradigms, rather than how to combine a set of civic

participation goals (e.g. education, collaboration, and

project implementation) into a new platform. In general,

there is a dearth of scholarship on how to design new action

platforms. For that reason, I decided to shift the focus of

my own writing entirely towards expanding on a new framework

of civic action, and how various elements should come

together to build a new tool for organizing large-scale

action.

I will respond to the shortcomings of today’s problem-

solving frameworks by developing a newly invented framework

of my own. Instead of trying to take apart successful

models for problem-solving and attempting to identify the

components that are responsible for their success, I will

start with a fundamental set of values and work up from

there. The first step of this process is to establish a

working definition for an “effective” platform. Here, I

will consider what it means for something to be effective as

a CAP, explicitly outlining what it entails. Next, I will

follow that contextualized definition of effectiveness to


its logical conclusion, generating a list of parameters that

a CAP should satisfy to be effective. In this section, I

will also point to questions that need to be asked in

designing such a platform. Finally, I will synthesize these

parameters into a unified vision of a workable CAP.

Personal Motivation

In an age of pervasive technological innovation, there

are a lot of things that I want to accomplish in the world,

but most of them are too grandiose for any one person to

tackle: finding the cure for aging, enabling commercial

space travel, curing neurodegenerative diseases, reversing

global climate change, and, most of all, engineering a way

to communicate with nonhuman animals using language. Making

any one of them my life goal would be a monumental

undertaking. Still, they are all important to me. Perhaps

it is that grandiosity itself that I admire, and my true

draw is to the atmosphere of ambition surrounding large

projects. Recognizing that I would find it difficult to

commit to any one of these projects at the expense of all

the rest, I have made it my mission to find a better way of


going about big projects—a way to accomplish greater things

in less time.

Two years ago, I stumbled across the perfect

opportunity to make this more than an abstract aspiration.

I applied to a research position with Dr. Matt Matsuda, then

dean of the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Honors

Program, with the broad pretext of investigating potential

uses for emerging technologies in the classroom. When I

entered the interview, however, he informed me of a separate

project that was being spearheaded by philanthropist James

Martin. Founder of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford

University, Martin wanted to work with Rutgers in

implementing Massive Open Online Courseware (MOOC) that

would teach college students about global issues. He

believed that one of the major barriers to solving massive

problems is the relatively small number of people who have

been taught the facts about major global issues. It’s

common for people to hear in passing about concepts like

“food security” or “environmental justice”, but even people

who are relatively worldly may hear mostly rhetoric and


politicized diatribes on these issues. Furthermore, the

severity of many world-wide issues is not proportional to

the focus of modern research and activism. By thematically

framing the most severe and widespread problems of our

generation as the challenges of the 21st century, Martin

hoped to rally the world in overcoming them.

The way that Martin originally framed this proposal,

these topics would be covered on a Rutgers-based MOOC which

could cover all of these issues in a semester, exposing

people to the fundamentals of each issue (e.g. giga-famine,

artificial intelligence, global climate change). Once I

obtained the position to work with Dr. Matsuda, I began to

discuss the project with my peers; two of my more driven

friends offered to help make the project even more

successful. Thus, Dr. Matsuda, his other research assistant

Fullamusu Bangura, Brian Lee, Mark Hansen and I decided to

expand the concept of this global issues MOOC into a broader

platform.

Over the next year, we would meet regularly to develop

a vision for this educational program. We already knew the


program would include a survey of the volatile dimensions of

humanity’s future, but we eventually concluded that a course

which taught about global issues would be incomplete without

material on how to affect change. We wrote this material,

drawing from a myriad of sources to compile those concepts

and tools which may help students from all academic fields

conceptualize civic action through social innovation or

social entrepreneurship. As complicated as this

multifaceted program became, it seemed reasonable to test it

out as a small seminar before we scaled it to an Honors

Program mission course, then perhaps a global initiative if

that proved successful.

We wrote the syllabus for the seminar, which ran in the

spring 2014 semester. The main project in this class was to

design some plan of action on a local scale that would

address one of the major global concerns covered in the

course. The experience of formatting this seminar

challenged many of my preconceptions about how people engage

with civic issues. Profoundly useful observations included

that open-ended dialogue tended to be relatively ineffective


at getting students to study the material more deeply, that

students developed skills the most expediently when they

were able to simulate their use in real-world scenarios,

that students developed much more innovative projects after

being required to answer a host of practical questions, and

that every student ended up extremely passionate about their

project. With this experience, I became sure that it was

possible to scale this seminar into something much bigger,

and decided to do my own research on how to create a

platform that facilitated civic action.

2. Effectiveness

As I discussed earlier, there are gaps in the agendas

of global powers, and these gaps include global risks that

current problem-solving paradigms are poorly prepared to

insure against. There are at least two reasons that these

paradigms are inadequate to guarantee success. First, there

is no standard method for coordinating the kind of planning

and action materially required to avoid global risks.

Second, there is not one particular “global power”

responsible for causing or solving these problems. This


makes it hard to ensure that enough resources can be

allocated to the solution if a problem arises.

These shortcomings are strong justification for

creating a better method of safeguarding our civilization’s

wellbeing. In this chapter, I will develop a framework for

thinking about global risks and problem-solving, proposing

that the way to maximize our protection is to create a

single platform that systematizes effective problem-solving

and empowers as many people as possible.

Thinking Global

While global risks may manifest as a conglomerate of

separate problems around the world, they often arise from

the interactions between global systems and local

conditions. Developing measures to avoid these risks

efficiently is thus a matter of understanding how individual

actions can be coordinated to counteract these harmful

global trends, then inspiring the efforts of multiple

factions around the world to combat these forces directly.

Simply combining lots of independent solutions is an

inefficient method of solving big problems, unless the


lessons learned from each local solutions are properly

contextualized. More complex problems require better

coordination between different communities. For example,

imagine a community decides that the best way to combat

climate change is to stop purchasing cars that use fossil

fuels. On a local level, this may reduce the community’s

carbon footprint, but car manufacturers will simply respond

to a successful boycott by redirecting any money they used

to advertise to this area into more advertising elsewhere,

diminishing the impact of this community’s local action. To

effectively eliminate fossil fuel usage by the automobile

industry, such boycotts would have to be coordinated on a

much larger scale.

In this scenario, simply scaling this protest into a

global boycott may be able to force a paradigmatic shift in

automobile construction, but often large-scale solutions

require more nuance than massively replicating a local

solution. Imagine, for instance, that runaway climate

change impeded standard agricultural practices, causing food

security to deteriorate around the world: the lack of


available food may be well combated in Idaho by an

initiative for growing and distributing potatoes among the

state’s starving population, yet the success of this

initiative would not be strong justification for

implementing a similar potato-growing program in Alaska. In

this scenario, a potato-growing initiative is a local

solution to the global problem of food insecurity. While

this initiative may deal with the local symptoms of that

problem, it does not address the root of the problem,

climate change, and thus will not prevent runaway climate

change from causing further difficulties for agricultural

practices. Even if initiatives around the world similarly

addressed food scarcity by developing better methods of

growing their own crops, this food scarcity is only a

symptom of climate change.

The aversion of global risks depends on understanding

their different dimensions, identifying what gives rise to

problematic circumstances, figuring out how to conceptually

change those circumstances, then contextualizing those

solutions wherever they need to be implemented. Because


efforts that repair the symptomatic damage done by global

issues often make positive change, it is easy to conclude

that these global problems are being successfully addressed,

but seeing this positive change hides the dangers of leaving

gaps in our problem-solving paradigms. It is not the lack

of progress that warrants better assessment of global risks,

it is the fallibility of our current methods.

Some global risks stem from gradually worsening

conditions and are salient enough to rally against: climate

change, human rights abuses, water pollution, and extreme

wealth disparity are major talking points in today’s

political climate. Other global concerns are much murkier

to the layperson, arising from the crucible of increasingly

potent technology and shifting cultural trends: the dangers

of self-evolving artificial intelligence, potential

outbreaks of synthetic viruses, and modern weapons being

misused for terrorism. Guarding against this latter type of

risk is more difficult to organize because it is not, per

se, a matter of visibly bettering the world, but of

developing precautions to secure against possible threats.


Reacting to worsening global conditions is impossible for

risks that are relatively asymptomatic until their fruition.

Any method of mobilizing global action to avert catastrophe

thus requires carefully orchestrated, proactive planning.

Model of Resolving Problems

For large-scale problems to be solved today, a variety

of conditions have to simultaneously be satisfied. For a

group of people to solve a problem, they first have to

become informed that the problem exists. They must then

learn about why the problem exists, why it needs to be

resolved, and what is needed to solve it. Among this group

of people, they must have skills which, when combined, are

capable of enacting a plan that solves the problem.

Furthermore, these group members must have among them the

ingenuity to come up with a solution that doesn’t require

any skills they don’t have. Of course, they also need to

have the resources required to implement their plan.

Lastly, their solution must have legitimacy among the people

it will affect, or else other people may fight against its

implementation.


Meeting all of these conditions is relatively

straightforward when there is a great deal of latitude in

solving the problem, and when the problem is of a scale that

the group is used to. For instance, if a group is faced

with the challenge of earning a minimum wage salary for each

of them, they could create one of an endless number of

businesses that capitalizes on their skills and resources.

But as each of the requirements that I described becomes

more difficult (e.g. the problem requires a very specific

solution, or it has a tremendous price tag), the likelihood

of the problem being solved decreases.

Global powers of today generally assume the form of

organizations. As organizations age and scale, the

decisions made by their executives have a tendency to become

inwardly focused and disconnected from the world around them

(Drucker 1967). Consequently, the operations of modern

global powers are far detached from the lives of average

citizens, and citizenries usually have little direct

interaction with the procedures of these global powers.


As society becomes more dependent on knowledge workers

and higher degrees of labor specialization, an individual’s

ability to contribute becomes more dependent on their place

in a group of people with complementary specializations

(Drucker 1967). As this trend continues, it becomes less

likely that an arbitrary number of concerned citizens will

collectively have a skillset that can be made effective for

a given task. This trend is true for organizations as well

(Drucker 1992): as the market globalizes and expands,

individual enterprises become more specialized, and it

becomes less likely that the people whose skills are

required to overcome a real-world challenge will spend time

together, further reducing the likelihood of global powers

coming up with solutions to real-world problems.

Conversely, as the problems facing civilization become

increasingly global in scale, they require broader, more

interdisciplinary sets of skills than before.

We cannot afford to take any chances with the survival

of our species. The human race must adapt to a changing

world by creating a new institution, a civic action platform


that is capable of and responsible for systematically averting

global catastrophe. An ideal CAP must eliminate as much of

this chance as possible by maximally satisfying the

requirements for solving a problem:

1. Raise awareness about problems that the CAP should

respond to.

2. Educate people about the circumstances that lead to

global risks.

3. Give citizens tools for implementing solutions.

4. Make it easier for good solutions to gain widespread

exposure.

Impetus for Maximizing Participation

It is unlikely that there are many imminent dangers

posed by current technologies or circumstances that are

noticed by nobody, out of the 7.175 billion people on the

planet (Central Intelligence Agency 2015). But without a

way to organize themselves, average citizens have limited

effective power, making it unlikely for their observations

to be acted upon. Ideally, the perfect CAP would

incorporate the ideas of every human on the planet to


increase the number of people participating increases the

pool of skills, resources, and perspectives that are used to

initiate action. In practice, any implementation of a CAP

is bound to include some and exclude others; identifying the

target membership and how the platform will reach them are

important questions in its design.

Today, power to influence global currents is largely

concentrated among governments, corporations, and wealthy

individuals, with average citizens having little direct

engagement with that power. If a community as a whole

believes that a certain change needs to happen in their

community, there exist no strong, general-purpose civic

systems that empower them to self-organize and make that

change. Representative governments give them the option to

elect somebody who will believe in making that change, but

this is an indirect and slow way of making something happen.

Besides, elected officials are more likely to be skilled

politicians than have the specific expertise required to

implement the change that the community desires. This


powerlessness is unacceptable, and serves as additional

justification for a CAP to reach as many people as possible.

Expanding civic power to the general population may

sound like it runs the risk of mob rule, but such fears are

irrational. Throughout history, communities have come

together to bring progress through social movements. There

are clearly cultural trends that drive people to change the

world even without structures, so by creating supportive

structures for that social change and global risk

management, communities will be able to bring progress even

more quickly. For the sake of that progress, conscientious

participation in those supportive structures should be

facilitated and incentivized, so that more and better plans

are made.

If people care passionately about an issue, they should

have a way to effect change. One’s participation in civic

issues should not be limited by their popularity, their

money, or their conventionality. A community should be able

to decide its fate, and an effective CAP is the perfect tool

to give them that power.


3. Objectives

Education

For a population who aims to solve its overarching

problems and avert disaster, it is direly necessary that

they understand the science behind those problems. If an

action plan is based on flawed knowledge of the world, then

it will fail. Yet people will form opinions regardless of

how much they understand a topic, so it is important that a

CAP places a high priority on spreading the facts about its

target issues. Notably, there is no robust system of

educating incumbent politicians about the issues they vote

on. Having lawmakers vote on issues they don’t understand

or fully appreciate is an unnerving thought, but it should

be expected without any system dedicated to keeping them

informed.

Providing education to civic participants is a question

of utility. If an issue is ideologically important to a

participant of a civic system, then they will engage in

discourse surrounding it, regardless of how little they

might understand the facts behind it. Thus, it is of great


benefit to the whole community for individuals to be given

facts in a comprehensible way. A forum of sensitive topics

is well served by some waypoint where users can gain access

to a quick, dense, and sound understanding of the issues

they’re discussing, based on well-vetted evidence.

So how can a CAP educate people about the issues?

Although this is an extremely dense question, it is

reassuring to remember that most global issues have given

rise to expansive dialogues, and many have spurred the

creation of textbooks and courses. In these cases, there’s

no need to reinvent the wheel; a CAP might be able to simply

compile materials from schools around the world, in some

format that is particularly expedient for teaching a diverse

population. One way to organize that knowledge might be to

crowdsource its compilation and condensation, after simply

laying out some guiding principles. The success of

Wikipedia in constructing a vast repository of knowledge has

proven the capacity of crowds to coordinate the assembly of

information (Viegas 2007).


There are a great number of major considerations for

the principles behind educating a user base: How is

information made accessible? Who decides what topics are

taught about? What is taught—current events, theory, or

practical skills? What kind of balance should be struck

between breadth and depth? How do environmental factors,

like visual organization or social context, interact with

participants’ ability to learn? How can a platform ensure

that it remains objective in what it teaches? How can a CAP

keep people engaged with learning? Do you make the

educational style universally appealing, or do you focus on

appealing to certain demographics who might use the

platform? How do you balance simplicity with complete

coverage of opposing viewpoints? Is learning done

asynchronously, through real-time online communication, or

in person?

When it comes to learning about issues that are heavily

politicized in today’s social climate, learning can require

people to change their deep-seated, prior understanding of

the world. To do this, participants must recognize where


their own beliefs contradict those of their peers, and

subsequently try to understand why they are different

(Scardamalia 1993). It would be somewhat unrealistic to

expect this level of introspection from everybody—every

participant in this civic learning environment would have to

understand, with rigorous nuance, how their own ideology

intersects with and contradicts the various ideologies being

thrown around. One of the difficulties of teaching about

global issues in school is that some material, like the

phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change, may contradict

the premises with which students enter the classroom, and

students who disagree will often dismiss what they’re taught

based on ideological grounds (Chan 2001). It seems possible

that this difficulty may limit the success of any education

platform that covers controversial topics, even if there

were a consensus about the facts to be taught, making

ideological differences an important factor to consider.

Luckily, it seems unlikely that every participant needs

to have a complete understanding of a topic for the group to

deliberate about it. For a given group of people, you can


ascribe certain qualities to that group that may not be

possessed by all of its members. Stahl (2006) writes that

“small groups are the engines of knowledge building. The

knowing that groups build up in manifold forms is what

becomes internalized by their members as individual learning

and externalized in their communities as certi able fi

knowledge.” A group can develop a collective state of

understanding, from which the group’s participants can

learn. This group cognitive state is not just a set of

individual cognitive states, which may differ greatly; it is

a pattern of discourse.

It is also important that civic participants have a way

to learn the skills that comprise good problem-solving. How

do you teach people how to innovate? What are the qualities

that predict a successful project? How do you design

something to be sustainable? These kinds of questions have

been asked by business educators and the emerging field of

social entrepreneurship, and to many of these questions,

there are practical answers (Bornstein 2010).


Deliberation

Maximizing conscientious participation is at the core

of designing an effective CAP. The format of the

participation is thus a crucial decision that must precede

any optimization of this participation. Technology and

political science jointly enable many different formats.

High-tech possibilities are becoming more popular in

determining public interest and guiding governmental policy-

creation. One could, for instance, data-mine the World Wide

Web to discover people’s opinions and map out political

beliefs (Awadallah 2012), implementing public policy based

on this survey. Yet, conscientious civic participation is

about more than collecting opinions that people have formed;

it is about deliberators getting to the root of their

disagreements and the holes in their knowledge, then finding

a way to move past them. Therefore, it is important for a

CAP to have some sort of forum for communities to explore

pertinent issues together, then collaborate towards workable

solutions as engaged citizens.


Direct Participation

Major contemporary paradigms of civic participation

that people look towards today—republics, referendums, and

petitions—seem to be inadequate as problem-solving

paradigms, because the number of people participating is

small, and the participation is not very conscientious

(Fishkin 2005, Palmieri 2007). In a representative

democracy, for instance, average citizens never have to make

many decisions about policies, and in fact are not able to

directly participate in the decision-making process.

Instead of having every person in the country make decisions

about every issue, we elect representatives who then make it

their job to make all of those decisions. When power is

concentrated among fewer individuals, and each of those

individuals has a greater fraction of power, corrupting them

is a far easier task for those who influence political

decisions through bribery or secret bargaining; perhaps

there are ways to correct for corruption, but it seems

dangerous to use a system that inherently makes corruption

and bribery expedient. The vulnerability of the system to


underhanded strategies brings up valid questions about the

moral legitimacy and practicality of a republic: To what

extent are our politicians corrupted behind the backs of

their constituencies? How did the two-party system come to

dominate our political scene, and why do political

discussions devolve so easily into dichotomous debates? To

what extent do the voters genuinely have control over what

happens in legislature?

In estimating how much power the electorate has in a

capitalist republic, especially where the government’s

finances are already spread thin, Noam Chomsky, one of the

leading modern proponents of the anarcho-syndicalist

movement, points out that in “representative democracy, as…

in, say, the United States or Great Britain, […] there is a

monopoly of power centralized in the state, and […] the

representative democracy is limited to the political sphere

and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere”

(Chomsky 1976). In 2014, $3.24 billion was spent on

lobbying US Congress and federal agencies (Center for

Responsive Politics 2015), compared to the $2.039 billion


required to fund Congress itself (Peterson 2014)—meaning

more money was spent by corporations to influence political

decisions than was spent on all of the operations of that

political structure combined. The general population has

little control over the economic sphere of politics, and the

power that it has to influence change through a republic is

thus significantly limited. This question of how to

centralize wealth that the population uses collectively

should be considered in CAP design, because material

limitations are even more important for an action-based

platform than a policy-based platform such as legislature.

More concern about the legitimacy of republics was

spurred by Kenneth Arrow’s treatment of social choice

theory. Arrow (1950) details that there are at least three

reasonable measures of fairness which cannot simultaneously

be satisfied by a rank-order voting system: that, if

everybody ranks a value X above a value Y, then the group as

a whole ranks X above Y; that the only way to change a

group’s preference for X or Y is to change that preference

in the group’s constituents; and that no single person can


decide the group’s preferences in every circumstance. Arrow

proves that “for any method of deriving social choice; by

aggregating individual preference patterns which satisfies

certain natural conditions, it is possible to find

individual preference patterns which give rise to a social

choice pattern which is not a linear ordering”, such that

imposing linear order will make it logically necessary that

a ballot’s results will sometimes be strictly unfair by one

of those three standards.

The final issue with republics is that, in practice,

there are far fewer candidates for election than real

configurations of values. It is unlikely that any

candidate, let alone the majority of them, can or will

dutifully advocate the collective values of their

constituency. Establishing a representation of social

preference by way of electing a set of individuals as

representatives is an extremely imprecise way of expressing

collective values. Furthermore, in term-based elections,

voting an official into office is the only time that a

population has substantive control over what they do or say.


Once a candidate has been elected in, they are essentially

free to implement whatever platform they please until the

end of their term.

Instead of focusing on improving representative

democracy, we should start building organizing structures

that make direct democracy possible. Representative

government may have been necessary at the time our

Constitution was written, because implementing a direct

democracy across such a large expanse of land would have

been a logistical nightmare. Without instantaneous long-

distance communication, it would have been impossible.

Today, we have the technology to make what would have been

extremely difficult very easy, so civic decisions can be

much more democratic and direct.

Democratizing civic action is not just made possible by

modern technology, it is made ideal by the great cognitive

power of large groups. As discussed before, groups engaged

in a discussion form, through collaboration, a gestalt

opinion and collective knowledge. This phenomenon has been

quantified by prediction markets, speculative markets where


people are rewarded for investing in accurate predictions

(Arrow 2008). Prediction markets have proven that a public

forum of enough non-experts can predict with as much

likelihood as experts what the future will hold (Wolfers

2004). When real money is used to buy predictions,

prediction markets may be considered online gambling, making

them illegal. There are still those that operate using play

money, and the results from both have proven that prediction

markets offer a robust measurement of collective

intelligence (Watkins 2007).

The structure of prediction markets makes it possible

to quantify collective preferences in a way that greatly

differs from a ballot. Part of the reason they can be so

accurate is that they are not susceptible to the errors

induced by imposing a linear order of people’s beliefs—a

user is not required to choose between competing

predictions, but invests in those they believe in with an

amount of money proportionate to their confidence in that

prediction. Perhaps more obviously, these markets’ accuracy

must be enabled by some impressive calculative capacity in


large groups of people. When you put a large number of

agents together, and you organize how they share

information, that collective can make quantitative

assessments so accurate that they can extrapolate into

future events.

Prediction markets prove that increasing the range of

civic participants would make solutions more likely to be

accurate. For a large population to predict the future, it

must collectively have the power to understand current

events and trends. What is fascinating is that the accuracy

of prediction markets is rarely dependent on the expertise

of the participants (Almeida 2010). The fact that even non-

experts are successful at making these predictions is a

marker that large groups of people can socially come to very

precise and sophisticated conclusions, even with (or maybe

especially with) vastly diverse individuals. If large human

communities have this kind of cognitive power when they

deliberate, shouldn’t they also be able to analyze

hypothetical alternatives for steering the future into the

right direction? What is it about the design of a


prediction market that allows it to harness this analytic

human power, and how might it be applied to problem-solving?

To be able to mobilize this cognitive power, an

effective CAP should have some method for quantitatively

establishing what people believe, and prediction markets

offer a possible model for this.

Building Consensus

Determining what a population prefers, the topic of

social choice theory, does not need to be a black-and-white

task. As discussed before, there is an intrinsic unfairness

in how rank-order voting represents a population’s

preferences. In a sense, a conclusion that is reached by a

rank-order voting system is not necessarily a legitimate

conclusion, and voting, by itself, does not allow for

oversight of those illegitimacies. The process of building

a consensus can, and should, include participatory

mechanisms that are more meaningful than ballots.

As powerful as they are, prediction markets do not

provide a compelling model for increasing the

conscientiousness of civic participation. They may inspire


a method for choosing action plans generated by a CAP, but

they do not entail a method for generating those action

plans. To do that, an effective CAP should still have a

focal location where people can build a collective

understanding and collaborate on good solutions.

Within any large group of individuals, given a problem

that they intend to solve, the members of that group are

bound to have a number of competing ideas about what the

best course of action is. Each person likely has their own

idea about a solution, and that idea depends on many

factors, such as their moral values, their knowledge of the

problem to be solved, their cultural predispositions, their

creative tendencies, and their intelligence. The diversity

of reasons for disagreement is important to consider in

determining how people should systematically build consensus

in a CAP.

People often draw conclusions with limited knowledge

and exposure to innovative ideas. A person who staunchly

supports a given plan of action might be introduced to a

completely different solution that even more strongly


resonates with their values than the one they originally

identified with. This effect is grossly exaggerated in

limited-party voting systems, in which people are pressured

by political realities to fall into one of a small number of

camps. Today, civic debate is often superficial because the

ballot options are always mutually exclusive—an arbitrary

number of options can be chosen. Increasingly, this is

causing people to think about complicated issues

dichotomously (Pew Research Center 2014). There is strong

argumentation from proponents of anarcho-syndicalism (Rocker

2004, Chomsky 1976) and deliberative democracy (Fishkin

2005) that the decisions of a society should not just be

items on a referendum, but the direct products of public

discourse. Voting is not, on its own, enough to qualify

conscientious civic involvement.

On the other extreme, with complete freedom in

discussion and no parties or practical considerations, it is

easy for discussions about problem-solving to become

incredibly abstract or trite. If a deliberation process is

not somehow solidified with concrete examples or actions,


then there is nothing to make actionable decisions about

(Drucker 1967). And even when realistic plans are part of

the discussion, people are drawn to that which is tried-and-

true, often to sidestep the socially strenuous conflict

involved in deep collaboration (Chan 2001).

These observation can be reduced to two restrictions on

an ideal collaborative environment: there should be a way

to stimulate deep dialogue between differing perspectives,

and there should be a way of making sure that people are

exposed to ideas that may resonate with their values more

strongly than the ideas they already have. Following these

restrictions will make it so that better and better

compromises will be uncovered. Then, if there exists some

solution to a problem that satisfies everybody, the dialogue

will continue to approach that ideal solution.

Taking into account all of these parameters, the

implementation of a consensus-building mechanism is highly

open-ended, but there are certainly more and less functional

design components. The details of such a mechanism should

be informed by contextual requirements and research on


collaboration—Austin (2000) presents a useful introduction

to how collaborative structures are built in the context of

business-oriented organizations, and Cross (2004) delineates

typical patterns of how knowledge can be distributed for

collaborative purposes.

Community Guidelines

Creating a place for civic discussion would require

careful planning. Any forum large enough to represent a

population would be filled with a massive number of

conflicting opinions, proposals, and facts on a great number

of topics. With such a diversity of speech, an open-ended

discussion space might be vulnerable to sociological forces

that shift the discussion away from its original purpose of

improving the community. Therefore, the space should be

designed in a way that strongly encourages people to craft

usable consensuses. This would entail a set of rules that

the participants agree on, which sets up a clear process for

distilling policy and action goals out of the overarching

dialogue. What those precise rules should be is beyond the


scope of this work, and highly dependent on the type of

community in which the CAP is being implemented.

Metrics for Projects

Once people have settled on what they want done, there

remains the question of how the goals will be carried out.

Sometimes, initiatives that people strongly support are

framed in plans that would never work successfully. Great

ideas are often poorly executed. As my own research with

Dr. Matsuda revealed, people create more actionable plans

when they are given a comprehensive set of universal project

metrics. To maximize the smart design and execution of

plans, an effective CAP should outline a focal set of

criteria that its plans should satisfy before being deemed

actionable.

Another reason to have explicitly outlined metrics for

judgment is that there are sociological factors that

interfere with the proper design and implementation of

strategies. For instance, republics inherently incentivize

hasty, heuristic measures of effectiveness, as outlined in

Bornstein (2010):


“The primary feedback mechanisms for policy makers—

press reports and elections—punish failure and demand

results in unrealistically short time frames.

Consequently, elected officials come to favor the

short-term appearance of success over actual success.

This dynamic understandably distorts policy making.”

There exist various available metrics that can be used

by a CAP’s participants in the design of good business

plans. Some noteworthy examples include the Balanced

Scorecard (Kaplan 1995), policy debate stock issues (Kerpen

1999), and social innovation evaluation plans (Alter 2000,

Social Innovation Fund 2014).

Measurement of results should not stop at the design of

plans. Any CAP that helps launch projects would greatly

benefit from setting up a system for monitoring them,

enabling the user base to adapt the action plan and task

list in response to shortcomings. Buzzetto (2006) describes

best practices for assessment as an ongoing practice, which

continually holds a plan against its projections, and


advises that e-assessment offers great utility in

determining users’ comprehension and completion of tasks.

Task Delegation

Once a plan is actionable, it must be carried out

before it has any impact on the world. In the an effective

CAP, whose primary resource is the large number of people in

its constituency, it would be logical for its implementation

to include a system of getting volunteers to carry out jobs

that are determined necessary. This system would need a way

of dividing the projects into individual tasks, and a way of

enlisting individuals to complete them. Although a system

for task management should be considered a vital part of a

novel CAP, the format for managing tasks would largely

depend on the CAP’s needs.

There is a wealth of research on task management for

businesses, and this research should be consulted when

designing the management of a CAP. French (1975) and Antoni

(2005) introduce two paradigms for managing teams and their

activities, and provide useful further reading for those

interested in designing CAP management systems.


Software for managing projects, teams, and tasks has

brought a lot of success to both large organizations, which

require thorough and streamlined organization at multiple

levels, and startup enterprises, who may entirely lack the

luxury of pre-existing organizational frameworks. There is

little research about task management software because of

its novelty, but there are many emerging options for

managing projects (Riss 2005). Related categories of

productivity software include collaborative software,

calendaring software, workflow software, and project

management software. Collaborative software in general has

received more focus in the literature; elements of this

software can be used for designing task management

frameworks.

4. Synthesis

In the first chapter of this thesis, I argued that

there is a pressing need to more actively address global

problems, using runaway climate change to demonstrate that

we must adopt a global problem-solving paradigm far more

effective than the ones we have today. The second chapter


responded to these tangible concerns by conceptually framing

a civic action platform. Building off of this definition of

an effective CAP, the third chapter translated this

definition into a list of objectives that a CAP must execute

in order to empower effective civic action. Here, I also

argued that the primary civic systems we expect to solve our

problems do not consistently or cohesively meet these

objectives, providing the impetus for the creation of a new

system that does. Now, I will visualize what an effective

CAP might look like if it was deliberately constructed to

meet all of these objectives.

Superstructure

This CAP would comprises three main sections: One

would teach about global risks. One would be a space for

deliberative problem-solving. One would be used for

managing tasks. This structure is diagrammed in Figure 1.

Taking advantage of the vast connective power of the

Internet and the organizational possibilities made possible

by computers, this platform would be implemented as a

website. Access to the website would be global and


unrestricted, but posting or uploading content would be

limited to people who have created user profiles. The

website would thematically be centered around a list of the

core global risks that the user base believes most urgently

need to be addressed.

Community Curated Primers

The first featured section of this CAP would be devoted

to informing the user base about the core global risks.

This educational content would be designed like executive

summaries, focusing on the key information to make learning

about the issues as expedient as possible. This content

would be compiled by the community that uses it, and

assembled according to strict guidelines requiring strong

evidential support and objectivity. Where controversy

exists, the reasoning for major opposing positions will be

outlined, much like the way that IssueVoter.org explains the

support for and opposition to each piece of legislation

passing through the US Congress.

In the spirit of Wikipedia, editing of the content in

this informational section would have a front page for


readers, and a “talk” page for people interested in editing—

this two-sided model has been shown to coordinate editing

and stabilize the information on encyclopedic webpages

(Viegas 2007). To facilitate efficient fact-checking, this

section would take advantage of databases of journals,

encyclopedias, and other sources that are established to be

trustworthy. Credibility, completeness, and clarity would

serve as the triple bottom line for judging information.

Consensus Builder

The consensus builder would be a space for

collaborative problem-solving, creating a new tool for

deliberative democracy. Conceptually, each core global risk

would be broken down here into a network of objects—

component challenges, questions, and projects. Complex

objects would be recursively divided into simpler ones. The

citizens using this CAP would hierarchically organize these

objects in order to discuss them with clarity. Similar to

the informational section, the consensus builder would have

two graphically distinct interfaces. In this case, the two

modes would be the forum and the network viewer.


The forum of the consensus builder would comprise of

talk pages for each object, formatted similarly to the talk

pages behind the primers. The forum would be designed to

maximize effective collaboration, taking advantage of

effective paradigms of online, group-based learning.

Because research on this topic is still burgeoning, the

interface of the forum would be highly experimental and

evolve greatly over time. The basis for adding or removing

functionality to this forum would be to augment

conscientious participation.

The network viewer would be a graphical user interface

(GUI) streamlined for rapid navigation of issues and editing

of connections. Graphically, this part of the web

application would constitute a sidebar with various

navigation tools and a blank workspace where the user would

load objects, each depicted as a node in a graph. Users

would use the sidebar to populate the workspace with nodes,

then to perform a variety of actions on the nodes, notably

adding, deleting, and modifying connections between them.

As users create these edges between pairs of nodes, the


website will keep track of how many times an edge has been

created from one to the other, storing this value as an edge

weight. As issues become explored in more detail, and as

projects are developed to address civic concerns, networks

will evolve among the issues, structuring these topics for

investigation and discussion.

Whenever a user loads a node, they will have the option

to load its edges with the greatest weight. They will then

be able to strengthen any pre-existing connection, causing

them to see that edge every time in the future that they

load the parent node. Alternatively, a user can delete

connections that they don’t agree with. The delete function

will eliminate the edge from their perspective, loading the

edge with the next greatest weight, but on the server side

the edge’s weight will simply decrement by one.

Incrementing or decrementing the weights of edges changes

the server’s representation of their relative weights,

aggregating into a social preference. This technically

makes it a Condorcet voting method, which renders it

susceptible to strategic voting. However, the user-side


consequences of strengthening or deleting nodes incentivizes

voting that is genuine rather than strategic.

In addition to setting relationships between different

nodes, the consensus builder would allow a user to judge a

plan by how effective it is likely to be, how well the plan

coincides with certain values, and how much evidence

supports the plan. Similar to a prediction market, users

would be able to assign percent values to each of these

characteristics, which would allow the CAP to calculate

which plans within a category have the greatest values for

each characteristic. This would enable the users to

formulate a collective opinion as to what should be done.

This process would be used to generate the list of global

risks at the core of the whole website.

When innovators explore this network and they see which

parts of a plan are agreeable and likely to work, they would

be able to incorporate these ideas into a new plan. Their

new plans may comprise largely of components that were

previously part of other projects, simply assembling them in

a creative and unpredictable way. This would allow the best


parts of distinct plans to be combined into overall projects

that find even more support from the citizens. The CAP

could then would prominently display the most agreed-upon

risk solutions, making it more likely that people would

investigate them.

Action Portal

The action portal of the CAP would be another form of

collaboration software. It would act as a separate GUI for

manipulating the projects and tasks that were created in the

consensus builder. The primary nature of this section of

the website is to allow for self-delegation among the

community, so it will have features that make it easier for

people to find tasks they are willing to do and capable of

doing. The citizens using this CAP will be able to self-

organize extremely efficiently for any issues they find

important, and they will be provided with frameworks for

continued project assessment to help them succeed.

Additionally, those projects that are highly approved in the

consensus builder will be more likely to attract volunteers

to complete their constituent tasks.


By making the functionality of the action portal

available to any project that is created on the CAP, voting

becomes much less important than the actual participation in

solutions. There would be two simultaneous processes

operating: in the consensus builder, you have people

analyzing how certain plans match up with their values, how

effective they might be, etc.; in the action portal, you

have people spearheading real-world initiatives that realize

those most widely supported plans. If people in a group are

widely aware of a debate that’s happening, and they

recognize it as possessing gravity for them, they will work

towards the solutions that they most strongly support. And

the more people that support a given plan, the more human

resources it will have. Ultimately, the market pressures of

supply and demand will push forward those plans that are

most in line with the people’s strongest collective desires.

Importantly, this market of ideas, unlike the contemporary

market of capital, does not allow for individuals to

concentrate resources; for a plan to become well-supported,


it must actually merit that support, as judged by the whole

community.

Scenario

To envision the actual use of this CAP, I will walk

through how a user may use it to engage with the global

concern of food security.

Let’s say a human rights activist is concerned about

improving food security around the world, but they’re unsure

where to start. They may not think of themselves as

particularly entrepreneurial, but they do know that they

want everyone to have access to healthy food. This user

logs on to the CAP website, and on the front page is a list

of major global issues that people are trying to address.

They see that food security is one of them. To learn more

about the issues that comprise food security, they read

through some of the primers that the website’s community has

put together. They see some major viewpoints on the issue,

and some key statistics and facts. This particular user

happens to have studied standards for food delivery into

food deserts around the world, about which they notice these


primers have little information. To fix this, they navigate

to the food security discussion page, share hyperlinks to

pertinent resources, and after having a conversation with

other users to better understand the history of the primers’

writing, the user directly edits the primer about food

delivery.

This user is confident about their knowledge of

agricultural practices involved in assisting food deserts,

so they head over to the consensus builder. They open up

the node for food security, then they load the most heavily

weighted edges. Their screen would look something like

Figure 2. Thinking through what they know about the issue

as a whole, they begin the process of breaking down the

issue in their own workspace, loading and creating nodes and

editing the connections between them. As they manipulate

their personal web of information and hierarchy of issues,

they delve into specifics behind various subtopics, looking

up resources to fact check. They only make changes where

necessary, depending for the most part on the consensus of


the community. Eventually, their screen resembles the

sketch in Figure 3.

Because the user happened to own a kumquat tree growing

up, they were confused when kumquats were listed as a fruit

that grows in the desert. In response, they go to the

“kumquat” discussion page, link to research that shows they

are not native to deserts, then return to their idea web and

delete the connection between “desert foods” and “kumquats”.

They then research what types of nutritious produce actually

grow in more arid regions. After navigating the issue of

food security very deeply, they believe they have figured

out how to use hydroponics to efficiently grow apples and

carrots in arid regions. Drawing from the various

dimensions of food security that they have studied, they

create a project node comprised of the major tasks that need

to be accomplished. In the action portal, they carefully

outline the specifics of each task and identify the

qualifications that somebody would need to complete each.

If this user has spent their whole life in suburban New

Jersey, their knowledge about farming in the desert may be


somewhat skewed. A number of their fellow users on the

platform think that the plan is very elegant, so they

strengthen its position in the “food security” solutions

network by up-voting the appropriate edges. Since these

users do not live in a desert or a food desert, they won’t

actually be implementing this plan.

Far away, in Arizona, somebody logs onto the platform

for ideas of how to change their community. They see this

plan and laugh at some implausible ideas, but ultimately

judge that it has good components. This Arizona resident

down-votes the tasks that are relatively ill-conceived and

creates some replacement tasks that would better assist in

implementing these hydroponic farms. They then inform their

acquaintances of this project. A handful of those

acquaintances will sign up for tasks that are suited to

their skillsets, and when they’ve finished these jobs, they

post their results under the task description and state, in

the task’s discussion section, that the task is completed.

After the entire hydroponics project is completed by

volunteers in the Arizona community, a local project will


have been accomplished, representing positive change in the

world. But down the road, as more projects like this are

implemented, the infrastructure for talking about food

security will have been refined immensely, allowing for a

much clearer understanding of the issue. The hierarchy of

topics that constitute “food security” will continue to be

streamlined and better organized. These changes in the

CAP’s knowledge networks will allow for projects of a bigger

scale to be conceptualized in the future. These larger

projects may include broader, more far-reaching initiatives

that are not merely a compilation of smaller projects. For

instance, with a greater understanding of the circumstances

that lead to food deserts may come an initiative to combat

changes in the climate that exacerbate agricultural

production in arid regions. Such an ambitious goal would be

broken down into subprojects, such as planting trees across

the country. This division of projects would be applied

recursively until it can be broken down into individual

tasks, such as getting a neighborhood to plant trees along

its roads.


Strictly speaking, this CAP framework could be used to

address any problem, and would allow enormous undertakings

to be assumed by communities as a whole, providing a

structure in which volunteers can self-organize direct

action. Through its continued use, it would develop through

group cognition more nuanced approaches to real-world

problems, and the accomplishment of each project would lay

the groundwork for more ambitious projects.

5. Conclusion

The evolving power of human technology makes possible a

number of catalytic changes that could wreak havoc across

the planet. If we invent a certain kind of artificial

intelligence, design the wrong kind of pathogenic virus,

allow runaway climate change to progress, or cross any

number of dangerous existential thresholds, humanity’s

ability to survive on Earth may be threatened in a way never

before seen. To protect the world from devastation, we need

to coordinate our global risk management as a species. I

posited in this thesis that the most legitimate and

effective way to coordinate widespread action is to create a


new civic action platform that maximizes conscientious

participation of citizens. Civic action platforms should

take into account a variety of principles established by

previous research, and I argued that there are certain

functions that a CAP should have in order to be impactful.

Having established a foundation for the creation of a

new civic action platform, I illustrated my own vision of a

platform synthesized at the intersection of those

principles. This CAP would educate the people about global

risks, making it more likely that people would take action.

It would stimulate collaboration in solving real-world

problems, giving the good ideas of a community more salience

for their respective merits than they might otherwise

achieve. Lastly, by creating a market of ideas, enabling

citizens to coordinate their resources, and organizing

specific task delegation, it would enable a community to

completely bypass existing institutions in creating social

change.

In practice, there are still many questions left to be

answered about the practical design of a civic action


platform: who should a CAP target to join its membership?

What problems should a CAP actually address? What utilities

should a CAP include? Who is in charge of informing people,

and how would they be held accountable for what they teach?

How does a CAP manage ideological differences?

Any project that affects communities at large will need

to take into account many social justice considerations:

how does it navigate cultural disagreements? How does it

account for hegemonic tendencies that may incite

geopolitical tension? In what language does the CAP

operate? To what extent does it incorporate cross-lingual

support? Who gets to participate in decision-making, and

what kind of engagement do they have?

It should be noted that there is potential for such a

CAP to pose its own risks if it were implemented

thoughtlessly. A platform that facilitates the building of

a consensus by its participants does not inherently have a

way of taking into account the needs and values of those who

do not participate. If outsider needs are not somehow

accounted for, then the platform could be construed as


facilitating the consolidation of power among particular

groups of people, who would then possess a degree of

hegemony over outsiders.

In response, a vital question for a CAP designer is how

to make sure that it doesn’t impose a biased sense of

justice on outsiders. The answer may lie in guaranteeing

access to as many people as possible, or it may lie in

somehow limiting the actions of this platform to

specifically avoid hegemony and oppression of non-users. The

platform that I synthesized would incorporate this awareness

into its rules and its culture: it would be a website

available to those with Internet access, but 4.250 billion

people—59% of the world—lack Internet access (Central

Intelligence Agency 2015) and would be effectively barred

from participation. It would be hard to artificially

restrict the platform’s user base from creating policies

biased against non-users, so as much as possible would be

done to stimulate awareness about intercultural differences,

and make deliberators constantly aware of the issues that

arise from a platform that doesn’t include non-Internet


users. Furthermore, ancillary efforts would be made to

expand the organizational paradigms used by the platform to

areas not currently connected to the Internet.

A website may not currently reach everybody in the

world, but creating a CAP that empowers 41% of the world’s

population to solve global problems is an improvement upon

current global problem-solving paradigms which place a

miniscule number of representatives in charge of finding

solutions. It is also important to consider that the

regions catalyzing global risks with advanced technology,

weaponry, and infrastructure are best poised to avert those

risks, and those regions are incidentally among the areas in

the world with Internet access.

The concepts I discussed throughout the thesis apply to

designing any type of civic action platform. A website is

one way to implement those principles, but it need not be

the only way. In areas in the world without Internet

access, those creating civic action platforms would be able

to use the means that are available to them. If the

principles I outlined can be used to make a website that


empowers Internet users, then they could just as well be

used to make social structures that empower non-Internet

users. Whatever the format of a CAP, if it takes advantage

of the guidelines described in this thesis and powered its

operations with a group of people invested in improving the

world, then it should give a citizenry much more direct

influence on the issues that affect them. Implemented

properly and on a large enough scale, a civic action

platform may be powerful enough to end humanity’s dependence

on the unjustifiable power structures of today.


Figures

Figure 1 - Superstructure of Proposed CAP:

Figure 2 - Loading Nodes in the Consensus Builder:


Figure 3 - Sample Idea Web for Food Security:


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