Cooperative democracy layers an Internet ecosystem atop existing governance and political practices. Some groups, like the Sunlight Foundation, try to “create an API for government”, but their focus is mostly on pulling information out of government. Cooperative democracy aims to create an API, so to speak, to push information into government, specifically the collective wisdom of the citizenry.

Here, an “Internet ecosystem” means widely-distributed collaborative interactions, akin to:

  • the blogosphere
  • Wikipedia
  • open source and Free Software
  • the Twitterverse

So, it’s time to dust off my Four P’s theory of what makes a strong, vibrant Internet ecosystem:

  1. Principles: (yes, I’m a broken record) I believe that communities that spell out, in a narrow detailed list, what it is the community is about, will fare better than communities that don’t. Wikipedia, for example, has the Five Pillars, the Free Software foundation has the Four Freedoms, open source has the Open Source Definition, etc. Some ecosystems have no central body (e.g., the blogosphere) and as such don’t really have a set of principles everyone agrees upon. Others (e.g., the Twitterverse) haven’t developed principles yet — that may work out well, but in times of crisis, they can’t turn to the principles to help settle disputes or otherwise resolve the issues.
  2. Practices: These layer atop the principles and establish codes of conduct, “habits worth forming”, and the like to try to convert the principles into actions. In Wikipedia, practices include the various ways to edit an article to ensure neutral point of view. In the world of Free Software, practices include the ways to attach your license to your source code and how to denote your own code’s interpretation of what other licenses are or are not “GPL compatible”. Sometimes, ecosystems try practices that don’t catch on (e.g., hashtags in the Twitterverse). Sometimes, the ecosystem is so widely distributed that multiple disparate sets of practices can be used with success (e.g., posting frequency in the blogosphere).
  3. Protocols: Protocols are the ways in which the participants in the ecosystem interact and exchange information. Sometimes, these are protocols in the truly technical sense, such as the use of feeds and posting APIs in the blogosphere. Sometimes, these are protocols involving human action but then augmented by technology, such as the use of tags in the blogosphere, or embedding license information using Creative Commons-style metadata. Sometimes, these protocols are driven by the tools, such as the Twitter API or the use of “talk pages” in Wikipedia.
  4. Platforms: Platforms layer atop protocols and, directly or indirectly, provide tools to ordinary folk so they can participate in the ecosystem. Sometimes, platforms are purely programmatic, such as blog pinging services. Sometimes, the platform is the dominant feature of the ecosystem, such as the Twitter Web service and Wikipedia itself.

The platform is the most visible portion of any Internet ecosystem and, by and large, if you don’t have a platform (or multiple competing platforms, like blogging services), you don’t have an ecosystem. The other three P’s, though, sometimes exist and sometimes do not. It is my argument that the more of the P’s an ecosystem has, the stronger that ecosystem will be. This is just a theory, and an anecdotally-backed one at best.

The Cooperative Democracy Project, with luck, will have all four P’s within the next few years. Practices, which tend to arise from practical experience, will lag the other three almost by default. But the principles, or at least a first hand-wavy cut at them, will be fleshed out here over the next several weeks, and protocols and a platform will follow later this year. Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course.