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Join the School of Creativity and Democracy - Transform the world through digital participation, arts, and legislative theater.

Fractal Democracy with Marta Poblet Balcell

Avatar: Nadia Nadesan Nadia Nadesan

Session Summary: Fractal Democracy – Marta

  • Crowd Intelligence: Designing new institutions for the digital era by harnessing collective knowledge through digital tools and blended environments.

  • Defining Politics: Encouraging reflection on personal and collective understandings of politics.

Case Studies:

  • Haiti (2010): Diasporic Haitians used satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap to update digital maps post-earthquake.

  • Libyan Crisis Map: Created for the UN, leveraging verified social media sources to aid humanitarian efforts.

  • Hologram Protest (Madrid, 2015): In response to the Gag Law, activists protested as holograms, symbolizing the limits of free speech.

  • Crowdsourced Constitutions: Iceland pioneered crowdsourced constitutional input. Morocco used Facebook for broad participation, but digital access was uneven.

Key Reflections:

  • "I don’t want to be a hashtag"—a critique of symbolic activism.

  • Aristotle: "A mob judges many matters better than any single person"—emphasizing the value of collective intelligence, contingent on independent judgment and diversity.

  • Hobbes: "The agreement of men is by covenant only, which is artificial"—highlighting the constructed nature of governance.

Governance Models:

Paul Baran’s Communication Structures: Centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks—useful for understanding communication but not governance.

Fractal Governance: A model for governing distributed networks, inspired by fractal patterns in blockchain growth.

Elinor Ostrom’s Nested Enterprises: Small, interlinked governance units working within larger systems.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Self-governing digital collectives. Example: Ukraine DAO, which fundraised via Ethereum to support humanitarian aid.

Open Questions:

  • How do we govern distributed networks on the internet?

  • What are the limits and possibilities of decentralized governance structures?

  • Can blockchain-based governance truly be democratic?

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