The Vehicle for Change: A Virtual Governing Institution

Abstract:
No longer can a protest movement be satisfied with a march on city hall. At issue today is a realization that many problems at the community level are the result of fallout from global agendas that have been pushed downward, through national and regional governments, by a powerful cadre of organizational elites who are driven by a need to be in control and the extraction of profit. The protests of 2011 largely came about because, in true medieval fashion, the peasants had nothing left to give to their lords and kings. This paper will define the kind of global administration that will be required in order to usher in a new renaissance and second age of enlightenment. It will expand upon an effort that is already underway to build virtual institutions for governing a new global state; developed on an open platform that will never be monetized for the benefit of a shareholder, but only for the support of the collective that helps to build it. It will become an organic institution, capable of evolving and growing like the social media that will drive participants to it, and with which we are already familiar. It will be governed without a hierarchy, and its sole purpose will be to germinate new governing narratives that will accompany protest movements. This paper will outline how a foundational base for this new institution can be easily organized at the grassroots level where as few as 18 people can formalize and then steer a community-based general assembly to the point that it becomes a participant in the global organization. Once online they will be affiliated with, and begin learning from, like-minded, similarly situated peers in a virtual realm where they can “see” and “sit in council with” their counterparts from hundreds of other locations as they use the virtual organization as a socio-technical system in a new world order for enlightenment, and in turn, governing.
This paper was prepared for presentation at the 7th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (MCIS 2012). If accepted for presentation at the conference it will be published by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. If rejected by the conference selection committee it will be published here.

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