Community Coordination Protocols

An overview for social benefit organizations

 

 

1. Introduction

In the current social and economical landscape it has been difficult for social benefit organizations and projects to establish themselves and become sustainable. Social benefit organizations and projects are meant as the ones which create value that is not accumulated by specific individuals or organizations permanently but is rather shared with society. All over the world there have been ongoing efforts from many different angles; research on alternative economies (e.g. social economies), cooperatives, creative spaces, non-profit organizations, open technology development, agricultural collectives, innovative individuals and so on. Some efforts have seen some significant success, but it still remains quite difficult for most projects to develop. One of the main reasons for this outcome, is that our economies are engineered to reward organizations that maximize profit production and accumulation. Nonetheless, the work of social benefit organizations is very important. Societies can thrive only if the created value (resources, capital, knowledge, services, products, art etc) is shared and then used for the next iterations of value production. That means that it is necessary to foster ecosystems that are supportive towards this kind of value distribution. The creation of such ecosystems is a quite complex and challenging task to be covered in just a few pages, but this text is focused on one of its key elements; the federative element or the coordination between social benefit organizations and projects. If organizations support, complement and invest in each other, their chances for sustainability grow significantly. So, we need to examine what are the prerequisites for social organizations to coordinate in such an ecosystem, what coordination means and how it can be achieved. This text approaches social coordination as a protocol design problem among others, aiming to integrate values, functional requirements, and observable outcomes into a shared federative logic.

Some future ecological innovations

 

Balance and imbalance in ecosystems is interchangeable. However, in a pro-life context the scales always have to lean slightly in favor of balance. It’s a cyclical process as well, the center of which has to involve a bit more harmony, otherwise life and its aspect of structured matter is not possible.

We are at time that ecological destruction if not the most is one of the most dangerous existential threats to life forms on earth, including humans. Scientific evidence has it that the main source of this destruction is human activity.

Ecological destruction is a multi-factorial phenomenon that is linked to economic, social, psychological and technological factors including others. The current text focuses on the technological aspect of the ecological destruction and how technology can be used in a beneficial way.

Below is a list of innovations that are judged to be important for the reversal of the current ecological destruction and the avoidance of any future ecological crises. This list is not exhaustive and might be updated in intervals.

Νέα άνοδος του ολοκληρωτισμού, της ακροδεξιάς και διέξοδοι

στο δυτικό κόσμο και στην Ελλάδα

    Στον αποκαλούμενο δυτικό κόσμο που βρίσκεται κυρίως στην Ευρώπη και στην Αμερική, τα τελευταία αρκετά χρόνια παρατηρούμε μια σταθερή άνοδο στην κεντρική πολιτική σκηνή, αυτών που αποκαλούμε ακροδεξιά κόμματα. Καθώς οι πολιτικές τους πεποιθήσεις είναι ιστορικά αλλά και ιδεολογικά συνδεδεμένες με τραγωδίες για την ανθρωπότητα (αυταρχικά καθεστώτα, δολοφονίες, εμφύλιους και όχι μόνο πολέμους, γενοκτονίες), αυτή η άνοδος είναι αναμενόμενο να προκαλεί αγωνία σε πολλούς ανθρώπους. Μία ακροδεξιά πολιτική ιστορικά έχει την τάση για αυτόν τον τύπο ολοκληρωτισμού που στηρίζεται στην ανωτερότητα της φυλής και του πολιτισμού των εκάστοτε τοπικών εκπροσώπων του, στην παράδοση όπως αυτοί αυθαίρετα την ερμηνεύουν, στο φόβο και στην εναντίωση απέναντι στο διαφορετικό (φυλή, σεξουαλικός προσανατολισμός), στην εναντίωση στον ορθολογισμό και στην ελεύθερη σκέψη και έκφραση (τέχνη), στην πατριαρχία και στη βίαιη επιβολή των θέσεών της με αστυνομικά, στρατιωτικά και άλλα μέσα όπως η λογοκρισία. Η επανεμφάνιση των ακροδεξιών κομμάτων για την οποία μιλάμε είναι συνεπής σε αυτές τις αρχές της ιστορικής ακροδεξιάς άλλοτε λιγότερο άλλοτε περισσότερο, αν και σε ένα άλλο ιστορικό πλαίσιο από αυτό των προ μερικών δεκαετιών που έχουμε στη μνήμη μας.

On Saruman's loss of power in The Lord of the Rings

     In Tolkien's legendarium Saruman is a maia. There were two orders of the angelic beings created by the one god Eru Iluvatar called ainur who entered the world of Ea, the valar and the maiar. The ainur participated in the creation of Ea with their song; they sung themes given by Eru and then Eru gave existence to their song by allowing it to manifest itself with the creation of Ea. The valar and the maiar were those ainur who entered Ea and tethered their existence to it in order to help shape it. The valar were of higher order, more powerful and wiser than the maiar, who would most of the times assist the valar in their missions.

Companies as parts of natural ecosystems

This essay is part of series regarding the development of an electronic platform that among other things will be protecting its users from fake news. The present subject involves the role a company can play on an ecological basis. (greek below)

 

            A company is not only a part of the social structure but also a part of nature. We should not forget that we are animals of planet earth. Our bodies come from the soil, the air and the water of this planet and they return back to those. Along with the rest of the animals and plants we are the organic portion of the planet. They are our relatives and cohabitants on the planet, as the well established theory of the evolution of species has clearly shown. With them we constitute a chain where each of its rings has its distinct role. Thus if we want to progress as humanity this can only happen in harmony with the environment of which we are a part. A company that focuses exclusively on profit or on the production of a product and takes nothing more into consideration is destined to be harmful towards humanity and the rest of the world. Of course, no activity could cause zero harm to the environment and neither this is the goal. We do not support a position claiming that nature is perfect neither that we should fully return to our natural origins.

            Nature is neither some kind of a metaphysical entity that has designed a plan nor something perfect. Its parts be it its atmosphere or its plants and so on are related, and through a constant flow of – to a great degree if not completely random – events they have reached the condition in which we have observed them. There are very often in nature destructive events like a volcanic eruption, which cause disharmony or creations of it which are at least partly problematic such as animals consuming the flora of a region leading to its extinction along with the extinction of the fauna that can no longer sustain itself. Despite the fact that after millions of years of evolution the creations of nature are still on top of the art of creation compared to what we as humanity can produce, they are for sure not perfect and they are always evolving. The distinction between humanity and nature is certainly to a great degree artificial; actually when we create a spaceship we are not that different from any other animal like a beaver building its home with twigs.

            So within the context of the evolution of life, production and technology is one more possible way to improve life. Crafting clothes protects us from several natural phenomena, producing technologies which can prevent an asteroid from hitting the earth protects us from an existential threat that poses a danger for all the living organisms of the planet, and creating telecommunications means among other things that we can store and share information gaining time while sprinting to prevent several existential threats. It should be stressed out here that technology does not only have a utilitarian purpose. It does not aim only at solving problems, but also at the pleasure of its creators, as it happens in the case of games. These are just a few examples for us to show the positive side of technology which is necessary to the course of evolution. Thus, focusing again on the role of companies, our task is to find out how production can be more beneficial rather than harmful to the world.

Assessing the validity of information

This essay is part of the studies that I do which are related to several subjects and also refer to the project of creating an electronic platform which among others things will be protecting its users from fake news. The achievement of every goal requires also valid information which is transformed to knowledge. The present essay is the second part of two essays related to the evaluation of truth and discusses practical ways of assessing the validity of information. (greek below)

 

            On a philosophical level, on a level of definition, a subject’s objective truth is the consistent sense that the subject has about the totality of its senses upon which all that are inside and outside it, all that it contains and contain it project. The goal of this essay is to discuss a practical way of evaluating whether information is true or false especially concerning information which is on the internet.

            By principle, for some information to be characterized as true it has to comply with the rules of logic and be verified in practice. During the coronavirus pandemic we could observe multiple logical fallacies performed by several social groups when voicing their opinion on emerging issues. For example, there were many times that the media referred to the death of young people and there were many people claiming that many young people die. The logical fallacy was that the death of some young people would not mean that many young people were dying. The statistics confirm that death by coronavirus in young people is rare. Similarly some people were hasty to characterize coronavirus vaccines as harmful, because there were some rare adverse effects which in most cases were mild. So the logical fallacy in these cases was the deliberate generalization of a rather special phenomenon.

On truth

 This essay is part of the studies that I do which are related to several subjects and also refer to the project of creating an electronic platform which among others things will be protecting its users from fake news. The achievement of every goal requires also valid information which is transformed to knowledge. The present essay is the first part of two essays related to the evaluation of truth and sets a philosophical basis on what truth is. (greek below)

 

            We begin with the definition of truth. We will not use the etymology of the greek word for truth which leads to its definition as non oblivion. The definition will be closer to that of the notion of validity. The first thing that we should bear in mind is that there are no facts; there are only interpretations of facts based on deliberate axioms. If we observe a flower on the road, we have no proof whatsoever that what we see actually exists, we axiomatize that it exists. To be precise we axiomatize the existence of our senses. It is by interpreting our sense that we conclude that the flower of the previous example is there. Furthermore even if we accept that there are objects external to us, since we get on touch with them only through our senses, this means that when we refer to reality we actually refer to the projection of reality on our senses and not to the objects themselves.