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About the project

Work in progress

Governance and progressive decentralization

All governance functions will harness both the qualitative and quantitative tokens discussed above. Governance will harness a range of approaches, from formal voting to informal discussions. We will aim to harness as many of the tools we describe in the book as possible, to show as well as tell the book's message.

Governance will address the full range of issues in the project's development: the evolution of all repositories, decisions about the physical publication process, etc. Initially, community input will be advisory and this will remain the case in final decisions until the book is physically printed.

However, we aim to harness Gov4Git to turn the process over to full and direct community control after the printing of the first edition of the physical books. While this milestone marks a point at which we aim to make the formal transition, we hope for this process to be gradual: we hope that overtime we rely more and more on the community to guide every decision and that our oversight becomes more of a formalism. We plan to incorporate additional governance elements to aid this transition over time, such as signals from the community of the value of various contributions which we can then approve. To get a sense of the kinds of governance structures we hope to employ, please visit the RadicalxChange website. We will include more details linked here as we have a clearer sense of precisely how we will use these elements.

Financial goals

We have no aspiration to earn any financial return on any aspect of the project, and in fact are spending some personal resources to make it possible.

However, there are elements of the project that may require financial support (e.g. promotion and distribution of the physical book) and many of the volunteers in the community may decide it is appropriate they be compensated for some part of the time they devote to the work.

We are committed to putting all base materials into the public domain and it is core to this project to avoid it becoming financialized or speculative. At the same time, we believe that there are ways that are not only consistent with our values but illustrative of them to help raise funds to the extent they become relevant. We welcome ideas from the community on this; some preliminary thoughts of ours include:

  1. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are issued along with physical copies of the book and allow the book to sell at a premium despite the lack of copyright.
  2. Raising funds through a Quadratic Funding grant on platforms such as GitCoin.
  3. Using partial common ownership/Harberger tokens to gate access to scarce associated resources (like Glen's consulting and speaking time).
  4. Issuing credentials and SoulBound Tokens to both direct financial contributors and those who fund the project through GitCoin.

We plan to pursue these approaches and to put any funds raised into the collective control of the community, after any necessary expenditures to ensure physical printing and distribution of the book are completed. We understand this will require appropriate legal steps to ensure compliance with organizational forms and standard in relevant jurisdictions and we plan to undertake these in the coming months, possibly with the assistance of the Open Collective Foundation.

All materials in this repo and in all other parts of this project (unless explicitly stated otherwise) are in the public domain

A CC0 license can be found in the project's repository, and most of the related software has a GNU General Public License.

We strongly encourage translations, both to other languages and to other cultural genres, whether in terms of formatting (fiction, journalism, etc.) or to different communities (religious, ethnic, disciplinary, etc.). While these "forks" can do whatever they wish with this public domain material, we plan to link to and "recognize" only a smaller group of projects that align to the root in terms of content, values, management style and copyrights. We hope this link and roots will remain relevant and respected because of the legitimacy this community will achieve through its principles and writing.

Citing the book

Citing the book promotes its recognition, increasing chances for collaboration and thus the inclusivity and sustainability of the project. Feel free to copy the citation samples below if you would like to cite the book.

Chicago citation sample

Weyl, E. Glen, Audrey Tang, and the Plurality Community. "Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy." 2023. GitHub. Accessed [Date accessed]. https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/main/contents/english.

BibTeX sample

@online{plurality2023,
  title={Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy},
  author={Weyl, E. Glen and Tang, Audrey and {the Plurality Community}},
  year={2023},
  url={https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/blob/main/contents/english},
  publisher={GitHub},
}