In late 2017, Barrett Brown announced the development of a new type of online activism which he hoped to bring to life in the next several years. This hybrid of journalists/ activists/ researchers/ NGOs/ and crowdsourced intelligence is known as the
Pursuance Project.
Essentially, the project aims to leverage the combined skills, expertise, knowledge and resources from all sectors of society an streamline them towards directed purposes. This organizational structure will provide new avenues to challenge institutional injustices and harness the collective power of activist communities.
Impactful, agile, secure civic collaboration.
The pursuance system is the world's first comprehensive framework for process democracy. That is, it allows individuals with no prior relationship to self-organize into robust, agile entities governed via a "proceduralism of agreement." These entities, called pursuances, in turn engage and collaborate among themselves to whatever extent they choose, leading ultimately to a vast and formidable ecosystem of opposition to institutionalized injustice.
https://pursuanceproject.org/
Structure / Architecture
Open Sourced
End-to-End Encryption
Provides Task Management (First of it's kind).
There are a number of possible structures and configurations a pursuance might take, here a few examples:
Figure 1: Alfonso has created a pursuance and then granted Buford and Catherine a degree of control equal to his own. There are two basic settings by which disagreements may be resolved among the three of them - requiring majority or unanimous votes - and a variety of options as to what each of these co- equals may do without approval from the other two and what requires a vote. For instance, each may be allowed to bring on participants without approval - indeed, this is usually for the best regardless of structure - but may require approval for putting out a public statement or initiating a new project.
Figure 2: Algonquin has created a basic chain structure whereby each new participant is only permitted to bring on one additional participant. Such an arrangement will be rare, but useful in certain specialized circumstances.
Figure 3: A participant may be linked inwards to two or more other participants in addition to whichever outward participants he may be permitted to bring on.
Figure 4: Several pursuances have joined together into a cluster, sharing information and tasks, and coordinating campaigns. The orange lines represent fairly informal connections among participants of different pursuances, who may act as liaisons. The green lines represent formal operational agreements among the pursuances themselves.
Note that the pursuance system isn't intended just for the creation of new entities; existing institutions such as NGOs may easily establish a presence in the universe as a means of organizing large-scale campaigns, getting assistance from specialized pursuances, or collaborating with one another with far greater efficiency than is generally achievable via conventional office-to- office cooperation.
As we can see pursuances are meant to be flexible and may develop into new formations as they evolve over time. Specific structures may be determined by the initial creators of a specific pursuance or can be designed to be more democratic in nature depending on the project's aims.
Basic Collaboration Mechanics and Information Flow
Since the Pursuance Project is still in its infancy, an in depth blue print of how
pursuances will function, including specific features, will be released as the project progresses and matures.
Obviously, task management is an integral part of any pursuance and is dependent on the settings established at the onset that will guide its scope and functionality.
Aside from the ins and outs of task management, information flow will occur under three main rubrics in a pursuance system.
- "Placed documents" - Documents, more or less permanent, that are accessible to one or more users; these may be set to allow further editing by a subset of those users.
- "Input Flows" - Documents created by a user to be "pushed through" down the line from user to user, with each given the opportunity to provide input before pushing it to the next user until it reaches the end of the line. At this point, it may either be converted into a placed document or sent back up the line for further input; this process may be repeated as many times as desired by the flow's originator. This may be used for such things as brainstorming and assessing news items and other data. That each user is directly confronted with the document, which remains in his module until being passed, helps to focus participants and encourage contributions (an option may also be set that automatically pushes the document through after some particular amount of time has passed without editing, in which case a notation is appended to that effect).
- "Submission Flows" - Documents created by a user to be pushed up the line, generally for the purpose of submitting ideas, proposals, and items of information, which each user may either push forward or not as deemed appropriate. This constitutes one of the basic mechanics of the pursuance system as "filter," and indeed was one of its original purposes; a pursuance that starts out with a few high-quality users can grow to include hundreds without any real risk of becoming cluttered with low-quality input coming from the margins, as items must be approved forward by each participant up the line.
As with several other aspects of the system, the flow process is subject to exceptions that may be determined via settings. By default, any participant may send one document to the primary or anyone else up the line at any time, outside of structural channels; if the document turns out to be worthwhile, the recipient may choose to renew the sender's ability to do this. Another setting determines whether a submission flow document, upon being created and sent up the line, also appears randomly at some other point in the pursuance, or at several points, where they may be pushed up the line as usual; this is intended to speed up the proliferation of time-sensitive news items, as well as to better ensure that good input from the margins get more than one chance for acceptance. Another setting allows for documents to automatically proceed to the next position on the line after some variable amount of time has passed without editing or approval/disapproval; this is largely intended to prevent bottlenecking due to temporary absences. Other settings will allow for additional refinement within a pursuance's existing structure.
This breakdown of the pursuance project is by no means comprehensive as I've opted to highlight a few key aspects of the project. For a more complete overview, I highly recommend that you visit the Pursuance Project official website from more information.
Website: https://pursuanceproject.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PursuanceProj
The Pursuance Project on Reddit and the Blockchain?
I recently came across a tweet announcing the creation of a new subreddit for the project. The subreddit is only a week old and has only a handful of submissions thus far, but it's nice to see the seeds beginning to germinate as this initiative has great potential.
Of special note, is a submission entitled:
Making Pursuance Project Indestructible, Incorruptible, and Indispensable
This thread is about the potential integration of stratified Blockchain technology and AI algorithms as a possible suitable fit in the development of pursuance projects. (Look out for a follow up post discussing this proposal.
It's my own opinion that the blockchain is a perfect match for this kind of initiative and in previous posts quite a number of Steemians came to the same conclusion.
Steemit may be ideally situated to experiment with different sorts of pursuances. I for one am seriously considering ways in which we can achieve this goal here on the Steemit platform in the future.
For now, I'd like to see a few examples of how some of the projects shape up before I attempt to introduce a pursuance on the block. That being said, if any of my fellow researchers have similar goals I'd be happy to collaborate and support similar endeavors.
@rebelskum's - Din's Fire is along the same vein and I hope we're lucky enough to get an update on its progress in the months to come.@chayon