Building the Bottom Up From the Top Down
A. Michael Froomkin · The Knowledge Bank (The Ohio State University) · 2009
Bottom up" governance."Self-organization."These are among the most talismanic virtue-words of modern political discourse.Yet the reality is that in politics, "self-organization" is rare, being hard to initiate and even harder to sustain.As Oscar Wilde once complained about socialism, it "requires too many evenings."Governance as we tend to know it depends primarily on hierarchical institutions, or on close coordination within small groups.True partnerships, conversations among engaged equals, do not seem to scale.Indeed, whether one believes the fundamental problem to be something about the economics of group formation, the iron law of oligarchy, or something in between, experience demonstrates repeatedly that the problem of group self-organization, not to mention selfgovernance, is all too real both in politics and other walks of life.Enthusiasts of modern communications have not been slow to point out the ways in which the Internet (and the cell phone) change the ways in which all types of groups form and communicate.For example, Internet-based 'social software' drastically lowers the cost of group formation and offers at least the potential of tools that may make group self-governance more practicable.