MICRO REPUBLICS
A REPLACEMENT FOR TRADITIONAL GOVERNMENT STRUCTURES.
REVISION 2
MARCH 4TH 2016
Introduction
With the rise of the World Wide Web, a powerful social force has been born. The legitimate function of government is the administration of justice, the protection of the weak and poor, and the protection of its people and law from external and internal enemies. It seems quite possible to create a social network for the administration of government that can far out-perform existing government frameworks and hopefully protect us all from usurpers and defrauders both at the collective and individual levels.
The goal of such a system would be to disperse power as broadly as possible by soliciting the participation of citizens for short periods of time on specific tasks. By removing the cumbersome and abuse prone system of law generation by a legislative body and instead depositing the law into the conscience of randomly selected juries, the rules begin to truly reflect the beliefs of the people. By restricting jury participation to people that meet minimum bar of qualifications, irresponsible and incompetent individuals are less likely to degrade the system over time. By holding jurors accountable for their decisions we ensure responsible behavior by those entrusted with power. By allowing more people to directly participate in the work of their own government, the level of competence, responsibility and understanding of the people is raised creating a feedback loop of continuing social improvement. This creates a true government “of the people, by the people and for the people”.
Functional Elements of a Micro Republic
The essential functions of a government for a free people are really quite simple and are the same at all levels.
• Certification of:
o Documents
o Individuals
o Relationships between documents and individuals
• Storage of and access to public records
• Management of officer and jury selection
• Management of cases of dispute
• Management of jury succession on on-going processes
• Management of credit and money
• Auditing
• Redundant and dispersed storage
• Accountability for all members
Weaknesses of existing governmental systems
Most governments are merely systems of control administered by one select group over others. Students of Natural Law have attempted to improve this with the creation of republican forms of government using written laws and social contracts, division of powers and checks and balances to attempt to keep government inefficient and self regulating in order to protect the rights of its citizens.
The problems that seem to persist throughout history even in the best republics are:
• Corruption of the language and the law over time.
• Finding an equitable method of representation and suffrage.
• Judicial Sophistry also causing corruption of the law.
• Guaranteeing protection from foreign powers without secrecy, growth or corruption.
• Corruption of the money supply.
• Long term containment of the size, cost and reach of government.
One aspect of government in general demonstrates why it tends to corrupt over time. That aspect is the inherent specialization of government management into the hands of a minority of people. The kinds of people that are attracted to government work are the power seeking and the lazy. Because the average citizen naturally has little interest in the workings of government, over time, less and less of the people in government represent the real social fabric of the citizenry. In addition to this natural tendency, powerful interests, both internal and external, tend to attempt to grow and corrupt government in order to use it to their own ends. This process of attack from within and without uses the most advanced methods devised to corrupt the government and citizenry. Once achieved, the government becomes a powerful tool of the few over the many. Such processes typically span multiple generations and at first proceed at a pace so slow as to be imperceptible by the majority of citizens.
A possible solution
What is needed is broad participation of society in government operations at all times with a fully transparent process which tends to support knowledge of the principles of Natural Law and self government. The body that historically epitomizes the participation of the citizen in government affairs is the Jury.
Juries are difficult to corrupt because they are chosen by lot, only meet for a specific task and for a short period of time with short notice.
Juries are large enough (12 people) to represent a good spectrum of the society while being small enough to efficiently conduct the tasks assigned them.
Juries are selected by lot making them independent of bias and more likely to represent the average citizen’s perspectives.
Juries are composed of non-specialists who rely on common sense, existing documents and evidence to make judgments.
Juries are not as susceptible to bribes as are judges and other government agents because they do not derive their livelihood from doing government services, their services are restricted to that of a single task, and the duration of their work is of a very short period of time – ideally only a few weeks at most.
Juries cannot tolerate unclear and voluminous law or conflicting precedent cases and will instead tend to judge with more common sense than judges do.
The weakness of juries is their inexperience. However with proper tools available to the jurors via the micro republic’s web resources, they should be able to quickly look up pertinent law and cases relevant to their current case, making the process of rendering a consistent judgment attainable without too much effort in most cases. Juries are also capable of enlisting competent council to help them in their tasks, however, these very councils can become sources of corruption.
Law on the other hand tends to corrupt over time with language, vagueness, bulk and technical complexity despite strict requirements as to passage, form and publication. Under a jury, law becomes a recommendation rather than a mandate. A system of minimal written law where a jury has total power over the plaintiff, the defendant, and the law and precedent cases with accountability for their decision yields a more common sense administration of justice. Because juries over time will gain more relevant past cases to consult, it is expected that a more stable system of government will also result over time.
Bad juries can only affect one case. The offending jury can itself be held responsible for its actions by another jury should this become necessary.
Any citizen can virtually call a jury to analyze a complaint or accomplish a government task at very little cost. The plaintiff can however be judged guilty by the jury should the complaint be frivolous or harassing in nature.
By holding jurors subject to being brought before another jury should their decision be irresponsible, all parties involved are held accountable. Appeals don’t exist but accountability does and thus the process of administration flows with speed and efficiency.
Such a system removes the unjust powers of the written law and the legislator and holds it in check to the spirit of truth as seen by the jury for the case.
What law exists in a micro republic is small, written by one man and unchanging.
With the process of selecting and calling a jury well understood and automated, it becomes an easy affair to apply the jury to all kinds of jobs requiring judgment that used to be performed by elected or appointed officials. Even common government tasks such as taxation, general administration and defense can be allocated to juries. The people empower and call the jury and the jury moves the republic one step at a time.
Some example scinarios
The following fictitious cases show how this system might work in practice. No one is perfect and any party might make mistakes but the system of accountability and jury review allows for eventual correction of most errors while not hampering the administration of justice by endless appeals.
Neighborhood disputes
Jack is ticked off at his neighbor Betty’s cat who is constantly getting stuck in Jack’s tree. Jack finally emails the local micro-republic with his complaint. The system calls a jury of 12 people and email’s them about the case along with Jacks complaint. The system also sends Betty an email with Jack’s evidence and is asked to give her defense to the jury. Betty, who isn’t even a member of the republic, submits her side of the story in a simple email to the jury – why not?
The Jury soon receives initial arguments from Jack and Betty and submits any questions they may have to each person. The jury explains to Betty that if she would like to join the republic, she can possibly win the case against Jack and he can be held accountable for harassing her. They deliberate and decide that Betty should pay Jack $5 every time Jack must remove her cat from his tree.
Betty doesn’t like this but sees the decision as fair and reasonable and finds the benefits of being able to call a jury anytime to help her with a problem makes it worthwhile to join the micro-republic.
The case is closed and all documents in the discussion are placed into a document collection and made available on the site for any citizen to search on and read. The case becomes referenced in the public record of all parties involved.
Foreclosure Situation
Larry has a problem with paying property taxes and has been warned for several months by the county that he better pay or the Sherriff will be coming by to seize his property in a few years. As a precaution, Larry calls a jury from the local micro-republic and documents his side of the story. The jury is selected. Larry explains that property taxes only apply to fee-simple title and the history of alloial vs fee-simple title to the Jury. Larry produces historical documents on land patents and explains that it used to be that individuals could hold land in allodium and it wasn’t till the last 100 years that individuals were gradually tricked into fee-simple titles due to improper title transfers from banking institutions to the individuals once the loan was paid off. The jury solicits input from the county assessor. The assessor thinks this is a hoax or baseless and ignores the jury’s repeated requests for information. After 2 weeks the jury begins passing on the problem to another jury which the system selects and passes on to that jury the documents of the case. This goes on for several months and several juries till a jury decides that the Assessor is clearly not cooperating in the process and awards Larry a recommendation that the county not seize the land till it has complied with the jury’s requests for information.
Larry is foreclosed on and the Sherriff comes to take him off his land. Larry has published the jury’s decision in the newspaper opinion section, showed it to his neighbors and friends and the Sherriff. The Sherriff notices that over 100 people in juries were involved over the months in the decision and decides to investigate Larry’s historical evidence. The Sherriff seizes the property for the county but knows this is wrong.
Other people notice this and decide to join the micro-republic in sympathy to Larry’s plight and eventually more tax foreclosure cases come up to the micro-republic and the Assessor’s office begins to notice this pattern. The county obtains a court order for the micro-republic website hosting service to shut down the site. The hosting service complies.
However, several members of the republic have been doing their duty to download backups of the republic website and they go to the open-source git-hub page and download the source files and startup a new republic and upload, as founder, a recent backup of the site. The new site notifies everyone via email that the site has moved and notes the date of the backup to the citizens. One citizen notes that they have a more recent backup and goes to the site to integrate their backup with the current site. The republic is still alive and continues to function with only a loss of a few days of history to the site. Juries are called on the incident and once again inform the county Assessor of their need to present their side to the jury.
Government harassment against the micro-republic website occurs several times but the records of the issue are saved each time and grow as time goes on. Eventually a clear case is made against the county for fraud and theft which no one can deny with many ex-jurors as well-informed witnesses. Meanwhile the micro-republic grows in reputation as a great place to get a fair judgment and more people join it. The site maintains the privacy of all members and eventually the government attempts to infiltrate the republic but each attempt eventually gets to a jury who expels them from citizenship and lists them as outlaws. All infiltrators become identified and shunned by other micro-republic citizens. The republic begins to expand across the state and cannot be stopped. Eventually a majority of the voters of the county become educated via the jury process of the micro-republic and the media losses control of the elections. The Assessor becomes a member of the republic and eventually convinces the county supervisors to join the republic. Eventually the county amends their charter to include allodial titles in land and the battle escalates to the state and federal levels.
Irresponsible Jury
A woman called a jury against a black man she claimed had stolen her purse while she was shopping. The jury happened to be mostly women and because the defendant was black assumed he was guilty and awarded the woman $150 in damages from the man.
The man paid restitution to the woman so he would not be outlawed but felt it wasn’t right and called a second jury to review the case. The second jury was more balanced and noted that there really was no evidence to support the woman’s case beyond her own testimony. The second jury found the first jury guilty of an unreasonable verdict and fined each member $25 payable to the black man as restitution. The man was restored his $150, the woman recovered her loss and the first jury learned a valuable lesson in proper jurisprudence.
Consumer Protection
A man called a jury against a company he had used for services to install a heating system. The system was installed but had constant problems costing him thousands of dollars in repairs due to parts constantly breaking. The company claimed they had done everything that was asked of him and that the parts were standard quality. The man did research into the parts and noted that many of the parts were made overseas and were of poor quality. He also compared the prices he paid for parts that were available in the US of much higher quality. The case was quite complex and was handed over to 4 juries covering 8 weeks of time. In the end the Jury awarded the man the cost of replacing all the broken parts with the quality ones made in the US.
The company did not honor the judgment for awhile until customers started asking the company why it was on the micro-republic’s outlaw list. The president looked into the matter and decided that getting off of the outlaw list was more profitable for business than saving the cost of the parts and installed the parts he wanted at their own expense.
Competition with lawyers
Several citizens decided to call a jury to conduct a class action against a local law firm for excessive charges. The lawyers were not releasing evidence and the case took several years passing through hundreds of juries mostly with no action taken. Eventually enough jurors were aware of the law firm’s practices to begin to affect the firm’s business. When the law firm learned from several ex-customers of their desire to go elsewhere, they decided to make their best case to the current jury on the issue.
The jury awarded the citizens damages amounting to 40% of the costs claimed by each citizen. The law firm accepted the judgment and became well respected and regained their lost business and lowered their rates finding that many people were not coming into the courts due to the micro-republic offering a much cheaper and easier solution. Although many jurors were involved in the case over years of time, their actual cost in time and energy was relatively small due to the law firm not participating for much of that time. Many juries can wear down an uncooperative party with little cost to each juror.
Complex cases
A very technical case of environmental damage was reported by a rancher. The guilty party was not known but water and soil tests showed excessive amounts of mercury and heavy metals found on his property. The plaintiff was unable to determine the cause so the jury called several juries separately each to investigate different possible aspects of the problem. Each jury was tasked with investigating a government agency or neighbor that might have caused the contamination. After several hundred juries working independently over several months, but sharing each jury’s findings, one finally came up with a possible source. That case was investigated further to reveal unauthorized dumping of contaminates by a local fertilizer company into a stream upstream of the owner’s property. The company had ties to the EPA and could not be held accountable by normal government channels. Damages were assessed against the company by the jury to be paid to the owner and though the company never paid restitution, their outlaw status eventually drove them to leave the area.
Harassment
A local environmentalist decided to call a jury to charge a logging company for environmental damages caused by their logging operations. The jury found the logging company guilty of causing unnecessary erosion in some of their operations. The jury sentenced the logging company to make 10 units of their best 2x4 lumber available to the community for free with each person allowed to take up to 10 8’ 2x4s home free. The lumber company was ordered to advertise the donation to the community. The lumber company complied because facing a lawsuit would have been way more expensive even if they had won and the judgment seemed fair.
The community was thankful for the wood and fair decision and noted that the logging company had changed its policies to prevent further unnecessary erosion of the forests they worked on.
The environmentalist was upset that they got nothing for their efforts so decided to call another jury on another logging company for the same charges. The second jury noted the previous case in the plaintiff’s record and decided that the second case was harassment, finding no real evidence that the second logging company was doing anything wrong and fined the environmentalist $2000 in damages payable to the jury for wasting their time.
The environmentalist called another jury to review the case. The second jury found that the first jury was unjustly benefiting themselves (an undamaged party) and required the first jury to donate the fine they received to local FOA chapter. They also found the environmentalist to be harassing logging companies and noted this for the record. The environmentalist decided not to bring any more suits against logging companies before the micro-republic for fear the he might be found guilty of harassment a second time with possible damages assessed against him.
Road repairs
A rural county finds over time that the county is simply not fixing its roads much even though taxes have been raised several times. A micro-republic citizen calls a jury to look into a solution to the problem. The jury recommends a private company be hired to repair the roads with payment for costs divided among all the micro-republic citizens that live off of the road to repair. There are few members initially but the word gets out that if everyone on Elm street would join the republic it would provide an equitable way to get their street repaired. Once this happens the word gets out that Elm street is much nicer than the other streets and a study sees the actual cost of the repairs is way lower than the money collected by the county for road repairs. As more people join the republic, more roads get fixed cheaply and the county finds it hard to get people to pay higher taxes for road work. The county eventually hires the same company to do their road work at similar prices.
Insurance
A micro-republic was formed for healthcare services. Each time a citizen had to pay a medical bill, a jury was called to review the case. The jury ensured that the expenditure was prudent and necessary and if so the amount was paid out of the micro-republic’s treasury in the form of credits. The jury would also update the estimated cost per citizen needed to pay the previous year’s claims and would update the monthly fees charged to all citizens to participate. No real cash was paid but credits could be paid within the micro-republic for other services and products. As a group, the republic was able to pay their medical bills by mutually supporting each other with credits. Eventually, healthcare professionals joined the republic and charged citizens in the form of credits instead of cash.
A private money supply is a powerful thing that can make a community economically powerful almost invisibly. With the oversight and accountability offered by juries, management of things such as insurance can be done with less chance of corruption.
National Defense
National defense is probably the hardest scenario to imagine a micro-republic working. As long as citizens are allowed to keep and bear arms it is still possible to organize militias via a micro-republic by juries soliciting the service of republic citizens in support of a local area’s defense. However, physical force will remain in the hands of governments until they can be changed from within. The important thing is that micro-republics teach people self-government and remove the need for centralized and corrupt government. Responsible citizens will vote more responsibly and hopefully this will help to eventually clean things up. Simply having an example and alternative that works better can embarrass politicians into reform and the Jury can someday be elevated back to the level it used to have in common law times. Wars are always caused by corrupt governments not by citizens. A micro-republic simply does not have the power to raise standing armies and so cannot become a problem like governments can. With sufficient participation, the cost of outlawry can reform an entire nation and with vigilant and armed citizens (like Switzerland), it can become un-worthwhile for external governments to attack such a nation. International micro-republics can join peoples of the world together into cooperative relationships despite governments and may eventually alleviate war entirely.
Imagine what else could happen…
These fictitious examples may be a bit optimistic but I think micro-republics offer a peaceful revolution of sorts that can slowly change the people and the government and eventually replace it. Micro-republic citizens can solve their own problems and the government losses power and credibility over time because it now has competition. Even very limited areas of use of this republic can cause the system to gain maturity and reputation and can be applied to more and more areas of society until the whole government game just becomes moot.
Republic Website Technical Specifications
The Micro Republic is a web based system of software that is open sourced and freely shared for any body politic to use as it sees fit. It is assumed that the system will be run within a VPN for security and that every precaution will be taken to ensure the integrity of the software and system components.
The database for the system is interwoven with checksums and detailed logs which can be downloaded at any time by any citizen ensuring data integrity and system resiliency should the main website be attacked or disabled. Minimal downloads of checksums can be done to quickly check for data tampering later and full downloads can be done less often by citizens to allow a full restoration of the site should the host site be attacked or destroyed.
The basic unit of power is the jury which is called by the system whenever a plaintiff requires one. The jury meets in a virtual sense and can often accomplish all its work without the need to physically meet. The system provides a secure form of communication via the website itself along with automatic documentation of jury cases with encryption used to maintain privacy of documents till ready to make public. Citizens can be notified by the system when changes happen that affect them or require their attention via normal email. Once the user has signed into the website he/she can then obtain what information is needed and perform communications in a secure manner.
Rules
The system consists of the following rules which it is encoded to enforce. These may be modified with newer versions of the software.
- Micro-republics are established by a founder.
- A critical number of users (founding quorum) are necessary to create a founding jury.
- Two witnesses who are citizens are necessary to validate all facts.
- Citizens join the republic with jury review and approval.
- All users must be verified as real by at least two existing users.
- All citizens must have on file a minimum amount of biometric data (a photo, finger prints, eye scan, etc.) to uniquely identify them as unique physical human beings. Citizens meet a higher standard than users.
- Potential jurors are citizens that meet founding document criteria for a juror and must be approved by a jury. Jurors meet a higher standard than citizens.
- A founding jury is a temporary quorum and may consist of founder approved verified users.
- Verified users are users who’s identity information has been verified by two or more citizens or founder approved verified users and who’s email has been verified by the system.
- Juries may be called by an existing jury or by any citizen of the micro-republic for any reason.
- The founder and founding jury creates the founding documents of the micro-republic.
- The founder validates the initial quorum of users who thereafter validate each other.
- The initial quorum of provisional citizens is the pool used to select the founding jury.
- The founding jury approves provisional non-jury citizens to become full citizens and full jurors. Citizen and Juror requirements must be defined by the founding documents.
- Founding jury members do not become full citizens until approved by a non-founding jury.
- All citizens must have a trail of validation that traces back to the founder. (no independent co-authorized subgroups are possible.)
- Once a quorum of approved jurors is established, the founder no longer holds any special powers. He simply remains the top nexus for validation of all members of the republic and can even leave the republic and still provide that central nexus.
- Juries hold all power over the case/task, plaintiff, defendant, precedent and the law.
- There is no appeal to a jury judgment. All jury judgments are final for the case in question.
- A defendant cannot be tried more than once for the same offense. (This idea would be expressed in the founding documents)
- A jury may hold the plaintiff or defendant or both or neither guilty.
- A jury is unlimited in what judgments and sentences it so determines.
- A jury may bring to a case any extenuating evidence it so desires, even that not directly related to the specific charge or brought before it by plaintiff or defendant. Anyone before a jury thus becomes fully accountable for their history and actions.
- Compliance with jury judgments is voluntary but coercion for enforcement of those judgments can be accomplished by outlawry. While a person is under judgment of a jury he/she may not exercise the privileges of citizenship until that sentence is carried out and the jury releases that person from obligation/judgment status.
- Any jury or member of a jury may be indicted by a plaintiff, defendant, or an agent of either for his/her/their judgment of a case. This kind of counter suit holds the jurors responsible for their decision but the counter suit cannot affect the outcome of the initial case in question. It merely holds the jurors accountable for their decisions.
- A jury may require one or more public, physical meetings of the jury, plaintiff and defendant to collect evidence or pronounce a judgment and execute sentencing.
- If a member of a jury dies or becomes incapacitated during a proceeding, another jury is called to carry on the case in question. This eliminates the motive to take out an unpopular juror to sway the results of a case.
- Any punishment is generally carried out immediately upon public dissemination of judgment.
- A jury has at its disposal the entire wealth of the republic to enforce its decisions as necessary.
- All jury pronouncements must be made public at the time of sentencing and judgment of the case.
- All jury proceedings are recorded and kept by the micro-republic. These are encrypted during the proceeding and accessible only by the jury at that time.
- No document ever having become public is destroyed. All public versions of a document are kept for the life of the republic and are open to searches and reading by all citizens of the republic.
- No public document may be made private.
- Documents may not be destroyed unless strictly private for the duration of their lifespan.
- Only private documents may be encrypted for security.
- All citizens must sign the entrance contract established by the founding documents and approve of all founding documents at the time of joining.
- Founding documents can only be changed by jury approval but the changes are only binding on citizens that have ratified those changes. Thus, multiple versions of the founding documents may apply to different persons. Changing founding documents is highly discouraged by this policy. It is thus critical that founding documents be well thought out and only contain basic philosophical ideas that hold the republic on its desired course or contain basic process descriptions in the recommended way juries carry out their duties. It may be better to start a new republic than to change its founding documents unless full ratification can be achieved.
- Personal identification information is never removed from the system so that new members cannot be separated from past membership history.
- Citizens may leave the republic at any time provided they are not under judgment of a jury or exercising the duties of a juror. Doing so may exile them from the republic.
- Rejoining a republic requires the same approval steps as required for a new member.
- Ambassadors cannot be jurors.
- Foreign Ambassadors cannot exercise the rights of a full citizen of the micro republic.
- A non-citizen (jurors are also citizens) can only read and search globally public documents.
- Only owners or persons assigned by the owner can view private documents.
- Citizens are free to transfer credits between each other.
- Credits are created by the republic and are never destroyed.
- Credits are created as payment for jury duties only. Thus the only tax on the republic is the inflation of these credits.
- All credits are owned by republic citizens. Credits belonging to citizens that leave or die are passed on to other citizens by the leaving citizen’s will or are given to the republic and used to pay juries without inflation till exhaustion.
Persons
A person is a living breathing human being with the single exception of the republic persona which represents the entire micro republic. Persons have the following information associated with them:
Name
The name is simply the way a person wishes to be addressed by the republic. It holds no legal identification value like the biometric data. It must be unique across all persons in the micro-republic. For disambiguation, the name of the father or mother of the person may be added to the name.
ID
Each citizen is assigned a unique ID number which is determined at the time of first sign in. This number is used internally to uniquely identify each person and to associate persons with documents and other republic entities.
Status
From a micro-republic point of view, a person is in one of the following states:
• Guest – when a person gives his email address to apply for citizenship in the micro-republic. This is obtained at initial sign-in. Guests generally only have access to globally public documents. A secret republic would only allow citizens to see public documents. Prospective citizens would be given access to these documents by a jury at citizen acceptance time. Founding documents would describe how this is to be done.
• Validated Guest – a Guest who’s email has been verified by the person clicking on a link sent to the email address of the account – the email address is then reasonably shown to be legitimate.
• User – two or more citizens of the micro-republic have verified that a validated guest’s biometric and address/contact information are correct and unique. Any citizen that renounces or is removed from citizen status reverts to a verified guest which has non-citizen status.
• Founder – the status of the first person to sign into the micro-republic. There can only be one founder in the republic. All person validations in the republic must have a validation path back to the founder to have full citizen status whether or not the founder is still a citizen of the republic. The founder is also granted special permissions during the initial stages of republic formation until a sufficient number of citizens exist to man juries. After formation, the founder is only identified for the purposes of validating verification chains. This state (of the republic being in the process of formation) is in addition to other states and acts more as a flag.
• Founding Citizen – a verified user who’s verification chain links to the founder and the founder has approved them for founding citizenship. This state is dropped once the republic leaves the formation state.
• Founding Juror – a founding citizen who has been selected to be a member of the founding jury.
• Citizen – a Verified User who has been approved for citizenship by a non-founding jury.
• Juror – A Citizen who has been approved to serve as a potential Juror by a non-founding Jury.
• Ambassador – A Juror who has been approved for ambassadorship by a Jury. Ambassadors are members of multiple micro-republics or are Citizens of other nations that can act as representatives for the micro-republic. They are used to assist jurors in cross-republic negotiations and treaties. A federated form of government could be connected via ambassadors.
• Outlaw – Any Citizen that refuses to comply with any jury judgment against them obtains this status by a jury. Outlaws are not allowed access to the micro-republic’s services except for communication with the jury that outlawed them and are not protected by the laws of the republic. Credit usage is suspended for outlaws. All republic members are encouraged not to do any business with an outlaw. Outlaws may only be reinstated into the republic by a jury’s confirmation of submission to all judgments against them. Note that a jury may determine that the judgment is unjust by confirming submission when in fact submission has not been accomplished – but this would be highly irregular.
Biometric Data
Biometric data consists of unique and comparable data derived from physical characteristics of a person. Biometric data must be verifiable to a person for the life of the person and very difficult for another person to counterfeit. It must also be unique for every person including twins. It may consist of several different sets of data combined to meet these criteria.
Users must have on file biometric data (typically a fingerprint or eye scan) that uniquely proves them to be physically who they claim to be. Once biometric data is submitted to the micro-republic by a person it can never be changed or removed. Biometric data is not saved but a cryptographically derived manifest of each piece of biometric data is saved for the life of the republic regardless of the status of the person.
If it is not possible to reliably produce unique biometric data for persons then there will be a heavy dependence upon the process of becoming a citizen to ensure adequate examination by real people to verify the person. In this case, the name or an assigned number becomes the unique identifier for each person.
In rare cases it may become necessary to update biometric data (for example; loss of body parts that were used for verification) by the approval of a jury.
Profile
A person’s profile is any contact data or identification data the person wishes to make public to the republic.
Email address
This is the primary email address used to communicate with the person. It is used by the micro-republic for official notification and communication with the person. Citizens are responsible to this email address for legal purposes. All email is processed within the micro-republic system – normal SMTP email is not used by the micro-republic.
There is only one fictitious person in the micro republic representing the republic itself. Only Jury’s can act on behalf of the republic persona outside of standard processes which are hard coded into the system.
Documents
A document is simply a file of data held by the micro-republic. Documents are search-indexed, optionally encrypted and compressed for storage. Documents can be in many formats but generally follow MIME conventions.
Read Status
Documents may have a read status of private, public or global public. Documents that are public are read-only to all citizens of the republic. Documents that are global-public are read-only to any guest. Private documents can only be seen or changed by the owner. The owner may add access keys to persons allowed reading or writing of the document – these become document users but ownership is not changed. Ownership of a document may be transferred to another user by the owner or by a jury in the case of the owner’s death or leaving the republic.
Write Status
Same as read status but for write permissions. Documents with multiple person write access are collaborative.
Checked out status
If a document is checked out by a person for writing purposes, it cannot be written to by others even with write permissions. Only persons with write status can check out a document.
Name
All documents must have a name unique among all documents owned by a person. The name of a document cannot be changed once the document is created and is used for reference by other objects of the micro-republic. Documents are also assigned unique IDs by the system for internal tracking and linking.
Author
The author is the name of the creator or original owner of the document. The author cannot be changed.
Owner
The owner is the person currently most-responsible for the document. It may change over time if necessary. Owners must have at least user citizenship status to create or take ownership of a document. Owners have permission to change changeable aspects of a document.
Type
Documents can have one of the following types assigned to them:
Memo – a simple document with no extra attributes associated with it.
Attestation – a document stating or certifying any fact. It must have verifications from at least two other citizens to hold legal status.
Place – a document holding a lat-long-altitude set of numbers describing an exact location or boundary on earth.
Deed – a document describing a piece of physical property on earth. It contains a list of place values listed in order delineating the boundary of a piece of property. Deeds must be properly attested and processed by a jury for them to hold legal value. A deed is a specialized form of an Attestation.
Verification – an attestation that links a person with a document indicating that the person attests to the genuineness of the document. All documents used as evidence in a case require at least 2 verifications from different persons.
Founding – a document containing guidelines for juries written at the creation of the republic. Founding documents must be filed topically by the micro-republic. Founding documents become owned by the republic pseudo person and can only be changed by jury process. Founding documents do not carry authority with them except as enforced by juries.
Collection – a document referencing other documents – like a folder.
Case Collection – a forum document used to document the process of a jury case.
Communication - a document sent between persons of the micro-republic. This is the element that supports the micro-republic’s email system. Communications are generally private but may be used as evidence in a jury case but must be made public by the owner before such use is possible.
Profile – a document that holds data used to identify a person. Ambassadors can use their profile document to copy their attributes to other micro-republics.
Backup – a document that is an encrypted and compressed copy of the entire micro-republic including source code and documents. Backups can be created by any citizen of the republic and can be compared with other backups or with the current state of the republic. Differences can be analyzed to detect tampering of the republic. The republic automatically creates backups and compares them periodically to detect tampering. A tampered republic issues a priority 1 warning to all citizens of the republic and indicates a security breach in the republic. Backups can be partial or whole.
Snapshot – a document that is a smaller version of a backup. This cannot be used to restore a republic’s data state but it can be used to compare with other snapshots or backups to detect tampering. Snapshots can be partial or complete.
Lot – a document generated by the system using the precise (to the millisecond) time of generation and a standard algorithm to select a random number from a given set of bounds. This selection method is used to select jurors for the jury pool of the republic. A lot is strictly deterministic based on the time of its invocation.
Jury Selection - a document that takes 12 lot documents and applies it to the jury pool in existence at the time of the lot to form a jury of 12 persons.
Solicitation – a republic-wide advertisement.
Jury Call – a document used to call and form a Jury.
Judgment – a document used by a jury to declare a judgment upon a person and to document the conformance of the judged party to the requirements of the judgment.
Group – a document consisting of a collection of profiles.
Image – a document that is a still image of something. The micro-republic supports the following formats: PNG, JPEG, GIF.
Video – mpg4 video files are supported.
Audio – mp3 files are supported.
Procedures
The micro republic has encoded within it the processing of the following described procedures.
- Republic Creation
a. Founder Login
The first user to log onto a micro-republic automatically becomes the founder. The founding citizen is responsible for creation of the republic’s founding documents, for recruiting the founding members of the republic, and to assist the founding members to form a founding jury with co-authentication of each other to establish the lawful kernel of the micro-republic.
b. Founding Membership creation
Founding members can only join if invited by the founder via an email with a member signup key URL. A micro-republic must have at least 11 founding members and a founder to be created.
c. Founding Member Authentication
Once the founding members have joined the micro-republic they must authenticate each other so that there are at least two affidavits of authenticity for each member including the founding member. This allows for human verification of biometric and profile data of each member.
d. Founding Jury Creation
The founder then calls for the creation of the founding jury which then has the official business of creating the founding documents.
e. Founding Document Creation
The jury forms such founding documents as:
i. Core laws for republic operations IAW basic maxims of law.
ii. Core requirement documents for citizens and jurors to agree to in order to be accepted as citizens or potential jurors.
iii. Any other pertinent documents such as republic jurisdictions, land boundaries, etc.
f. Founding Member to Jury Citizen conversion
Once the business of the founding jury is completed including all members signing (and cross witnessing) the founding documents necessary to become a citizen and juror, all founding members and the founder are converted to non-founding normal citizens with appropriate rank (user, citizen or juror) based on what founding documents have been signed.
All citizens of the micro-republic must then ratify the founding documents by signing all of the documents created by the founding jury.
Every new citizen must ratify the founding documents by signing them, agreeing to be morally bound to follow the documents.
A republic is now born. - Jury Selection
Juries are created by the request of a plaintiff who must be a citizen or juror of the republic. Once requested, the system uses the date and exact time of the request along with the current eligible juror person pool to select jury members via a random yet deterministic process. This process is fully documented in the jury formation documents created for the called for case so that anyone can see that the process was done legitimately and it can be audited. Person pools can be reproduced at a later time using stored logs which become part of the republic’s permanent records.
Selected jurors are notified via email and must follow founding document procedures for processing the case. - Self Audit
Of critical importance is the ability of the micro-republic to audit itself. This involves a check of data logs to verify that all information in the database lines up with log entries and that all log entries and actions meet republic maxims. Audits use snapshots or backups to check activity between any two historical points in the republic. A self audit occurs at a frequency specified by the founder and amendable by any jury assigned with the task of updating founding documents. By design, all data in the database is linked with CRC checks with records and previous CRC checks to make tampering of data extremely difficult. The CRC checks create a gridlock that all data entries must conform to pass security checks. - Site Backup
A site backup can be made by any republic citizen and contains the ability to be applied to an un-initialized micro-republic website to create a copy of the original micro-republic including all persons and documents in the republic. The restored site will have a different unique serial number so members know it’s a copy. This is a way of protecting the republic from malicious attack by providing for frequent and dispersed copies of all records needed to recreate the republic should the need arise. - Site Snapshot
A site snapshot is similar to a backup but does not contain sufficient information for restoring the site. It is used for self or manual auditing and generally just includes key database CRC values. - Document Export
This is an encrypted export process used to transfer documents from one micro-republic to another. These are typically done by ambassadors for intra-republic business. It allows a secure method of cross republic document transfer. - Document Import
This is the complement function to a document export and is used to create documents for a micro-republic that came from another micro-republic or other outside source. - Case Initiation
A plaintiff can easily call for a jury to handle a case. The plaintiff creates a complaint document and this becomes the initiating element for the jury selection process to process the complaint. Juries can hold the plaintiff guilty for misrepresenting the facts or for frivolous jury calling. There may or may not be defendants in a case. All republic business is conducted by juries and must be started by case initiation. - Document Search
Full text searching of all public republic documents is inherent in the system and usable by citizens and jurors. Documents may have keywords associated with them for searching. Searches can also be filtered by various document attributes such as persons or types. - Profile Search
Similar to a document search, all persons can be searched by biometric data or by profile data or by documents associated with them.
Application
This system needs no heavy enforcement to work. Outlawry is sufficient even in severe cases. This need not encompass all persons in an area to work either. This could be applied toward such things as:
• Risk Management – replacement for insurance
• Association government such as churches, schools, clubs, etc.
• Road maintenance
• Fund management
To have this replace government, it need not be done all at once. Initially, for example, a micro republic could be hosted by a local sherrif’s office or other public entity as an alternative way for people to use arbitration to settle disputes. This creates a public record that establishes the integrity of individuals and will eventually influence businesses and the public causing a positive force in society. Even if not enforced, the judgments themselves give evidence for actual court cases and will tend to sway officials towards agreement with the micro-republic’s jury decisions. A system of high integrity can drive out a system of poor integrity over time.
Suggestions
It is impractical for a republic to remain in existence for very long simply because it generates an ever increasing number of documents in its normal running. To keep the system from failure due to overload, it is suggested that periodically a new republic be created and members of the old republic join the new one and start over. The old republic remains intact for historical reasons and ambassadors can be used to bring needed documents forward to the new republic from the old.
The name republic is a misnomer due to the fact that this system shuns written law. Perhaps a better name can be found.
This is a work in progress and suggestions are gladly accepted.