Foundation Future 25

-- Structural Analysis --


Structure


The preliminary charter for the foundation would allow for the establishment of the foundation Future 25 under German law as a non-profit foundation. Here I present a comment to the charter and an analysis of its proposed structure. The foundation is still in development, everybody with a serious and sincere interest is invited to participate!

The Foundation Future 25 has five main organs, please see the figure:

  1. The general assembly. Consists of all founders and engaged co-founders. It is the main democratic legitimation organ. It selects the majority of directors and a minority of trustees.
  2. The board of trustees. It is the control organ. It controls the fulfillment of the charter by the board of directors, but it has no control over the day-to-day management. In order to guarantee its independence, it has the possibility of self-election.
  3. The board of directors. It is fully responsible for the management of the foundation and controlled by the board of trustees.
  4. The president. He/She represents the foundation to the general public. The office of the president is an honorable position. His powers are to dissolve the board of directors in cases of "emergency" and to call for re-elections of its members. The president can delay amendments of the charter by his/her veto. Once a year he/she presents a report on the state of the foundation to the board of trustees for discussion.
  5. The re-appraisal council The council is a temporary body, which can be appointed at the suggestion of the other organs of the foundation. It's purpose is to examine and re-evaluate decisions and events which happened at least three years into the past. It follows the leading rule "To learn from the past in order to improve the future". The re-appraisal council is not bound to instructions.
The idea of a re-appraisal council goes back to a proposal by Dr. Mayer Hillman.

Election rules
All terms are for 5 years, reelection is possible only once for co-founders and twice for the original founders. The eligibility of the members of the organs are:

  1. The general assembly. Every citizen of the world can become a member, but only for minimal periods of ten years such that preferably people with a longer time-horizon would join the foundation as co-founders. In order to limit the members to those with a real and sincere interest in the realization of the mission of the foundation Future 25, a certain not to small financial contribution towards the endowment will be required. The limit is set by the board of trustees and requires a compromise with the need to allow for a world-wide outreach.
  2. The board of trustees. The trustees themselves can elect up to 7 outside personalities and up to 13 members of the general assembly as trustees. These would typically be members with special contributions to the foundation. The general assembly can elect up to 13 members of its own long-time (10 years) members to the board of trustees, keeping in this way the board of trustees in touch with the assembly of founders and co-founders, without breaching the the basic self-election autonomy of the board of trustees.
  3. The board of directors. Half of directors (2-8) are elected by the general assembly. Only members which have shown a substantial time (four years) of engagement with the affairs of the foundation are eligible. The board of trustees exerts a certain influence by appointing 1-4 directors. Among these four members there will be typically important co-founders. Another 1-4 directors are selected randomly from the members (with a membership of at least six years) of the assembly.
  4. The president. Is elected by the general assembly, but the board of trustees has the exclusive right to name candidates. Suitable candidates are members of the general assembly with special merits for the foundation.
  5. The re-appraisal council. The members of the council are selected randomly from the members of the general assembly. Such the council will not be tainted by eventual political or ideological debates. The council can summon a facilitator for his meetings. Once established any given council will meet only for one session of 2-4 days in a row with confidential face-to-face meetings. The council is dissolved with the publication of his report on the web.
The here defined structure of the re-appraisal council is akin to that of a citizen consensus council.



Voting systems


The dominant voting systems nowadays is voting with simple majorities. It is, however, well known from the theory of voting that simple majority voting has several shortcomings, especially in the case when one winner has to be selected from larger group of candidates. For instance, majority voting does not alway entice the voter to be honest, that is to cast his/her vote for his or her favorite candidate. Instead he/she might cast his/her vote for an alternative candidate with higher chances to get elected.
In all voting processes of the foundations Future 25 either the "Condorcet-method" or the "approval voting" will be used. Both methods, solve at least in part, the problems of the standard majority voting.

"Democratic decision-making" is generally identified in western democracies with "elections". This is however not necessarily correct. Democracy means literally only that the people decides. It would be optimal, if all citizens of a country, or all members of an organization could take part directly in the decision-taking. If this is not possible, for example due to organizational reasons, then one has to select decision-maker, the leadership.

A fair procedure to determine the leadership is to draw lots. Randomness gives everybody exactly the same chance to become a leader. Elections become only then necessary if it is clear that not everybody is equally well suited to decide on behalf of the community and if it is established that competent members of the community can be, in general, expected to win the elections.

The determination of the board of directors, the only executive organ, is of central significance for the foundation Future 25. A mixed procedure will therefor be used in order to determine the directors. The random component impedes the emergence of power-politics and gives to every member of the general assembly a fair chance to become a director, without the need to climb possible informal hierarchies.


Participation and Opinion-Formation


The process of opinion-formation is central to the functioning of associations with many members. It takes place normally in informal gatherings and in the formal meetings of the associations. The Foundation "Future 25" will be, on the other hand, a world-wide association and initially new co-founders may be unknown to anybody else. The successful integration of newcomers into the opinion-formation process will be crucial for the growth potential of the foundation. It will be a challenge to present structured Internet communication capabilities to the members of the general assembly, encouraging the individual engagement.

Options for participation
Content and formal structure of participation are correlated. The management of the foundation will need meetings of the board of directors, either face-to-face meetings or by video-conferences. The general assembly is, on the other-hand, very dispersed and face-to-face meetings will be held probably only every few years in terms of foundation-wide gatherings with public and informational character. The members of the general assembly will therefore need to deal with the following topics via Internet:

  1. Elections
    Internet voting procedures for the election of international associations are possible and work well. To give an example, the American Physical Society uses a web-based voting process very successfully. Every candidate is given a structured space for self-representation.
    An open problem in this context is the selection of the candidates for the subsequent election. Several possibilities exist for this, the possibility of self-nomination being the most democratic alternative, as we will discuss further below.
  2. Decisions
    The charter for the Foundation Future 25 foresees the possibility (non mandatory) for the directors to present important decisions to the general assembly for approval. The general assembly itself has no autonomous decision-making capabilities and the submittals of the directors need approval of the trustees, such holding up the control function of the trustees over the directors.
  3. Proposals
    An important task of the general assembly will be the formulation of project proposals. These proposals on how to spend the available money for projects, which need to follow the guideline of the charter, will be submitted to the board of directors. The directors have the duty to consider these proposals, but they are non-binding. The possibility (and the duty) to formulate proposals may become, with growing financial resources, a major reason for joining the foundation as a co-founder.
The general assembly of the Foundation Future 25 will elect electronically members of the board of directors and of the board of trustees. The voting procedures and the selection process for the project-proposals will also be done via Internet-communication.

Structured Opinion-Formation via Internet


A foundation has a financial capital stock, the endowment and the human capital of its members. It is the human capital which generates new ideas for projects and for the development of the foundation; active members are likely to attract new co-founders. The homePage of the foundation Future 25 must therefore provide some essential tools for structured opinion-formation, supporting the personal engagement to the foundation of its world-wide dispersed members .

Web-based opinion formation
Let's describe in some detail a possible web-based tool for structured opinion formation. This tool could serve, with small alterations,

  • for the selection and presentation of candidates for elections,
  • for the selection and presentation of projects and
  • for the formation of interest groups within the foundation.
Here how it would work for the case of project proposals. This web-based tool would allow the generation and the preselection of project proposals for a later decision of the general assembly by Internet-voting. A short list of proposals would then be submitted to the board of directors.
Every member of the general assembly could start (with password restricted access) a webPage on the homePage of the foundation. This webPage would be preformatted (standardized), it would contain space for:
  • information about the member,
  • title and type (category) of the project,
  • short description of the project (few lines),
  • an estimate of the costs and of the time-scale involved,
  • a longer description of the project (few paragraphs) with possible links to external sites and
  • clear-cut criteria: Under which circumstances is the project to be considered a success or a failure!
  • Together with a section for possible support-notes by other members.
As such, this tool would lead to an uncontrolled multiplication of project proposals, its use for structured opinion formation would be limited. The preselection process giving raise to the structured opinion formation comes in through the rules applying to the last point, the support section:
  • a support can only be added by a (password restricted) access of a member,
  • it is standardized and has three possibilities: positive, neutral and negative support,
  • together with space for a small comment.
The rule is then:

A proposal which does not attract enough positive support within a certain time (half a year or so) would die, it would be removed automatically from the homePage of the foundation.

Web-based information exchange
The structured tool for opinion formation described above is, of course, not sufficient for complete exchange of information. The individual project proposals need to be arranged into searchable lists and structured space for advertisement of new proposals needs to be established.

Once a proposal is preselected, the supporters of the proposal would be asked to form a small local working group, working out the "pre"-project in some depths, its realizability etc., making it ready for a final decision on it. The general assembly would then vote, by Internet, in between different final proposals and submit them to the board of directors for consideration.


Result-Oriented Discussion Forums


The structured opinion formation described above needs to be supplemented with a less formal process allowing for the discussion of new ideas and for problem recognition in the development and in the administration of the foundation. A suitable tool, the "result-oriented discussion forums", may work in the following way:

Every member of the general assembly would be able to start a discussion forum (Internet chat thread) on a freely chosen subject of relevance to the foundation. The discussion forum would have a finite life-time. If the number of contributions exceeds a certain maximal number (one hundred or so) or if there is no further contribution for a certain period of time, the discussion forum would be terminated automatically. At this point the closed discussion forum would fall into one of following two categories:

  1. The closed forum is considered irrelevant: Only few contributions from limited number of members of the general assembly.
  2. The discussion in the closed forum reflects an important concern or idea: It received a substantial number of contributions from a large number of different members of the general assembly.
In the first case nothing more would happen, in the second case the three most active participants of the forum would then have the right and the duty to prepare together a résumé of the closed discussion forum for publication in the newsletter of the foundation. The résumé would contain:
  • The subject of the discussion forum.
  • The name of the initiator.
  • The overall number of contributions and contributors.
  • The name of all contributors together with the number of their respective contributions.
  • A summary of the major points, the pro and contra arguments and possible results and agreements.
The publication in the foundation newsletter of the résumé would entice the Internet-discussion forum to lead to positive results. The résumés of discussion forums of high quality would draw the attention of the others members of the general assembly, and lead to real changes and progress. Before publication, all participants of the closed discussion group would be given the possibility to vote on the résumé. The result of the voting, that is the number of participants believing that the summary reflects the actual content and the course of the discussion, would be published together with the résumé itself.

Voting and opinion formation


An additional purpose of voting procedures, in addition to their intrinsic task to determine office bearer and the like, is to contribute to the opinion-formation in an organization. If organized properly, secondary information can be gained from a voting process, enhancing the intra-foundational communication-process and opinion-building. Taking an Internet-voting procedure as an example, we will discuss now a possible, illustrative procedure:

On the webPage for the voting, in addition to casting the ballot, an elector would have find additional information and and possibilities to choose:

  1. The possibility to casting the vote either secretly, privately or publically. `Privately' would mean that only other registered electors would have the possibility to look at this record.
  2. The possibility to write a `private' comment (only accessible to the observers for the ballot) on issues related to the voting and to the voting procedure.
  3. The possibility to volunteer for the job of an observer to this voting.
Observers for the voting
After the ballot 3-5 observers would be chosen randomly among the volunteers, see above. The task of the these observers would be to compose a short report on the voting procedure, which would be published on the homePage of the foundation or in the newsletter. The observers would summarize and analyze in this report, besides the usual statistical information, the content of the posted comments.

Any discontent of the electorate with the voting procedure, and other secondary information beyond the actual casting of the votes, could be commented upon in the preferably impartial voting report. Examples are expression of discontent with the formulation of the questions or with the procedure used to select the candidates or with the timing of the ballot. As such the ballot-report would contribute to the intra-foundational communication.

The selection of small action-groups with well defined tasks, as the just described ballot-observers, by drawing lots is meant to enhance the formation of internal networks. People with previously only loose contact would have the opportunity to get to know other better, when working together on this temporary committee.


Nature of the Projects


Programs versus large-scale projects
Most foundations spend their annually available financial means in quite regular ways on projects. For example they may establish a program for certain types of fellowships which are granted every year, or they may give every year a price to the "best in something". This money-spending policy minimizes the effort necessary to manage the financial means. Long-term programs are, on the other hand, unsuitable for the foundation Future 25, for two reasons:
  1. A program repeated year by year will in general not lead to a substantial media covering and it does not provide a strong incentive for possible benefactors to donate. Donations of substantial size are most readily given when they contribute towards the realization of a new venture.
  2. If most of the available financial resources are spent by the board of directors on long-term programs, a major reasoning for joining the foundation as a co-founder, the possibility to have an influence on projects, would cease to exist.
Looked in either way, long-term programs would lead to a certain degree of stagnation, which is incompatible to the very core principle of the foundation Future 25. The foundation will therefore need to spend its yearly available financial means on only a handful of selected projects, which would grow over time in size, proportionally to the value of the endowment. Of course, any single project may run for several years in a row, depending on the circumstances.

Specification of purpose
The charter formulates the purpose of the foundation quite openly. There are two reasons for it:

  1. We expect the foundation Future 25 to be active also in several hundred years and we cannot predict the nature of the pressing problems to be solved then.
  2. A narrow specification of the foundation's purpose would severely limit its growth potential.
One has to acknowledge that the relative vagueness of program of the foundation might, on the other hand, be viewed negatively by prospective benefactors initially, in analogy to the slow start problem. In the end, the charisma and the enthusiasm of the supporters of the foundation will determine the outcome of this dichotomy. It is also clear that the projects will be initially modest in nature, their ambition increasing steadily with the size of the available financial resources.