Chapter 11b
Step by Step
A journey of a thousand miles.....(and all that)


The organization we build will be self-sustaining once it is operational, but building its infrastructure in advance, according to such a plan as described in the previous sub-chapter, will require raising a substantial sum of seed money. We are hoping that many people who have the technical skills that will be crucial to this Project’s success will be motivated by the Project’s moral purpose to lend their skills to the Project at a substantial discount, and perhaps to even defer some portion of their discounted fee to a time when the organization is functional and can pay them back. But we cannot count on that, and in the area of software development in particular, (as well as legal and accounting services, and many other costs that will likely be unavoidable), we must be prepared to raise enough money to cover substantial development costs.

We mention fund-raising right off the bat because we must realize from the outset that it will be crucial to our task. If we had $10 million dollars, we would stand a very good chance to succeed. If we can make do with less, so be it. But if we need $10 million to make this work, then we must figure out how to raise that sum.

$10 million is just a number pulled out of the air. We may not need near that much, or conceivably we may need more. The point being made is that we must resolve ourselves to do whatever we need to do, and we must not underestimate the formidable nature of the task at hand.

We have tried to imagine a priority of goals and tasks that must be accomplished in order to move this project forward. Here is a list, although not necessarily in a refined order of priority. There are many sub-steps, of course, within each step listed.

1) We must create and develop the means to communicate for the purposes of collaboration
on this idea. This blog is intended to provide an initial step in that direction

2) We must develop confidence in the idea by recruiting new people to it.

3) We must organize ourselves into a decision making body.

4) We must win the support, and preferably the participation, of influential people. (We see
this as a very high priority, because it will facilitate the accomplishment of all the other
tasks).

5) We must locate resources for developing the software that this project is predicated upon,
and create at least a rough estimate of the cost of software development.

6) We must raise a considerable sum of money to begin to develop the software, and to
accomplish the other tasks that require immediate expenditures.

7) We must obtain legal counsel to help us create the organization’s legal entity.

8) We must obtain accounting consultation to create and maintain orderly financial records.

9) We must hammer out the detailed structure and rules of the organization. We must write a
constitution to define its form.

10) We must recruit and train people in diverse geographic regions to participate in the
Project.

11) We must develop a detailed plan for how to ‘roll out’ the organization, once its
infrastructure is built and ready to use.

12) We must organize a ‘provisional government’ to manage the Project as it is rolled out and
put into use.

13) We must ‘roll out’ the Project to be populated and put into functional use.

Let’s look at these steps in greater detail:

We think that step 1), developing our means to communicate and collaborate, is reasonably self-explanatory. We hope that others will have useful and creative ideas for creating tools that will facilitate our ability to collaborate on developing this Project. We hope that this blog can serve to get us started.

We hope that 2) is also self-explanatory. A steady, (though measured), influx of new people will maintain our confidence in what we are doing. We will not at the outset have anything in place for people to join, other than the effort to build something. As we recruit new people to the Project, we must think in terms of having immediate concrete tasks for them to do.

We must create a means of decision making, as outlined in step 3). At early stages, this will not necessarily be ‘democratic’, other than in general tone and spirit. Democracy requires structure, which we do not yet have. Perhaps our process of decision-making can develop as the Project develops. Current list-serve software, crude as it is, can be used, (although laboriously), to make democratic decisions, if and when key decisions must be made. As we develop the software for the Project, we can immediately put it to use to facilitate the development process itself.

We have investigated, to the best of our non-tech-savvy ability, the use of Drupal web technology for building the software the organization will need in order to operate as imagined. If there are any tech-savvy people reading this, we hope they will put themselves prominently forward with their ideas. We are hoping that perhaps we can begin to build a more developed collaborative communications apparatus early on that will include decision-making functionality.

We hope that natural leadership will emerge to guide us as we move along, and that a collaborative spirit will allow us to function through cooperative consensus whenever possible.

Step 4), winning the interest and participation of influential people could be crucial to moving the Project forward. The endorsement, and ongoing participation, of people whom others respect, admire, and listen to, could be the key to attracting the participation of people with needed technical skills, and the crucial key to fund-raising in particular. We have several prominent personages in mind whose interest we will try to recruit. Devising ways to approach them in a manner that will win their interest, just to take a look at this idea, will be a challenge in itself. If anyone reading this has any contacts to, or with, prominent people, who they think might be interested in this Project, we hope they will use those contacts, and perhaps forward this material to them. And if anyone reading this paper and/or blog IS a prominent personage, we hope you will contact us, (TrueDemocracyProject@gmail.com) with your interest and ideas.

We have many ideas for accomplishing Step 5), locating resources for software development. Hopefully, someone who is reading this paper will have extensive technical expertise, and possibly contacts in this field, and can help us begin to move in that direction. If we can attract and involve the efforts of one or more prominent personages, that might likely open doors to people with technical skills.

Computer science departments in colleges and universities might be a source of energy we can tap. Perhaps professional computer scientists, especially those in academia, might be motivated to participate by the pure technical challenge, coupled with a sense of civic responsibility, moral commitment, and/or professional pride. We must not underestimate the power of a just cause. Our moral purpose here comprises a ‘cause’ that has the compelling moral power to attract the people it needs.

But if all that fails…if we have to outright hire professional software engineers to develop what we need, it is easy to imagine that millions of dollars might be required. That brings us to step 6), raising the money we need, whatever amount it might be. As we already ‘lectured’, if we need to raise millions of dollars to develop this Project, then we will simply have to swallow hard and develop plans to raise those millions of dollars.

We are confident that we could do this should it be necessary. We must constantly ‘think big’. While speaking in terms of millions of dollars is speaking in astronomical sums to all of us as individuals, when considered collectively, in the context of a Project of this scope, a project with a compelling moral purpose that must involve the efforts of millions of people, it is not that large a sum at all, nor would it be impossible to raise. We can think in terms of small sums from many people, and/or in terms of large sums from a few wealthy people who might be interested in making either donations or loans to the Project, out of their own sense of social and civic responsibility.

Again, we must not underestimate the power of the ‘moral cause’ that lies at the root of this Project. There are many people in this society who have great wealth and influence, whose social and moral sensibilities are such that they might very well be interested in contributing to this social cause. People in the entertainment industry in particular, might very well be interested in lending their time and talents for the purpose of fund raising, through concerts, speaking engagements, (occasions where a famous name draws the crowd, and then you pass the hat), etc.

As we transition from an idea to an actual project in active progress, we think that whatever funds we need can be attracted to this ‘cause’.

Steps 7) and 8), the need for legal counsel and professional accounting expertise, are fairly self-explanatory. The Project must exist as a legal entity if it is going to own assets, (the money we raise), and those assets must be assiduously managed and accounted for.

It is well worth it to repeat that we must realize that this organization must be built upon a bedrock foundation of public trust, or else people will not be motivated to join it and unite their resources, through paying dues, with those of others. Any hint of financial irregularity could very likely be fatal to the public trust that is crucially essential to our success. As stated previously, (and it bears emphatic repetition), every penny that flows through this organization must be properly accounted for, with redundant oversight and reconciliation of all expenditures. We believe that the organization must function with ‘open books’. All financial records must be transparently available for scrutiny at all times by any citizen-member.

And as we also stated previously, (and which also bears repetition), we believe that any salaries that are paid in the course of this project must be of such a modest level that they will be perceived as ‘stipends’, so that the people who receive them will be widely viewed as motivated by moral purpose rather than financial reward. Those who accept the burdens and responsibilities of office must be properly perceived as accepting a sacrifice in order to do so, rather than being rewarded with an attractive salary and opulent perks and privileges of office.

Step 9), the creation of a constitution for the organization, may very well be an arduous task. It will probably be best to form a committee, with representation from a diverse cross section of interests, experience, and expertise, to tackle this crucially important task. We believe that this constitution must exist before the organization is fully created. Its ‘ratification’ will consist of the pledges from the citizen-members who join, and from all Local Citizen Groups that form, to abide by the rules set out within it. It must, of course, contain provisions for democratically amending it, once the organization is fully operational.

We hope that the assistance of people with expertise, either experiential, (people who have served in legislatures, or have vast experience in organizational behavior), or academic, (people with expertise in Political Science, or other relevant academic disciplines), can be enlisted for this task. People with deep organizational experience, and people with expertise in academic disciplines such as political science and organizational management, could be instrumental in writing a clear and concise constitution that defines the organization’s structures, procedures, and rules.

Step 10), recruiting and training participants, dovetails with step 2), attracting new people to the project, and giving them something to do. We will discuss this more thoroughly in the next chapter on ‘rolling out’ the organization. It also ties in directly with step 11), developing the plan for roll out.

We will also discuss steps 12) and 13), forming a provisional government, and the roll out itself, in some detail in the next chapter.


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