7) Cog Circles

Part 7 of the 12-part series - 'A Grand Machine to Beat Covid-19' - investigates the governance processes of the Machine and how the system could be managed and financed.

The MMM could be set up by a group of online volunteers, working ad hoc and using informal, collective decision-making. This would establish the Machine as a voluntary collaborative project – owned and governed by its users. Anybody could sign up, so it would effectively be run by the Citizens of the World… with all organisational workings kept fully open and transparent.

As the MMM grows, it will become necessary to formalise the approach, with users agreeing a range of governance rules and institutions. What follows is a possible skeleton-sketch of what the maturing system may look like.

Governance

The guiding principles of MMM governance should be the promotion of: grassroots initiative, respectful cooperation, and collective decision-making. Individuals can decide how to take action and shouldn’t be prevented from doing anything without good reason. A co-operative crowdsourcing atmosphere pervades, with many activities undertaken without formal leadership.

People go along with ideas they like the sound of and choose to follow the suggestions of persuasive experts. Voting-facilitation systems enable all sorts of democratic decision-making to take place at different levels. The platform also supports professional teams, where standard workplace hierarchies will usually apply (e.g. clinical trials managed by specific project leads).

Different projects can be run in different ways with various governance structures, settings and flexi-templates available. Individuals setting up Collaborations are free to design leadership and management processes appropriate to the particular context, whilst larger Challenges (Co-operative or Competitive) should be run by Cog Circles (councils). Different types of Cog Circle include:

· Expert Assemblies – which gather all specialists within a given area or field. For example, groups of healthcare workers, scientists or ICT professionals. There may be multiple levels of group specificity, with more precise categorisations gathering doctors, virologists or cyber-security experts

· Assessment Juries – Ideation Challenge judging panels would include a small number of top experts, selected to bring a range of different perspectives to bear

· Organisational Groups – key external bodies, such as scientific institutions or companies, might compose themselves on-site, to make use of the MMM platform and resources

· Governing Councils oversee Programmes, Challenges, Sub-Challenges and major Collaborations – cogs should have a mix of relevant expertise

· Control Councils oversee different core aspects of the platform, such as programming and policing – cogs should have a mix of relevant expertise

· Grand Council – includes all MMM users… this body can make certain major decisions democratically

· High Council – makes high-level MMM executive decisions (a few hundred members?). Need to develop some kind of selection/ rotation process…

The MMM operates within a freedom-loving, tolerant atmosphere, but will need rigorous policing to maintain the right character. This is not the place for fake news or pseudo-science, so anything like that must be firmly clamped down upon. There needs to be the right balance between taking a hard-line against nonsense and remaining scientifically open-minded regarding non-modal approaches. ‘Politics’ should also be generally unwelcome on the platform (especially party politics) as the Machine needs to keep a cool head and enculturate an objective, scientific mindset. Obviously, no bullying, discrimination or nastiness.

Users who break the rules should be warned about their behaviour… if they persist, then ultimately they should be excluded from participation. The crowd is self-policing, of course, with trusted guardians, administrators and stewards upholding the principles and rules of the MMM. Everything should be done openly, with a ‘Guardian Control Council’ providing oversight and arbitration.

Ensuring true user identity is very important for the MMM, as it fundamentally relies on accurate data. Fakes, trolls or bots can’t be tolerated, so users should be clearly identified on their profile with accurate information openly displayed (note that sensitive personal info is kept private and will be anonymised before being made accessible to researchers). It’s also important to verify claimed expert qualifications, through checking organisational email addresses and other processes. How to achieve these policing and identity-assurance goals needs careful consideration, as some of the problems eluded to are highly complex.

Money

Lots of things can be accomplished through the Machine without requiring large amounts of money. Fundamentally, the MMM relies on crowdsourcing sweat-investment for the Cause in the unique, all-hands-on-deck atmosphere of the world in the early 2020s. But, the practical experiments would be very expensive to run (especially the main clinical Mega-Trials) and then there’s the Competitive Challenge prizes to be paid. IP buyouts would also be costly… and data-storage would need to be funded as well. If the Machine were to run at full-pelt, then billions of dollars would have to flow through the system every year.

Money to lubricate the Machine could be raised from four sources:

1. Citizens – crowdfunding a large number of small donations, as well as some major philanthropic contributions

2. Business – money… as well as IP donations and offers of free server space (it’s important to ensure that this private-sector money doesn’t corrupt impartiality in any way)

3. Non-profit organisations – prize-sponsorship… as well as offers to run key aspects of the Machine (such as experiments)

4. Governments – on the national and international level

Given the amount of money required to operate the Machine at full-scale, the governments of wealthy nations would probably need to be the biggest donors. Enormous sums have been promised towards fighting C-19, so perhaps some of this could be spent through the MMM. The WHO could use the system to allocate a portion of its funding, as could national and supra-national R+D commissioning bodies. After all, investing resources through the Machine enables donors the best possible oversight of how the financing is used… and ultimately, the system should return the biggest bang for the buck in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

The MMM doesn’t need money to flow in and out of it – rather, money should flow through the system, without the Machine actually touching it. The platform providing governmental (and other) users with an excellent system for ensuring that their R+D funds are allocated in the best possible way. And the platform doesn’t require much in the way of assets either – just its IP: protected for use by the whole world. Lots of organisations offer to donate server space to good causes, so the platform should be able to make use of such facilities. Relying on crowdsourcing means the Machine requires no professional workforce and hence incurs no staffing costs. Ideally, there should be no payments made directly by the MMM itself.

The platform is fully owned by its users. Everyone owns their personal data, has full control over how it’s used, and can withdraw or delete it at any time. The rest of the information is owned collectively. Data should only ever be used for scientific, medical or crisis-response purposes – with commercial, political or broader security utilisation strictly prohibited.

Summary

Although donors keep control of their funds and thus have influence, it’s important that the MMM remains firmly citizen-governed. Ideally it should be a user-led entity. One that is rigorously transparent and science-focused – strictly non-profit and non-state. If the MMM has no staff and no office, with everything done and decided publicly on a fully-open platform, then there is no backroom where secret deals could be done.

As the ‘organisation’ has no ‘inside’, the Machine should be able to maintain an exceptional level of transparency in everything it does. A new model of organisation – one that’s only recently been enabled by technological advances.

Read the next blog in the series - Part 8 - Integration and Interface