Not yet, but I feel it’s critical to have some basic rules. There are network fundamentals we have at the moment. Enforcing those makes sense as a start. Any update must meet those and we must be able to test that. Then go from there.
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And no one expected the results of the 2016 U.S. election either. Don’t assume people will vote or think your way before the polls close. Personally I find the security issues raised by not having an auto update feature rather concerning but I do concede the points about voluntary choice and shaping the network. For example say there was a choice of whether to say integrate some feature to import/export data from the clearnet, which would be a clear security issue, or there was a mesh networking feature but integrating mesh networking would degrate performance of the network somehow. Essentially what I’m saying is what if integrating x update came with a trade off to the network? Then users would have to choose what kind of network they wanted to use. It wouldn’t be a matter of just a better network but rather would it be better for them, specifically. It would be like comparing Arch and Debian, or Manjaro and Ubuntu. Both are great distributions but they have distinctly different pros and cons. So just as the Linux kernal at it’s core become a platform for developing Linux based operating systems so too would the SAFE network platform become a platform for developing distributed encrypted internets, plural. We usually think of having a single internet. But it might come down to having multiple networks and then the big question is how do you import/export the data easily across multiple networks?
Ultimately that seems to be the end result of giving people choice. If people can choose how to shape their network then you need to plan for divergence and eventual splitting of the network into multiple networks. And if that’s an inevitability you have to plan for a data import/export function of some kind. How do these different networks talk to one another?
This sounds way too much like representitive democracy for my taste. And it has one of the big problems of democracy: Users will have to be familiar with their representatives in order to make informed political, or in this case techno-political, decisions. Who do you vote for if you don’t know who is capable and/or reputable? I mean in a small community like ours we kind of know each other but most people who use the network will just want their internet to “just work” and won’t have a clue who the devs who made it and who are working on it are. It’s like so many people who don’t pay attention to politics. Well even more people don’t pay attention to code so long as it works. So same problem as democracy here: It depends on a well informed user base which most people are not. You would need an educational function of some kind to bridge the gap.
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If democracy is a concept of people being represented, then that demands that the vote they make affects what is local to them and what they are familiar with - and respecting that opinion.
If the Safe Network is layered, then there can be choice, and providing for everyone fairly calls for choice. I wonder there’s no reason that the very base need to change, if it works and what is layered on top can be a choice of alsorts. Good examples above but you can choose your desktop environment at least in Linux without changing the underlying OS; and you can change the OS without necessarily changing the hardware. If the Safe Network we understand atm is near to hardware in concept, then there need not necessarily be multiple networks… indeed it’s better for everyone, if there is one universe, in which alsorts can occur… because that allows more variety to be spawned on the back of the same data.
As for the OP title, which I’ve not read yet… good Government is about representation and mandate. The so called democracies we suffer atm in the real world are too often acting without mandate - and notably at a level that is too macro; so, we tend to bipolar, rather than refined response from solutions to complex problems. Politics is not getting better for have bigger answers, we need nuance - in the same way that nature tends to. There’s no advantage in new universes, when all you want is to spawn a new species; etc.
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