Advices — member councils

A question examined by the people who know it best and the people it affects most.

Advices develops the member councils of Drayker. A council is formed for one question, not kept as a standing body with fixed categories or seats. When a decision, a veto, a reputation dispute, an algorithm or the revocation of a member level, recorded with its reasons, needs to be examined, members convene a council, and whoever convenes it takes part in it.

Dknowledge crosses the question with each member’s links to it, what each one knows, has lived and has built, and calls the best-informed people on the matter and the people most affected by it — the context clusters of that question. The council debates with Dk in the middle of it. Together they look for contradictions, find gaps and test interpretations. The conclusions are recorded and become the basis for revising decisions and vetoes.

It is an adaptive system: the same mechanism resolves small and large questions, with whoever knows most and whoever feels the effect most. A council does not replace the members’ constitutional process. It gives a contestation the examination that the contested agent cannot make on its own: whoever decided cannot be the only one to examine their own decision.

A practical example

A team loses access to a shared instrument because the system recorded its project as abandoned. The measurements had stopped arriving because the protocol had been moved, by agreement, to another city, and the record of that agreement never entered Dknowledge. The team contests the classification and convenes a council, of which it is part. Dknowledge calls the people who know the protocol, the people who worked in both cities and the people who keep the research records. With Dk, the council finds the gap, the conclusion is recorded, and the effect of the classification is suspended while the correction is made. This is an illustration of the proposed design.

Why this exists

Complex organizations tend to drift into oligarchies of specialists. In a supersystem where an intelligence takes decisions of its own, a contestation cannot end inside the system that decided. Councils bring the question to the people who have knowledge of it and a stake in it, with Dk helping them examine it rather than judging alone.

The argument in full is on the manifesto. The economy page states plainly what contributing here earns and what it does not.

How a council is formed

• Convened for one question. Members convene it, and whoever convenes takes part.
• Composed from links, not categories. Dknowledge relates the question to what each member knows, has lived and has built, and calls the best informed and the most affected. There are no standing seats and no fixed domains.
• A small group drawn by lot in important decisions. Only in important decisions, and according to the type of convocation, a small group also enters by lot, drawn from the active members who signalled they want to take part or left random participation switched on. Everyone in the council, members and Dk alike, proves what they assert and justifies each position well: the examination is a joint investigation, not people against Dk.
• With Dk in the middle. Dk brings the records, the alternatives and what it knows and does not know. Members bring the context the data did not contain.
• Also convened by Dk. When Dk Global’s certainty about a decision is low, it convenes a council itself, with the members most connected to the matter and those most affected by it.

What keeps the examination independent

• Access to preserved records, authorized for the question, so the council can read what actually happened and not only the explanation it receives.
• Technical support it can consult without permission from the party under examination.
• Composition the contested party does not control. The agent whose decision is under examination does not control, alone, these conditions or the choice of who composes the council. Dknowledge’s search follows recorded criteria that whoever convened can check.
• A path from conclusion to operation. An authorized operator suspends the rule applied to the case, records the change and preserves the functions that are not in dispute. If the usual operator refuses or is unavailable, a substitute path exists, with access and competence limited to what is needed. Who recommends, who examines and who executes can be different people or instances. Whoever administers the infrastructure answers for the execution, within competences distributed beforehand, separate from the council and from the contested party.
• Intervention tested before delegation. The capacity to intervene is built and tested before any critical function is delegated.
• Verification of compliance. A revision ends with evidence that it was carried out, not only with a new answer from the agent. The council follows whether the same information affected other decisions and takes each of them to its own examination.

How much a conclusion weighs

A conclusion is weighed by its grounds. How much it weighs depends on what is under examination: a veto, a request, the global planning of priorities and projects, a local question, or a change to the constitution or to the kernel. Each case has its own configuration, optimized for it.

A value choice is one in which nothing of great importance in the system is modified and no mechanism is altered. When members ask for a rule on a value choice, they convene a council for the debate and, separately, a vote. Dk Global can help in the debate, but on a matter of this nature the members’ values weigh most. See constitutional alignment; how that vote runs is still to be specified.

The veto chain

Vetoes with their grounds, ratification signatures, triage outcomes and council conclusions are signed, hash-linked entries in the veto chain specified in UID and replicated over Dk Network. A council reads the chain, hears contested triages of a veto’s grounds and appends its conclusion to it.

Each member holds an absolute veto: power over their own life and their own Dk Personal (what stays private, what Dk represents, refusing a task, leaving). It holds only within the vetoer’s own sphere, and what also affects others goes through the contextual veto.

The justified contextual veto over decisions that directly affect the member’s life and context stays with each member: anyone can refuse what directly affects them. The veto carries its real grounds, even when its author stays anonymous, and vetoes are weighed by what their grounds reveal, not counted. A justified veto can be made without the vetoer’s name appearing in the decision, and the constitution protects against retaliation: disagreeing takes no courage, it is part of the common work.

Councils in technical review

In DFMP, validation runs alongside development rather than after it. Ideas are discussed with the communities and with councils formed for the question, turned into comprehensive papers and reviewed for empirical rigor under the principle: kind to people, relentless with ideas. A council does not gatekeep persons; it tests hypotheses, models and dependencies.

State of this documentation

Technical review currently runs through public issues and pull requests on GitHub. How councils are convened, composed and recorded still has to be specified with worked cases, and tested, before any function depends on it. The criteria Dknowledge uses to compose a council have to stay examinable, so that no one can pack a council.

How it fits the whole

Councils are the examination layer of a system whose legitimacy depends on decisions staying open to the people they reach. They work with Dk and Dknowledge, record their conclusions in the veto chain, inform DFMP and, once specified for the federation, examine contested triages and decisions of DAF; in Phase 0 they have no venue there yet. Long-term constitutional authority belongs to the members’ constitution. A council’s conclusion is weighed by its grounds; it is not a vote.

Contributing

Open an issue to help specify how councils are convened, composed and recorded, or to write a worked case. Issues small enough for one person to finish carry the open-function label and appear on the board at drayker.org.

Related: dfmp (the proposal and validation process) · daf (the federation and its decisions) · uid (identity and the veto chain)

Drayker belongs to its members, has no shareholders and distributes no profit, and its work is primarily voluntary. Content licensed CC BY 4.0.