KuneAgi achieves an unprecedented level of internal democracy. The software is designed to concretely enable the participation of all to debates and to decision, to avoid power confiscation or usurpation, while still assuring the capacity to take decisions within a finite time frame and being protected against malevolent actions.
Internal democracy is assured by the following functions:
- the freedom to take the initiative of a new proposal, even on a subject where a Working Group already is active. Therefore, nobody can own a subject, and nobody can forbid others from reflecting on it and from bringing their contribution. This freedom makes "voting with one's feet" possible. If a Working Group is dysfunctional (because of the behaviour of one or several of its Members) unhappy Members may freely create a competing Working Group. The risk of having Working Groups splitting into a myriad competing initiatives is regulated by the following rules, embedded in the software: (1) Working Groups must be larger than a threshold to be allowed to operate and (2) the Support Tokens are limited in numbers. Proposals that would be too close on a given issue would take the risk of not having enough Active Members in the Working Group for it to be considered as legitimate or to see this issue fall in the depths of the rankings, if the Support Tokens were dispersed on all available proposals
- the freedom to amend the action proposal being produced in the Working Group, and the assurance to have each of these amendments be the purpose of an explicit decision
- the fact that all transformations brought to the Document describing the action proposal (acceptance or refusal of each amendment and of each interim version) are the purpose of an explicit and democratic decision by the Working Group, by simple or qualified majority
- the freedom for each Member to contact any other Members, through an internal messaging system, with the possibility to find previously unknown people via the Working Groups where they are active
- the remote, non-real-time, written work reinforces equality and fairness among Members: geographic (and also financial) constraints, those stemming from time availability (for employed people or parents) and from oral expression (often due to social or national origin) are significantly reduced
- the traceability of all discussions and of all decisions in the Working Group, of the identity of all contributors, and of all moderation decisions taken by the controllers randomly chosen among Members
- the indexing of the Documents describing action proposals. With this indexing, any interested person may be alerted (1) of the existence of the Document as soon as it appears (which allows him / her to apply to the Working Group being set up to work on it) and (2) of its publication (which allows him / her to allocate a Support Token to it or to reallocate one previously placed elsewhere). This indexing also allows to automatically generate partial action agendas, that are relevant for a geographic or a thematic area only
- the mechanism of Support Tokens. This feature ranks action proposals naturally in priority and relevance order. The fact that each Member only has a limited number of Support Tokens forces him/her to manage them with care
- the attribution of an indelible reputation to each Member, being attributed by peers having worked with him/her in earlier Working Groups. This reputation This reputation bears explicitly on co-operative behaviour. This reputation is a strong incentive for Members, if they intend to be accepted later as Members of Working Groups, to have and to keep a co-operative behaviour.
- the possibility for a Working Group to exclude a Member considered as a trouble-maker, via a democratic decision
- the distributed nature of the identity validation of new Members and of the moderation of action proposals. Each time these operations must be done, a randomly generated group of Members performs the validation. This avoids that controlling power be concentrated in the hands of a technical administrator (or of his/her superiors), and reinforces the sense of ownership of Members on the smooth operation of the whole. The control of the identity of new Members avoids the multiplication of avatars (and of votes) for a given natural person, and preserves the sincerity of decisions.