Eww, it's Icky!

The first objection to the whole plan will come from those of an anarchist bent.  

It's a system of authority.  It's people being judgmental.  It's inequality.  

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I'm not creating those things.  Those things are going to exist.  I'm recognizing that and dealing with reality in a planned manner.  And frankly, that stuff comes from "a place of privilege" as the current wokester lingo would put it.  If your concern is "why is there organization at all" rather than "if only things were organized better" then you're like Costa Rica being all proud of not having a military.  Costa Rica gets away with it because it's under US protection.  Any proposed moral code that relies on that moral code being universal for it to start being beneficial is not a real moral code.  Yes, if everybody were just filled with love instead of enlightened self interest then we wouldn't need systems of authority.  People would just be productive and well behaved and there wouldn't have to be ways of motivating people to do the right thing.  If only there were Gardens of Eden everywhere people wouldn't need to be productive.  Let them eat cake.  

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So I'm not going to argue that aspect any more here.  I'm going to talk about design, not about whether to do it at all.  

 

Structure

An order is an independent organization operating under the Default Rules of Procedure (DROP) and which has adopted this Code for Orders unanimously, retaining both without contradictory modification.  Orders are made up of a hierarchy of subordinate organizations called councils.  A council is a group of several members, one of whom is the leader.  Councils are subordinate organizations as authorized by the DROP.  Their own resolutions are void where they contradict resolutions of superior levels of organization, this Code, or the DROP.  Only unanimous vote of all participants may adopt a modified Code or DROP.

 

Eww, why have Rules?  Why not just let it flow like we did at that party?

Under ideal conditions groups of friends can just interact informally if they are getting along and aren't trying to accomplish anything together other than hang out because they have no worries.  Even then, some people will dominate the conversation, it's just that the stakes are so low it doesn't matter.  If you choose not to say whose turn it is you still have made a choice.  You have made a choice for it to be the turn of the loudest or rudest or most aggressive or maybe the most respected by most mostly to the extent it's measurable so we'll let you go first.  When you eliminate rules you don't eliminate rule, you just switch to different defacto rules.  Sometimes that works when the stars align.  When it doesn't  you can wander away because we aren't really doing anything, right?  But if a group of people wants to actually accomplish anything rules are essential to getting it done and making it fair.  They don't oppress, they prevent oppression.  

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So, this code first designates rules of order.  I wrote my own because of the flaws in Roberts Rules (explored elsewhere).  Or actually, not first.  First it's an "order" and "an independent organization."  I chose the term "order" because I want it to be useful for multiple purposes.  An order might be a geographically cohesive group or it might be a group spread out over a large area and sharing a common culture.  Like a fraternal or chivalric or religious order.  I chose the term "organization" for the DROP because it's the most general term I could use other than "group."  It's a standing group.  "Body" and "assembly" and "association" and so forth all have technical meanings that are specific.  

 

In the DROP I set up a special class of "motion" that is harder to repeal or over-ride.  Roberts Rules gives an array of different levels of majority required for different things.  It's philosophy is that something must be harder to change than it was to do in the first place.  This is wrong, it should be exactly the same and should usually be a simple majority.  There should be some rare and special things, essential (of the essence) to an organization that should not be subject to everyday change.  Supermajority requirements shouldn't be enough.  Why?  Because when such a "constitution" is adopted unanimously and every new member also signs onto it, then even a supermajority taking that away would be 2/3 overrriding 100 percent.  When you join a voluntary organization (as opposed to being born into a nation) you vote for it as is.  So all members vote for the unanimous constitutional provisions. 

 

Now, there is the matter of the strange structure of orders, being made out of smaller organizations called "councils."  There's a whole question of the "membership" of mere "participants."  Is it even legit to allow a provision to require all participants for its repeal, rather than a unanimous vote of the high council?  My thinking is such a thing can be OK if it was originally adopted by all participants with the explicit provision stating all participants are required for an appeal.   It was accepted by all participants when they signed on, but perhaps reluctantly, so allowing repeal by the same standard of unanimous  vote of all participants makes sense.  Granted, for an organization of any size this makes modifying the constitution essentially impossible, so it had better be perfect (or something that can be worked around)--or you might need to start over from scratch.  

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The terminology about "An order is an organization which has adopted the Code and DROP retaining both without modification" is awkward but it just means that if you modify the Code or the DROP you might be technically legal in terms of the DROP but you are no longer defined as an "order" in the sense meant by this code.    But that is true only if you make "contradictory" modifications.  You can alter and expand the rules of procedure you are  using, but those modifications just can't contradict the original version.  And you can make void resolutions that contradict it and they're just void, not fatal.  

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Now, as for hierarchy, and the objection that "Eww, hierarchies are anti-egalitarian."  People aren't equal.  They're unequal in myriad ways.   I'm better than you at some things, you're better than me at others.  Some people will try to claim they're generally superior, but usually do so by limiting consideration to what they are superior at and disregarding such contests as "least asinine".    They're just proving they're insanely devoted to dominance for its own sake rather than for any purpose, especially any common purpose.  It's not about one spectrum.  And inequality isn't fixed.  Things change constantly.  But at any given moment in time, inequality is the essence of quantity thinking.  Without it you can just talk about categorical absolutes, not relatives.  Hierarchies are unpopular because they're incorrectly all conflated with rigid general hierarchies.   Hierarchies, such as caste systems, are indeed bad when they assign people general social rankings, rather than specialized detailed ones, and especially so when they keep those rankings frozen.  But meritocracy is a thing, vertical mobility is a thing, and being better at ping pong than your boss at the office is a thing.  More on meritocracy later, it's getting slammed too.   It's just like order.  When you don't have it you still have it, you've just hidden the rules.  

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So, what I'm doing here is defining "orders" as being made up not of individual "members" but of  "councils."  Councils are largely analogous to "committees" but not really because they barely overlap at all.  A committee is when a larger group carves out a subset of itself to assign a task.  If a body is made up of people named A, B, C, D and E, then a committee could be made up of  C, D, and E, but not of E, F, and G.  F and G are not in the first body so the group "E, F and G" is not a committee.   (Note: a sector council could create a committee of sector members.  But the committee concept isn't used here.)   These things I've made up don't have to play that game.  They're more like the Unitarian Universalist Association.  The members of the UUA are "congregations."  But it's even more so.  These "councils" are mere parliamentary creations, like committees, rather than legal corporate entities.   And they're arranged in unequal relationships.  Higher rules beat lower rules.  More on that later, but essentially it's just enough to form the foundations of structure.  

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And the final sentence of the paragraph seems simultaneously redundant and contradictory.  Really it's neither, but it's of questionable legitimacy even under the rules I've created.  What do "participants" have to do with an "order"?  Could the UUA make a bylaw calling for something to require consent of all "members of all congregations"?  Sure it could.  It could call for something to require the correct astrological alignment.  It could say a provision will be repealed the next time the Cowboys win the Superbowl.  Consent of all participants is an event that triggers an outcome that has been established, and that setup was part of a resolution legitimately adopted.   So, an implication of this being possible is that when the participants modify the code or DROP for their use they have followed the DROP and they are still an organization, but they aren't an "order' as defined by the Code.  There are consequences, but if they want to do that, the Code defines a threshold.   

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Councils have superior and subordinate relationships with each other.  Each subordinate council has only one immediately superior council, but a superior council can have several immediately subordinate councils.  Councils which have the same number of councils superior to them are said to be on the same level.  Participants of an order can be members on multiple councils, provided those councils are each at a different level.

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I don't define superior and subordinate.  It doesn't matter.  If you don't know what that is, they could be named Jack and Jill and it would be clear from context what I'm talking about because I define what those designations imply.  Jack's rules are stronger than Jill's rules.  And here I define a standard branching hierarchy.  Once I introduce "sectors" we're talking about a "nested hierarchy."  

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Levels are counted from the top down instead of the bottom up because a council can have a variable number of subordinate councils but has only one immediately superior council.  It's a branching hierarchy, as stated.    Actually, it would have been more clear to say "councils which have the same number of councils DIRECTLY superior to them are on the same level" because you could confusingly take "superior" to mean "on a higher level" even though it is clearly defined later such that  aunts and uncles are not included, as it were, just direct lineage.  But it doesn't matter because the same result would pertain.  Even counting diagonal superiors, those on the same level would have the same number of those, it just wouldn't also be equal to the number of superior levels.  Which isn't the point so it doesn't matter.  Levels matter because when an order grows or shrinks levels can get added or deleted.  And stuff.  It's used to talk so I have to define it. 

 

Such as right away:  you can be  your own boss all the way down.   The higher you are in an order the more councils you lead and the more meetings you go to.  Every general is also a colonel and a major and a captain and so forth.  Not only that, there are additional special "order" roles that don't pertain to "council" or "sector" roles.  And no, this isn't complexity for its own sake, all this is necessary to optimize simplicity.  If you have leaders being separate from what they lead, then you have to do all kinds of work arounds to deal with that when things change.  Sure, you can make special definitions and procedures, so that when you lose your higher title you get to choose which lower element  you want to retain membership in, but that isn't just inelegant it could lead to additional dynamics that could have side effects.  Better to just say you are stove piped all the way up, your own leader at every level except the top one you are at, so every general is also a member and leader of a particular squad.   

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Higher-level leaders will also be leaders at lower levels, and on all councils the leaders are also members.  The leader of each council is always a subordinate member on the immediately superior council.  All the councils and participants subordinate to an individual leader make up something called a sector.  The highest-level council in an order is called the high council.  The leader of the high council is called the president.  The participants of the high council are called the deputies.  The sectors led by the deputies are called departments.  The highest-level council in a sector is called the sector council.  Resolutions of the high council are resolutions of the entire order and resolutions of a sector council are resolutions of the entire sector.

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Every order has a President and immediately subordinate deputies.  An order with 3 members has just one council, 

and the council leader is also the order president while the 3 council members are the order deputies.   In an order with

8 levels of hierarchy, that has 15 councils immediately subordinate to the president, the leaders of those 15

councils are also deputies of the order and the councils they leader are called departments just as they would be in a

much smaller order.  President and deputies are the individuals at the top two levels of any order, they aren't a

particular  level.  And the President and Deputies make up the  high council of the order, regardless of the size of the order or the number of other levels below them.  

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A similar thing pertains to something called a sector.  "Sector" is like the military term "unit."  The word comes

from the notion of a pie like slice of a circle.  The chart of the league of nations kind of illustrates this concept.   

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Sectors are "nested" so that subconferences of the Preparatory Conference for the Disarmament Section are also part of the

Disarmament Section and also subordinate to the Secretary General.  There were probably task teams subordinate to the

subconferences and they were also nested in the whole.  Got it? 

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The secretariat is like a "council" and the committee that  heads the Disarmament Section is like a "council" and the 

committee that heads a subconference two levels under it is also like a "council".  The  head of the Disarmament section

is on the Secretariat and all subordinates of that person are in the Disarmament section, which is like a "sector."  A "council" is a group of leaders of lower level sectors.  The sector council is at the top of  a sector. 

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Each of these councils heads a sector and is the governing body of that sector.  Councils make resolutions and those 

resolutions outrank the resolutions of other (necessarily subordinate) councils in the same sector.   

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It's important to understand the difference between sectors and councils here.  In internal terms, sectors are what is real, in a sense, but in another sense, they're more abstract than councils, which are themselves just parliamentary fictions of the actual legal organization.

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The design choices need explaining I guess: a nested branching hierarchy is necessary for the functioning of the evaluation system, which is introduced later.  

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