How should Mina’s Protocol’s governance be organized to harness the intelligence of individual community members to make the best decisions?
Governance is crucial to the future of the Mina Protocol for key decisions to be made effectively. For example, what are the rules and processes for making changes to the protocol? And how should the development of the protocol and ecosystem be funded? To realize Mina Protocol’s vision of an internet of true things powered by users of Mina’s proof of everything, these decisions also need to be aligned with the wishes of the Mina community. Consequently, all key stakeholder groups in the ecosystem need to have a voice, agency and support to participate in decision making.
This raises the question: how should Mina’s Protocol’s governance be organized to harness the intelligence of individual community members to make the best decisions? To answer this question, this is the first in a series of blog posts that explore collective intelligence where groups of people are organized at scale to solve public problems in ways that often outperform individual people alone.
First, we introduce collective intelligence and insights from biology, including the decision making processes of brains and swarms.
Inspired by these insights, social science researchers have developed high level frameworks for organizing groups of people to make decisions as a ‘hive mind’. We summarize these frameworks and frame Mina Protocol’s governance around them since some of their methods are already being implemented.
Ongoing experimentation and learning is central to collective intelligence. Public problems have become increasingly complex, including the emergence of wicked problems that have multiple causes and nonlinear dynamics so there are no obvious or clear solutions. Feedback loops and interdependencies mean trying to solve one aspect of the problem may create other problems. Proposals for solving problems cannot be verified in advance but only from practice by implementing and testing them along the way.
Since governance is a complex, ‘wicked problem’, it is impossible to know at the outset how best to configure Mina Protocol’s governance processes to optimize their efficacy and alignment. We conclude by explaining our experimental and incremental proposal so that Mina’s community can iteratively add, test and improve governance processes based on real world learning.
Imagine harnessing the cognitive power of a large number of individuals to tackle society’s most pressing challenges. This is the essence of collective intelligence where groups of people are organized at scale to solve complex public problems in ways that often outperform individual people alone.
Collective Intelligence has roots in a long intellectual history. Ancient Greek philosophers argued that the expertise to govern a city was found not in exceptional individuals but in the community as a whole. Today, there are many societal examples of collective intelligence, such as:
There is order in biology across levels of organization from cells to organs, organisms and even societies. Each level solves its own type of problem whether metabolic, physiological, anatomical, behavioral or societal. One finding is that collective intelligence features across these scales of organization since evolution has re-used similar processes to solve these different types of problems. Consequently, collective intelligence spans a range of disciplines, including biology, computer science, ecology, organizational psychology, political science and sociology.
Towards one end of this range is the study of brains that can provide insights about how to organize a collection of unintelligent neuronal subunits into an intelligent collective. Specific communication and functional links are needed to connect decision making subunits in ways that can be updated based on real world experience and learning. Subunits act on local information based on feedback and rewards, and their behavior is sensitive to the behavior of other subunits closeby.