Grassroots Federation: Fair Democratic Governance at Scale
This work addresses the challenge of fair governance in large-scale decentralized digital communities, which is critical for democratic participation at scale.
The paper proposes a framework for fair democratic governance of dynamically evolving federated digital communities, ensuring persistent and eventual proportional representation despite structural changes like joining and splitting. It extends static fairness properties to dynamic settings, reconciling integral seat allocations with overlapping federations.
We propose a framework for the fair democratic governance of federated digital communities that form and evolve dynamically, where small groups self-govern and larger groups are represented by assemblies selected via sortition. Prior work addressed static fairness conditions; here, we formalize a dynamic setting where federations evolve over time through communities forming, joining, and splitting, in all directions -- bottom-up, top-down, and middle-out -- and adapt the fairness guarantees. The main technical challenge is reconciling integral seat allocations with dynamic, overlapping federations, so that child communities always meet their persistent floors while long-run averages converge to proportional fairness. Overcoming these challenges, we introduce a protocol that ensures fair participation and representation both persistently (at all times) and eventually (in the limit after stabilization), extending the static fairness properties to handle structural changes. Prior work shows how grassroots federations can be specified via atomic transactions among assembly members, Constitutional Consensus can realize these transactions and the democratic processes leading to them, and Constitutional Governance in Metric Spaces lets a community govern itself and amend its own constitution. Together, these works form a comprehensive design for an egalitarian, fairly governed, large-scale decentralized sovereign digital community platform.