Opastopia

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<section begin=glossary /> Opastopia is an imaginary society that actively promotes and applies the open assessment method in its societal decision-making. The society has taken the role to actively remove hindrances preventing the use of open assessment, and also to study these hindrances. <section end=glossary />

Scope

What are the hindrances of applying open assessment as a general method in societal decision-making? What are the actions the society can take to remove these hindrances?

Definition

Rationale

The practical experience so far has brought up two major obstacles when open assessment has been suggested.

1. The audience does not believe that the making of open assessments could gain large enough popularity, and thus the potential benefits from the mass collaboration do not materialise.
2. The audience does not believe that the assessments performed could have such a large political impact on their own. Specifically, the possibly anarchist ideas selected by the assessments cannot be used as a basis of a policy that gets accepted and applied.

Result

Procedure

An opastopia must remove the hindrances of performing open assessments and of applying the selected policies. This can be done with the following policies:

• Those who participate in open assessments and bring up important new ideas should be explicitly and materially rewarded. The benefit of a social innovation is easily hundred times larger to the society than was the cost to the inventor. It is a good investment for the society to give a good reward to the inventor and thus stimulate social inventions.
  • There must be a way to evaluate the merit and importance of contributions in Opasnet.
  • There must be money in the budget of the society to pay rewards to contributors on a routine basis.
• The conclusions of the assessments should be actively developed into real policies. This is of course easier, if the assessments are originally designed to evaluate potential policy options. Then, the assessment itself gives answers to the question, how the problems assessed should be solved. One straightforward way for policy-making is to estimate external costs of activities, and then internalise these external costs by applying taxes (such as environmental protection taxes) that are as large as the external costs. When all the external costs are paid as taxes, the activity becomes a value-neutral issue to the society, and then it is the market forces that determine whether the activity prevails or not.
• An opastopia should actively promote the use of open assessment in international policy-making. In addition, it should offer the policies and practices developed to be further used and developed in other countries.
• An opastopia should have a research project that actively studies the performance of open assessments and policies developed based on them. The new information is used to develop better ways to utilise open assessment.

Management

An opastopia should have a foundation or an institute that takes care that open assessments are performed, that contributors get their rightful rewards, and that further research about open assessment is continuously performed. This organisation should provide Opasnet services in several languages in aim to expand its use to and in other societies.