Opastopia

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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.

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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

Input

The input to opastopia is the same as with all societies: the whole human life in its richness, and all events occur and cause a need for the society to act and react in the situation where it happens to be.

Output

The output is threefold:

• An assessment about what should be done in the situation.
• A policy that aims to put the recommendations of the assessment into action.
• A policy that aims to promote the making and applying of open assessments in the society. (This can also be seen as an output of a separate, meta-level assessment.)

Rationale

Making open assessments to promote societal benefit

The tragedy of the commons is a situation where there is a general individual interest to exploit some common resource in such a way that the resource becomes overexploited and degrades. This causes harm to the society, and all individuals as well. The term was developed in an agricultural society where "commons", common farmlands, eroded because of too heavy pasture. Nowadays, the atmosphere is a commons where the individual interest to dump carbon dioxide overwhelms the carbon sink capacity of the atmosphere, thus causing harm to everyone in the form of climate change.

The tragedy of wolves is an opposite situation, where a common resource is underused (from the point of view of societal benefit) because of the fear of wolves eating cattle in the commons. The fear may be justified or imaginary, but nevertheless the individual interest of not using common resources leads to the dis-benefit to the society. The global economic depression that started in 2008 is a typical tragedy of wolves.

These examples show that there are situations where the individual interest and the societal interest are in conflict. It is clear that conflicting interests lead to a suboptimal division of resources. It is suboptimal from the point of view of both the individual and the society. The conclusion from this is that the society should actively identify and analyse these conflict situations, and seek solutions where the interest can be brought in line so that an individual has an interest to act to the benefit of the whole society.

Because the interest discrepancy is a major issue, open assessments should actively analyse situations with multiple decision-makers and their interests. These are called multi-player assessments, and they often have connections to the game theory. In open assessments, the players considered are often a) a random individual, and b) a public decision-making body. The public body (a municipality, a nation) should have real decision-making power related to the issue. In the assessment, it is assumed that the public body truly aims to benefit the society as a whole. (This assumption is needed because, unfortunately, there are examples where different parts of e.g. a municipality administration end up to the tragedy of commons among themselves. In some cases, it might be illuminating to make assessments where a part of public authority and the true societal interest are shown as separate players. The assessment could reveal discrepancies between these players.)

The conflict interest issue can also be viewed from the point of view of categorical imperative by Immanuel Kant. Kant says that an individual has the responsibility to act in a way that it is in line with societal interests. The practice has shown that not all individuals follow Kant's advice in their lives. Therefore, the society has the responsibility to change societal structures in the way that it makes it easier for an individual to fulfil the categorical imperative. Instead of putting all the moral responsibility to an individual, an opastopia changes the structures of the society in such a way that the selfish interests of an individual are in line with the moral norms of the society (and thus probably in line with the moral norms of the individual as well).

Promoting open assessments

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 assessment about what should be done in the situation.

For performing open assessments, see the main article: Open assessment.

A policy that aims to put the recommendations of the assessment into action.

This requires explicit commitment to the principles of open assessment, and a promise to utilise the results of assessments. Otherwise stakeholders do not participate and bring their information into the assessments.

A policy that aims to promote the making and applying of open assessments in the society.

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.