Introduction
Transparent
Open
Neutral
Democratic
Organizations
Conclusion
Introduction
A TONDO is a new type of organization. For example instead “Idea INC”, which would be a corporation, the name of the organization would be “Idea TONDO”. (Note: In our model it is possible to have an organization that is both a TONDO and a INC, or a TONDO COOP, or a TONDO non-profit etc…)
A TONDO is used when you want to create an organization that effects the population at large. Whenever you have an idea that effects everyone in a population, then everyone should have a say in how that idea is organized within an organization. Therefore a TONDO by definition is required to be Transparent and open otherwise people will NOT be able to know about the idea that effects their lives, or will not be able to get involved for whatever reason. A TONDO is not allowed to have any barriers to entry. Of course it can have internal structure and organization for security, accountability, resiliency etc…
Sometimes something as simple as a label or group identifier, disempowers people within an organization. For example if you have a organization that is working on an idea that effects an entire population, and that organization has the name “Adult” in the organization name, then the membership of that organization may be against empowering Youth or younger people. Therefore names and purpose, not just membership, must be Neutral so all people feel comfortable engaging. By ensuring that the words used are neutral, individuals will not be pushed away even if they are invited into the membership. TONDOs build structural models to ensure that within the organization, everyones perspective is equal and supported, instead of being biased towards a specific label or ideology.
Of course if an idea is going to effect an entire population, the fair and most functional way to make decisions is using democracy. Many organizations say they want to “protect democracy”, but then the organization functions as a mini oligarchy or mini dictatorship. TONDOs are a form of organization that believes the ONLY way to have a functional democracy is to be build it with fully functional democratic organizations from the bottom up. A society full of organizations run as dictatorships, oligarchs, and elites with no accountability to the people, by definition have no power to build a social democracy of the people, that model is failing us. That is why TONDOs are so important, they are the building blocks that build a democratic society bottom up because every organization that supports the society will also be democratic. The democratic aspect of TONDOs is the most flexible, as there are endless variations of democratic decision making models, and only creativity holds us back.
In concept this model and idea may seem simple, but running any organization is a massive system of processes, and anyone who delves into the difficult work of building any organization, let alone a TONDO will need help. Help is available, as we have an infrastructure for supporting the creation of organizations. You can get organizational support (more info coming soon), or just start as a Sponsored Org through our Sponsorship / Cooperativeship Program. You can also contact us or support our work at www.A4R.net. For those who are ready to learn more, we are going to deep dive into many details of what makes a TONDO.
Transparent
Transparency is a core principle to transforming society. Transparency is the light against darkness. Private and Secrete organizations are the normal of our society, and are the darkness of where corruption brews. By keeping everything public and transparent you protect people involved, and ensure your organization is secure from external manipulation.
When focusing on making changes to society, there isn’t anything that should be private and secrete. It makes no sense that our elected representatives in a democracy have closed door meeting with corporate oligarchs to discuss decision making. The Peoples representatives should be transparent and every discussion should be recorded and available for public review and scrutiny. Closed door sessions to discuss the future of the people is ripe for corruption and abuse. Although there are always situations that call for redactions and protecting individual identities, that should be done on a case by case bases. The Peoples Legislatures should be run more like a public court room than a boys club for the rich.
Transparency is easy to achieve, just do communications public searchable platforms, and record everything and have it available publicly. This can easily be done with live streams for video and podcasts for audio. There are numbers benefits to having all recordings public and activly live stream and record all communications when addressing issues important to an entire population. The most direct benefit is that the discourse changes and gets much more professional. Individuals are less likely to say something nasty or irrelevant that they would say in private. This also helps save time and streamline meetings to stay focus and on topic. The only downside is that individuals tend to open up less about their personal ives and get less emotional. But with public policy, that is actually a good thing as we need to be focusing on everyone, not just ourselves.
Just because communications are public and transparent by default, does NOT mean that information can not be made public. It is just doenthe oposite way. In a normal private or secrte organization, information is Only public when there is agreement to take the information from private form to public form. This can take up 100’s if not 1,000s of hours of time to build agreement on making even simple information public. In a publicly transparent organization, anything can be made private, simply by making a decision to change it from private to public. Also by law all personal identifiable information is not legal to present publicly so that also creates a set of private information that all organizations have to deal with even if they are transparent on everything else.
Open
Being an open organization, means that there can be No Barrier to entry. That includes anything and everything that can be a barrier to involvement and engagement, as well as anything that can be a barrier to empowerment, and any barrier that we may not have even thought about yet that we realize in the future. Barriers can be physical, mental, emotional, or anything else. What is a barrier for one person may not be for an other, and vice versa. So the organization must be able to continually evolve and address their openness as the process of being an OPEN organization is NOT either yes or no, it is about constantly evolving for the times and needs of the population.
The first and most obvious barrier to almost every single organization that exists now, is money. Money can NOT be a physical barrier to entry, and more so, money can not be a mental barrier either. Someone may be able to physically Alford $1, but mentally it could be the thing that pushes them away.
Most organizations have a huge barrier to entry with membership. You simply have no power. In other words you never are truly included in the organization, and that is a closed organization. Most organizations never even consider distributing power, but most that do can have unlimited barriers and ladders to clime that are unobtainable for the vast majority of those who get involved. Most political organization are controlled vy very few people, and accountability is reserved to people with a specific party label, or other limitation or barrier to enemy. Typically many organization require years of volunteering, if not decaes, to gain power, and even so many people are passed up and never are empowered.
What is insane is that it really doesn’t matter what level you are on in the system, if when you are at the top, the structures are the same in our society within our organizations. Very few people have the vast majority of power, and there is little realistic accountability to hold them in check. So TONDOs do the opposite. We build organizations that are fully accountable to the people, and ensure the needs of the people are not just considered and ignored once every 4 years, but instead that there is an on-going non-stop relationship between the people directly in choosing our own fate. In essance decentralized democracy.
Neutral
Being neutral is essencial, as a social population has such a diverse group of people. As soon as you start using words that preference one group over an other, you create baises within the decision making and empowerment model. Lets jump into the example above. We want everyone to be able to get involved we all view points represented and protections and professional buffers for minorities and majorities alike.
Lets say the elderly lost more access to benefits and affordable medicine.The organization could be called “Restore Elderly Benefits Now!”. If you want to make an organization that is fighting for the rights of the elderly to get their benefits and have access to low cost medicine, that is comply fine, we will even support it to help be created. There is nothing wrong with the model and idea, it just isn’t a TONDO. Having the name and purpose to be focused on the “Elderly”, automatically creates a situation that could effect the dynamic and leadership of the organization. If you had two people running for a leadership position, and a vote was called, one person is in their 20’s and an other in their 70’s and say they want to represent the elderly, the group may be biased towards the person in their 70’s because tehy better represent the purpose of the organization. Again there is noting wrong with that, it is just not a TONDO.
Any organization that is not a TONDO can easily have a umbrella version that is a TONDO. For example if you create an organization that is about Healthcare Access and Medicine for ALL, then the name and purpose can easily be aligned neutrally for all people. You can still have a sub branch or group within the TONDO focused on elderly care, but that would NOT define the umbrella organization itself. A TONDO must be neutral to ensure that everyone feels comfortable not only getting involved, but to voice their own interests andconcerns. In this example the 20 year old could not only be on equal ground to run for leaderhsip against the 70year old,they also could voice their need to access for their health and their own needs, separate from the elderly. in a TONDO every individuals needs can be herd as equal to everyone else. The majority could choose to focus on the elderly anyways, but the voice and vote of the 20 year olds involvement would be protect in principal by the structure of the TONDO.
Democratic
Democracy, the most complicated part of a TONDO and 99% of organizations simply do NOT function democratically. Furthermore we define democracy as majority democracy to qualify as truly democratic. Even organizations that do function with open membership voting, typically take that away after the “director” becomes a dictator of the work. From there most organizations simply don’t apply any sort of democratic model that has any verifiable way to actually proove or test that it is functioning democratically. This tends to lead to one simple repeating theam in society, the louder and more masculine, the most successful. A truly democratic organization will be calm, collected, and every individual will feel herd and know that their point of view is being considered and addressed. Progress may be slow, and
Lets review minimal standards of what a democratic organization means. Then we can go to building a model that would be the most ideal.
We will break down democratic organization models into 3 categories for options and thresholds.
- Under
- Minimums
- Ideal
Most organizations that say they are democratic, which is rare already, function with a model that is under the minimum required threshold to be actually democratic. This is VERY dangerous because this educates people that simply by being “perceived” as democratic,that you are, even if you do NOT operate democratically. Most of these organization have a elite class of power and typically this is created through plurality, creates plutocracy, and I like to call it elitetocracy.
In that context if TONDOs are supported well, they will have a huge legal resource budget just like COOPs. If you say you are a coop to get sales of your products, but don’t operate cooperatively, the internal COOP association will sue you and go after your organization, as one organization that says they are a COOP but are not, brings down the credibility of all organizations. The same thing is true for democracy. We need a new calibration of democracy, as calling something democratic that is not, weakens the word. Most organizations, and even countries, simply are not democratic. There is NO such thing as a YES or NO question to democracy, it is a spectrum, but we are going to focus on the threshold.
So lets start by going into what a democratic organization looks like that is right under the threshold where they seem to operate democratically but are NOT actually democratic.
Under
Organizations
By definitions organizations are complicated and have many parts. The primary component of creating a functional organization in the context of a TONDO is accountability. The oposite of a organization with structural accountability is what we call a “hobby”. We use the term Hobby to describe a single person or friends that have complete 100% control of the activity and work they do. No one else has power because it is a personal individual power and control over their entire hobby. Therefore in our definition a dictatorship that has a entire country controlled by a single person, or a few people, which is accountable to no one, would be considered a Hobby as well under our definition. The same can be true with large corporations, like Google or Facebook, where the voting power of the shareholders is controlled by just 1-2 people. Again we define that as a hobby even though it effects milliions even billions of lives. TONDOs by definition must be structurally build with accountability as professional organizations that ensure the minimum number of people or organizational representatives with control always has less than 10%. Therefore you need a minimum of 11 people to initiate a functional TONDO. It is also possible to start a TONDO with a single person having more than 10% power, as long as it is clear in the structure and bylaws that their power above 10% can automatically be removed and they have no ability to prevent it because that would be a conflict of interest.
In order to
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