Grassroots Federation: Fair Democratic Governance at Scale

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic framework for fair democratic governance in federated digital communities, ensuring proportional representation and stability amid structural changes.

Contribution

It formalizes a novel protocol that maintains fairness in evolving federations, extending static fairness guarantees to dynamic, overlapping community structures.

Findings

Protocol guarantees persistent fairness and eventual proportionality.

Addresses integral seat allocation in dynamic federations.

Extends static fairness models to evolving community structures.

Abstract

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.