Symbiotic Democracy - Government sets Standards & Infrastructure

If central government plays standards-setter and infrastructure steward (not owner), you can get the best of decentralization and coherence—so communities interoperate and LLMs/SLMs can reason over them safely.

Here’s a crisp blueprint.

Vision

Create a National Community Information Architecture (NCIA): open schemas, registries, and APIs that describe communities, sub-communities, people, roles, resources, decisions, and contributions. Government supplies the protocols and pipes; communities keep the power and content. LLMs/SLMs plug into this fabric with strong provenance, consent, and safety.

What central government provides (and governs with communities)

  1. Open Community Schema (OCS)

    • JSON-LD/Schema.org–aligned models for: Community, SubCommunity, Member, Role, Proposal, Decision, Charter, Resource, Event, Dispute, Treasury, Transaction, Contribution, BrandEngagement.

    • Required fields for LLMs: canonical IDs/URIs, timestamps, status, jurisdiction, privacy class, provenance, consensus type, confidence score.

  2. Community Registry & Namespace

    • A public directory issuing persistent IDs (e.g., ocn://sports/cycling/road/fixed-gear/night-riders-london).

    • Hierarchical IA you can traverse: main groups → subgroups → niches (infinite depth).

    • Versioning & deprecation rules so models evolve without breaking downstream apps.

  3. Community Knowledge Graph (CKG)

    • A national, open knowledge graph that links entities across domains.

    • Dual access: GraphQL/REST for apps; SPARQL for graph queries; vector search for retrieval-augmented LLMs.

  4. Governance Protocols (human + machine readable)

    • Standard states & flows: Proposal → Deliberation → Vote → Decision → Policy.

    • Conflict-resolution schema (mediation → restorative panel → binding arbitration).

    • Liquid democracy and delegation represented as edges the AI can follow.

  5. Consent, Privacy & Data Rights

    • Verifiable Credentials (DID/VC) for identity, roles, and skills.

    • ODRL-style machine-readable licenses on every object (who may use what, for which purposes).

    • Aggregation rules for psychographic insights (community-level only by default).

  6. LLM/SLM Readiness Standard

    • Content chunking, metadata, doc types, embeddings policy, source fingerprints, retrieval contracts.

    • Provenance headers (signatures, hash chains) to prevent hallucinated citations.

    • “Constitution files” for each community: values, red lines, moderation norms → fed directly into model guardrails.

  7. Model Access Layer

    • MCP-style connectors so any agent/model can: list communities, fetch charters/decisions, submit proposals, check votes—subject to permissions.

    • Rate limits, abuse detection, red-team endpoints, audit logs.

  8. Reference Implementations (open source)

    • CommunityOS SDK (TypeScript/Python) + UI kit for registries, proposals, voting, treasuries, ledgers.

    • Civic Co-Pilot: a government-hosted assistant that answers “what’s the rule here?”, “how do I propose X?”, “who maintains Y?”—grounded only in the CKG.

  9. Funding & Incentives

    • Schema adoption grants; procurement preference for OCS-compliant communities; tax credits for publishing open decisions/metrics.

    • Community Data Co-op rules so licensing revenue flows back to members.

How communities plug in (without losing autonomy)

  • Keep their own tools (Discord/Notion/DAO stack). A lightweight Publisher syncs their objects to OCS, adds IDs, provenance, and access policies.

  • They inherit parent taxonomy but can add local facets (infinite niche granularity) via namespaced properties (e.g., health:nutrition:diets:keto→athletes→vegan-keto).

  • They choose decision methods; the state machine is standard, not the politics.

Minimal example (OCS, JSON-LD)

{
  "@context": ["https://schema.org", "https://data.ncianet.gov/ocs/v1"],
  "@type": "Community",
  "@id": "ocn://sports/cycling/road/fixed-gear/night-riders-london",
  "name": "Night Riders London",
  "parent": "ocn://sports/cycling/road/fixed-gear",
  "jurisdiction": "GB-LND",
  "charter": "ipfs://bafy...charter",
  "governanceModel": {
    "decisionFlow": "proposal>deliberation>vote>decision",
    "votingMethod": "supermajority_66",
    "delegation": true
  },
  "privacyClass": "P2-public-aggregated",
  "provenance": {"publisher": "did:gov:uk:NCIA", "signature": "0xabc..."},
  "metrics": {"members": 842, "lastDecision": "2025-08-01T20:11Z"}
}

Operating model inside central government

  • National Information Architecture Office (NIAO): runs schema registry, CKG, and connectors.

  • Community Schema Council: rotating seats (civil society, tech, local gov, communities) sign off changes via an open RFC process.

  • Ethics & Safety Board: audits model behavior against community constitutions and equalities law.

  • Open Standards Charter: everything royalty-free; public test suites; conformance badges.

Rollout plan (fast but safe)

  1. 90 days: publish OCS v0.9, bootstrap registry, ship CommunityOS SDK, launch 3 pilots (e.g., Cycling, Nutrition, Local Food).

  2. 6 months: add MCP connectors, provenance headers, vector/RAG endpoints, and the Civic Co-Pilot.

  3. 12 months: mandate OCS for public procurement involving “community engagement”; grant program for migration; start cross-domain ontology work.

  4. 24 months: evaluate, codify into a Statutory Open Community Data Standard; open evaluation suite for LLMs using the CKG.

Guardrails (to keep this from becoming centralised control)

  • Standards, not content: government hosts schemas/IDs, not conversations.

  • Local-first mirrors: communities keep authoritative copies; registry is a signed index.

  • Forkability: any group can mirror the registry and still resolve IDs.

  • Participatory change control: schema changes require deliberation periods and public reasoning.

Why LLMs/SLMs thrive on this

  • Clean, consistent IA and schema → higher answer quality, fewer hallucinations.

  • Signed provenance + consent → trustworthy retrieval.

  • Clear decision/consensus states → models can explain the “why,” not just the “what.”

  • Rich hierarchies → precision for niches without losing discoverability at higher levels.

SD-Governance, Symbiotic DemocracyFrancesca Tabor