Ultimate frisbee, Net Generation and alternative forms of governance

Hokay
So as part of my never ending ultimate frisbee political endeavors I have been part of an ongoing discussion about the future of the sport in Israel (as board member of Flow -Israeli Flying Disc Association). Part of my ongoing struggle is transforming the way the sport here is played and viewed by its own participants. I wont delve into that too much just to say that one emerging theme has been that of how the sport is governed. For those unfamiliar with the sport (shame on you!) one of the main cornerstones around which proponents focus is Spirit Of The Game - which basically means that people take it upon themselves to treat each other fairly and respectfully and thus the rules are built around self refereeing. This has created a sort of "outcast" or "alternative" feel to the community. So when governance is talked about there is always the conflict between the "power to the people" crowd who don't want structure and want to leave the players responsible for everything - and the classic hierarchical structures that most of us (yours truly amongst them) feel are critical for advancing forward.
So...well I have started to think and look around and see what other forms of governance are available apart from classical delegative hierarchical democracy.
Thinking about the current trends in the business arena, especially the internet and new media one starts to think how the principles of coopetition and distributed co creation could impact how we do things here. Most of the material that I have come across deal either with commercial coopetition in which business entities have a vested interest in gaining traction for new technology, breaking some R&D barrier or pushing standards. In these cases they usually create a consortium or NPO or even a JV and usually declare their IPR to others, reveal some of their future plans and so on. Other instances of non classical structures often occur in international relations context (like the UN, EPI and others) some interesting thoughts on this type of interaction can be found here. In these instances national entities (which are hierarchical in and of themselves) interact as peers to try and govern hypernational issues.
Another interesting example is TakingItGlobal - a youth founded and centred NPO that encourages youth participation in political, social and environmental issues. TIG works through education programs created by its members in cooperation with partner organizations and has a heavy emphasis on web based participation.
It would seem that most of these forms of peer cooperation examples put an emphasis on deliberative process as opposed to a bargaining one. That is - instead of a bunch of disparate entities bargaining over the outcome as viewed from their perspectives, deliberation requires that prior to decision making the problems are well understood and articulated and clear metrics for the success of the process are put forth and agreed upon by the parties. This is in line with current thought regarding win/win or integrative negotiations as opposed to distributive negotiations.
What can be learned? Well it seems that no one has come up with a complete alternative to some sort of power delegation. This might have to do with the fact that deliberative processes are by their nature long. They lend themselves to important non urgent issues but fail with urgent matters need to be dealt with (think "in battle" or "in game" situations).

I would argue that the advent of connectivity and IT has not really changed the basic premise of governance - sometimes a decision needs to be made quickly and this means that very few people can be involved. Technology will however narrow the gap of applicable situations for using collaborative processes. Employing technologies like web polls, wiki's, forums and such will allow us to manage the collaboration across a wide audience and with shorter cycle times. Take a look at what the UPA is doing with the Ultimate Revolution - a strategic planning process with a heavy emphasis on member participation based on web enabled forums and data collections, as well as conventional meetings. The process chart lets you see how they have chosen to mix traditional with new.
So can we manage things differently? I believe there is much room for inclusion of new approaches into current thinking and mitigate some of the principal-agent issues that classic governance suffers from.

This needs to be done with caution - not every aspect can be freely translated into these type of processes and some aspects will not stand much to gain. The most probable areas for incorporating collaboration are:

• Strategic planning
• Rule evolution
• Fund raising
• Event planning
• League moderation
• Knowledge base creation
• Community reach out

One caveat that needs to be dealt with is the loss of "experts". Many times in collaborative processes there is equal weight put on each contributor. This means that more often than not popular views get acknowledged rather than views based on hardcore expertise (this problem arises with search engines like Google that rank according to popularity...). The UPA took care of this by manually putting in various expert groups and or decision milestones where management will be involved. This works well for a strategic issue that deserves detailed attention and planning. If we want to move a step further and create many other semi self governed processes we will need to devise an expert ranking system that will moderate the process effectively while still allowing the man on the street to push change ahead.
I will try to followup on this issue with David Barkan - who has been consulting the UPA in their process (as well as being a long time player/coach/prophet and friend of Flow...)
MC