Principles

The current way in which society is organised and facilitated presorts it’s ongoing development towards a future which, when we realise we have a choice, might not be the best fit for what we actually want. We increasingly keep each other busy with tasks and a siloed focus on topics that really do not address how to attend to our actual needs. Discipl attempts to articulate an architecture for any society that embraces technology for good in a sustainable way so it can be applied for any type of current and future society, not excluding the ones that for most people now seem impossible. It addresses the lack of a coherent vision of how a society as a whole, from local to global and apart from the values people in it decide to hold on together, can be facilitated optimally through looking at society in a systemic way. But Discipl can not include concepts that do not have to have a place in every of the possible types of society that embrace technology for good in a sustainable way. This is a wicked problem of coping with wicked problems we might not even know about yet.

Not surprisingly new approaches for innovation that look deeper into such a wicked problem before prematurely running into solutions came into being under the flag of Design Thinking. Approaches like LEAN UX, imagineering and ‘frame creation’ all share one big challenge: understanding wicked problems requires the understanding of the needs of each and every stakeholder that is possibly involved. What we automatically end up with is a simple core architecture for a society that just attends to any need of any person in it as a main organizing principle at any level. It turns out that a society that does just that through something we call “nonviolent collaboration” might even be realizable and works. However, conscious or unconscious bias may stand in our way. A known big such a bias which also seems the fundamental cause for most of the wicked problems in current societies globally is that of a persistent and self replicating pattern of increasing emphatic disconnection from each other resulting in increasing usage of control systems. A pattern which over a long time now even has gotten deeply ingrained in languages and cultures almost everywhere in the world. Without a focus to overcome this through enhancing emotional intelligence in people, any technological or judicial solution will render useless.

Discipl integrates all the needs and as such it also integrates all of currently existing societies that are willing to embrace technology for good in a sustainable way, with all the agreements (laws) that are already there. The scope and focus of Discipl however lowers the threshold and adds the ability to shift into different tracks towards any (preferable) alternative that now may seem naive and utopian, because systems in society got us in a deep track that however seems to steer us unconsciously (Actor Network Theory) towards a future that might be one not of our choosing. At least, in this way, Discipl is better prepared to adopt a wider range of future changes we choose to make to society for solving wicked problems while the world around us is changing fast. With a strong focus on solving needs through techniques based on NVC we hope Discipl will result in people to get more aware of their own non controversial needs and that of others and that this will stimulate engaging with our differences, restoring the empathic connection between all people such that they can collaboratively make the choices solving all the wicked problems we now keep struggling with and as such steers us towards a society that works for all.

Discipl identifies an easy to remember set of main principles out of which the architecture unfolds. These principles are:

• Attend to all needs : we engage with everything by focusing on the non controversial needs of everyone involved and just attend to them in a way that works for all
• Nonviolent collaboration : we stimulate usage methods and tools for collaboration in which the empathic connectedness between people involved is restored and no control is needed beyond this
• Open free knowledge :  we stimulate publishing all non personal information as open free knowledge
• Anonymous transparency : we stimulate maximising the publishing of anonymous statistical information while minimising usage of personal data
• Sustainable Nature 2.0 : we stimulate embracing technology to automate all the things in autonomous systems in such way it is sustainable, unharmful for people and nature and really blends in.

We are currently working on a comparison of how all of this relates to the dutch constitution, NORA, UN SDG’s, NGL Community and more and will publish about that here.

With these high level principles, which replace the former Discipl Manifesto though it still is relevant, we are developing a discipl architecture and technology stack following a roadmap while engaging in multiple small projects in collaboration with both public as private organisations.