Sustainability is an information issue to be dealt with judicious use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), to break two informational-type of constraints, one logistical and one technological, towards meeting the daily operational requirements of the around 200 democracies that elected public officials run in most existing countries and states. The logistical constraint occurs because most humans live in the area of the world, in the Global South, where there is no easily accesible formal information on how to use public resources efficiently. They do not receive printed monthly billing, meaning that systemic poverty of The Global South can be traced down to a billing problem. More precisely: A massive global billing bottleneck is the root cause of most of the favela-urbanism poverty around the globe. In regards to the technological constraint, most humans are oblivious to the mechanism that would enable them to influence public decisions. Effective billing systems and influencing public decisions require the existence of postal services that are adequate for those tasks.

Equipped with a clearer view of what lies ahead, the network has also found that sustainability ultimately depends upon Best Democratic Practice; the application of the right techniques through the technological interface that some sectors, that is, some residents of successful countries use nowadays for exercising their democratic power. The correct use of this technological interface needs to be optimized, scaled up, and then systematized globally so that human society can streamline its collective intelligence and eliminate the constraints to sustainable development.

Although usually unbeknownst as best practice there, the only countries in which citizens employ Best Democratic Practice today are developed countries, which usually benefit from the existence of adequate postal services: precisely one of the key factors that makes them rich and developed. Once that sociotechnical platform becomes scaled up to the rest of the globe, such communication processes will allow the synergistic interaction between the constituent and legislative functions of the state, which in System of Systems parlance, is run by elected  officials through a Legislative System of Systems. Of course, rich countries are more advanced in this aspect than poor countries.

In practical terms, constituent-legislator communication, or the lack of it, is an issue that can create situations akin to the virtual representation scenario that brought about revolutionary acrimony two centuries ago between the British Empire and its American colonies. It´s also a matter of correcting the situation of representation without constituent-legislator communication in the Global South, and of some but not enough -and not systematic enough, communication between constituents and their legislators in developed countries.

Because constituents own the decisions made by their legislators, they should assume ownership by eliminating their technological constraints. Each constituent can do this by carrying out the sociotechnical task of articulating the conflict-relevant information he or she owns and communicating it to the relevant legislator through the teledemocratic infrastructure. From the Systems of Systems perspective, a national teledemocratic infrastructure consists of the complete infrastructure of a national postal service, including existing old post or royal roads, and the Internet, when those communication channels are used to communicate with legislators.

More on the Logistical Constraint: Adequate Postal Services

It's no coincidence that the Internet offers business advantages that have brought accelerated growth to the sector. Not so with postal services, which have been termed as slow and old-fashioned. Postal services of the Global South have suffered from indifference and inattention to the point that they have become inadequate to satisfy basic institutional needs, such as serving as a transport medium for municipal, utility, and housing-authority billing systems.

Because they are the weakest link in the supply chain for mobilizing local resources, the network has identified developing-country postal services as creators of the logistical constraints that have stymied most efforts that have been made to somehow deal with the shantytown and favela-slum issue of the Global South. The giant billing bottlenecks of the Global South come alive because without adequate postal services, households cannot receive monthly bills for the consumption of basic public services or to pay rent for social housing punctually. Without that information, they have no way of knowing how to control their use of services, nor can they compensate the service provider for the consumption of the service or pay the agreed price for subsidized housing. On the other hand, if beneficiaries are somehow aware of their obligations, the lack of economic and formal methods of communication -in the form of adequate postal services- makes it impractical to create and enforce sanctions for late or no payments.

At the end, the public-service customer and/or public-housing tenant can waste the service (leave lights on all day and night without concern, or not worry about faucet or other water leaks, et cetera, et cetera.) and live rent-free. Concurrently, the service provider does not maintain its infrastructure for lack of funds, whilst having to rely on subsidies to avoid becoming bankrupt due to lack of income, and the public housing administrating body cannot build enough public housing to meet the demand. The same goes for other local authorities that cannot bill for property and other taxes, and therefore, e.g. cannot offer police protection or develop or service the infrastructure, bringing the homeless closer and closer to jumping at the opportunity of invading public lands.

What is the real business of postal services? Contrary to popular belief, the strategic function of postal services is not the transport of letters and packages. Postal services are  suffering from marketing myopia because mostly unbeknownst to them, they are in the business of helping make democracy work. The condition affects Global South countries disproportionally as there are some postal-service-based requirements for human society to govern itself.

For example, good governance requires freedom of information -which postal services help institutionalize as a byproduct of the secrecy of posted mail. A self-governing society also requires a habitat with good public services and good public infrastructure plus sufficient affordable housing to meet the demand. These are costly propositions that must be billed effectively and formally and consequently, in spite of the widespread use of the Internet for billing purposes, postal services must offer a level of quality that is adequate for those tasks. Thus, adequate postal services are a basic ingredient for the emergent success of every democratic system.

From the industrial engineering point of view, a first requirement for any industrially underdeveloped nation seeking to become industrially developed is the hosting of adequate postal services.

So it is unfortunate that at the beginning of the 21st. Century, Global South postal services are inadequate for improving tax and other revenue that would help in the process of financing basic public services, and the upgrading of the nowadays crumbling public infrastructure, including the construction of affordable housing, and in general just stopping the whole favela-urbanism abomination of human civilization and human dignity.

As part of protracted efforts to obtain results, Global South governments and ODA donor countries have been following the reductionist script of the international development community, and have been providing blanket subsidies without end. So it is also unfortunate that those subsidies have had the unintended consequence of making the overall public-service and infrastructure sector a giant favela-urbanism incubator for mismanagement, systematic corruption, and emergent poverty while draining away or redirecting resources that are otherwise critical for health and educational concerns.

In that context, favela-urbanism poverty can be viewed as a measure of entropy caused by the dispersion and loss of ODA, but mainly local, resources as the lack of effective billing systems impedes the growth of the tax base and hinders the development of the whole national financial system. In general, the effect that lack of effective billing systems has upon the size of the tax base, and then on the favela-slum producing logic Professor Pieterse lays out in his UN-Habitat video, affects national fiscal and monetary policy and percolates through the whole national economy as the low investment and productivity, and low income typical of emergent economies.

The Oxford Dictionaries define entropy as lack of order or predictability, or a gradual decline into disorder, and The Global SoS Network has found that the quality of postal services, in turn, is related to a precise level of entropy in democracy. This looks like a coinciding set of results from using Physics PhD. Eliyahu M. Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC), and Management Guru Peter Drucker's views that if you can measure a variable and control it, you can manage it.

From the Complex Adaptive System of Systems (CASoS) perspective, the dramatic implication of this concurrence is that Global Poverty, conflict, etc. are attractors of democratic systems in which the agents of the systems -humans- cannot adapt or learn because they cannot use the right channels to resolve inter-agent conflict, so they descend towards the attractors. Another case in point is the faulty logistics interaction between the component of the SoS impeding the agents -again, humans- either from investing or from having sufficient income to maintain a certain standard of living. There is another attractor there: Emergent productivity is limited to a fraction of productivity in developed countries. A good example of this situation is Chile, an OECD country with an inadequate postal service. Despite having been recognized as a very well-managed country, Chile has a fraction of the labour productivity of European and other OECD countries. As if underlining the Chilean productivity gap, the Santiago Times, a local English-language news outlet has reported that between 2011 and 2018, the number of Chilean favela slums had doubled.

However, aside from its usefulness for conceptual learning, the whole attractor perspective could become a moot point because controlling and eliminating favela-urbanism poverty in the Global South calls for a strategic thrust that will generate a system reaction from which it cannot recover. Benchmarking and regulating the quality of Global South postal services will reduce entropy on one side. On the other side, the benchmarking act will be the key ingredient for breaking, that is, eliminating, the forementioned logistical constraint.

It was thus an auspicious beginning when the President of the Russian Federation, Mr. Vladimir Putin, decreed Russian Post a strategic enterprise: He triggered a powerful tectonic shift in the economic paradigm of the emerging world by realigning it and then ushering the entry of postal services into the realm of best practice for mobilizing the local resources required for the development and upkeeping of the built environment.

Mr. Putin´s visionary intervention is also aligning the tectonic motion of those sociocultural forces towards the creation of teledemocratic mailstreams, through which self-organized constituent work teams will streamline the approach to local, regional, national and global challenges as they determine the systematic and environment-friendly:

  Image: © Benetton Group S.p.A.; with Adequate Technology? caption by Globalsosnet

An Engineering Design Process for Placing the SDGs On Track,
and Under Budget

Further operations research The Global SoS Network has carried out indicates that the streamlining of collective intelligence, that is, systematic constituent-legislator communication, is Best Democratic Practice (BDP) because it helps create a solid sociotechnical platform for meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The sociotechnical platform is solid because it ensures broad public participation in decision making. By promoting strong institutions, BDP is intrinsically embedded within SDG 16. Thus it is to great avail that Inter-Parliamentary Union Secretary-General, Martin Chungong, said "Goal 16 is the powerhouse from which all other action will follow."

Operations research has, in turn, led to a CASoS Engineering Design Process with a Theory of Change that aligns the projected results of the teledemocratic processes that will emerge around the world, with appropriate entry-level targets of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Very importantly, the versatility of the network's Participatory Action Research (PAR) Technology Roadmap for Sustainability allows the use of the minimax principle as a viewfinder that will help identify which SDG Targets will:

• Break the technological constraint, in order to maximize the effect that the usual minimal yearly gains in agricultural and labour productivity will have on a) inducing sustainable economic growth on a global basis; and b) accelerating the overall process that will eradicate Global Poverty, and
• Break the logistical constraint, in order to minimize the cost of eradicating favela-slum urbanism in the Global South.

By pursuing the network's PAR Technology Roadmap for Sustainability, which contains a globlal PAR cycle, practically any underdeveloped or developed nation can leverage these short-term results towards placing all of the other SDGs on track by 2030 to be met at a fraction of the projected cost. In addition to a drastic reduction of waste of national and international funds, costs will be redirected so that there will be no need to meet SDG Target 17.2, which calls for developed countries to commit a minimum of 0.7 % of their GNP for Official Development Assistance. Instead, the main cost will likely be for the biggest affordable-housing and infrastructure construction project in history, which can be delivered through conventional -albeit greatly magnified, financing venues.

To the uninitiated, meeting the SDGs on time still looks like an untenable proposition. For example, temperature records were broken in the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. Furthermore, Dr. James Hansen, who is a Columbia University Adjunt Professor, and was NASA's top climate scientist, has stated that a tipping point was reached in April 2008. And although Dr. Hansen has managed to somehow modify his worrisome landmark, in some quarters the jury is still out as to whether the unprecedented continuous increase of global temperature constitutes the first manifestation of catastrophic climate change, or just a fluke.

Either way, it could be said that were BDP not to be given priority, it is highly likely that the SDGs will run the same luck as the Millennium Development Goals, which offered less than stellar results. Considering the stochastic underpinnings of human affairs, the eventual outcome could be the end of the capacity of the ecosphere to sustain human civilization as we know it.

MIT Professor Thomas Malone does state that in the end, we will probably make choices that save the Earth. This means that focusing the collective intelligence towards the meeting of habitat SDGs 13 and 14, should be given the highest priority. And considering that the UN weather agency found 2016 to be the hottest year ever -a record that was broken by a significant margin in 2023- the Affordable and Clean Energy-seeking SDG 7 should pioneer the way towards sustainability.

 

---

Influencing The Machinery of Government

The conceptual framework contained in this webpage helps visualize the diminishing returns of the the zero-sum-game mindset residing in traditional political processes, in which some people and social groups use personal points of view as weapons for clashes of opinion, and where they 'hunt' for legislative resource-allocating power. Such antagonism helps bring up yet another reason for viewing partisan politics a form of art, rather than a science, mainly because the results of political processes cannot usually be predicted with accuracy -probably excepting either of two doomsday scenarios: a) The Runaway Greenhouse Effect, or b) The stark realization of eventually having rocket and nuclear engineers bring forth Mutual Assured Destruction and its corollary, Nuclear Winter.

If the machinery of government is to deliver predictable results consistently, then starting from school-age, the national population should learn and know how to 'operate' it correctly, something that brings importance to know-what, know-why and know-who. Thus macroergonomically speaking, citizens should acquire tacit and explicit knowledge of the task at hand, as they meet the stress-releasing operational needs of the mechanisms that make the overall democratic system work in their behalf. There should be no doubt that there is work involved. Democracy is always a work in progress in need of tending, but the tending task is not being done by the citizens of the world. And although the task is intermittent, it is also eternal.

Consequently, by using teledemocratic collective-intelligence techniques, citizens can enhance and accelerate the natural adaptive capacity of the democratic system.

 

---

The Tools and the Method Required for Implementing
Best Democratic Practice

     In favor of streamlining the collective intelligence and place the SDGs on track in a cost effective way and on time, CASoS methods engineering prescribes that whenever constituents around the world identify a conflict that affects them, they would first self-organize. By employing their permanent role as stakeholders in voluntary ad-hoc participatory action research (PAR) for Best Democratic Practice (BDP) for resolving the conflict at hand, they would meet to deliberate with family members, friends, neighbours, co-workers or peers, or even with new acquaintances. It is at this time that AI comes in handy for insights into the problem at hand, and in spite of the scarily complicated, hi-tech and expensive-sounding names, the streamlining of collective intelligence is refreshingly simple, very convenient, and surprisingly economic.

 

Once constituents have formed an opinion on a subject, or agreed on a suggestion regarding constituent conflict, they would interact individually -in a formal way- with the legislative function of their Legislative System of Systems. To interact formally, they would use at least four tools to initiate a simple three-step communication method. The tools are:

 

a pen, a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a postage stamp.  

The method consists of writing periodic letters to the pertinent legislator, having them delivered, and obtaining feedback through each subsequent reply from the contacted legislator.

---

Some national and other legislatures, and a few NGOs, usually promote BDP under 'Write to Your Legislator' and 'Write to Your Member of Parliament' motifs. While social and political scientists may deal with the psychological aspects of the know-why and know-who, CASoS methods engineering and business-system analysis techniques are the way to go for the know-what and know-how of keeping the task simple, convenient and economic, while maintaining transparent communication between the contacting constituent, and the responding legislator. No one wants legislative offices flooded with handwritten and typed or printed constituent correspondence.

To a certain degree, and depending on variables such as intrinsic motivation, technical capacity and stress, it is likely that neither will constitents be interested in exercising their democratic power as a regular course of action if it involves any protocol, rite or complex password routine beyond writing and posting an undersigned letter to the pertinent legislator. Teledemocratic communication need not and should not contain any overt or hidden stressors for citizens because according to sociotechnical theory, the daily social and technical operational aspects of democracies need to be balanced and optimized. If there is any unbalance, then changes should be made to the technical system to obtain joint optimization between the social and technical aspects of the system. In other words, constituent-legislator communication has to be simple.

How can people and computers be connected so that -collectively- they can act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

By opening a conduit through which each constituent can channel and then release civic stress, the streamlining of collective intelligence creates teledemocratic communication processes that feature total social inclusion. With the proper arrangements, all adult cognizant -literate or illiterate- residents of a country or nation can influence, and ultimately establish, the outcome of public policy for the good of all stakeholders, and of the environment.  
Once constituents have established such processes, then the same constituents, now in their role as workers, will feel more empowered on the job, at work. This will translate into workers having more meaningful experiences when carrying out their tasks, thus having stronger feelings for participating in task improvement and task simplification activities. This will result in more horizontal organizations accompanied by more quality and productivity. From then on, increased trust in the objectives of management will cause the emergence of unity of purpose at work, the resulting boost in quality and productivity will also boost wages and eventually, the global standard of living.    

The Constraints to Sustainability...   ...get smaller each time a postal worker delivers a formal reply from a legislator to a constituent. "Constituents comprise the world's most powerful social groups, and teledemocratic techniques make self-organized but informal constituent work teams the most versatile social networks. Starting from the thresholds of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, constituents systematically consider AI-generated advice in order to form their own opinions, then communicate -to their legislators- their points of view and suggestions about best practices for resolving constituent conflict. When constituents carry out these activities, they spur technical progress towards optimizing symbiotic human-computer coevolution. Such coevolution will have a positive side effect: human intelligence amplification, IA, which will equip humans for better decision-making. With millions of constituents acting as agents and legislators as nodes of national neural networks, these teledemocratic activities gradually harmonize the sociotechnical ascent of society through the  Kardashev Scale of sustainable development. As a natural consequence, the AI-driven streamlining of collective intelligence evolves into participatory collaborative intelligence processes that, because of the adaptive capacity of the system (that is, the capacity of most constituents, of most legislators, and the adaptive capacity of most institutions), the processes become fine-tuned specifically for the Win-Win resolution of constituent conflict. The emergent result of such configuration, which Professor Malone calls superminds,  will beget unity of purpose from all cultural, economic, and environmental spheres of human activity whilst continuously helping generate small but continuous gains in productivity."  Image: © Trinidad & Tobago Postal Corporation.

Deducing that the logistics of transporting teledemocratic information require the existence of postal technology that is adequate for the task, the focused collective intelligence of constituents now creates nationwide teledemocratic mailstreams towards the legislatures. Subsequently,  legislators will use traditional parliamentarian procedures in order to resolve constituent conflict in the forums human society has designed for that specific undertaking.

Because it is the task of legislatures to allocate resources to the executive function of government, the deliberation of the much better informed perspectives will in effect result in the allocation of resources with much less or no adversariness at all. Improved constituent data will result in a more managerial and systematic approach, not the partisan mentality where the gain of one individual, group, or nation is perceived as a loss to another individual, group, or nation. It is not a devolution of responsibility, because citizens have always held it. Rather, it is the devolution of authority to constituents for the more efficient, and much more effective, resolution of conflict, meaning that the overall quality of public decision-making will improve systematically.

It is important to keep in mind that constituent conflict could represent any aspect of the civic domain:  from neighbour's squabbles over fences to unfilled potholes or tragic police interactions, to inadequate housing, or crime, education, corruption or troublesome traditions, medical care, wages or cost of living, inefficient public services of any kind, relationships between the facets of myriad social groups, or any environmental problem. Constituent conflict is essentially any civic life situation that causes stress to a citizen. Only when business managers note improved government efficiency and effectiveness will they become more motivated to invest in more technology for increased productivity and sustainability.

This would take the form of more efficient machinery and methods that will help make small gains in labour productivity and wellbeing. The complex-adaptive result is that improved government performance brings about improved incomes and improved quality of life as the standard of living improves, meaning that everyone involved, and the environment, win.

For the Global South, in addition to serving as a medium for constituent-legislator communication, adequate postal services allow for institutional focusing of adaptive capacity in order to address pressing social needs. As the expressed need for adequate postal services helps create a 'climate for change,' it serves as motivator for the rollout of municipal, utility and affordable housing billing systems wherever needed, which is in most countries at the beginning of the 21st century. The resulting income streams are key for the lupkeep of public infrastructure necessary for meeting social needs such as quality education and medical services, and for all-important trade.

The Internet is a very convenient venue for establishing teledemocratic processes. But until poor countries become affluent, the cost of each computer or cellular phone, in addition to installation costs (electric supply, fixed or cellular-line or Internet hook-up fees, modem, batteries, printing ink, etc.) plus monthly payments, maintenance, upgrading, training, and other hidden costs, must be compared to the cost of  a few stationery items and that of family mailboxes, which are usually made of low-cost sheetmetal. Home letterboxes only need a key and lock, require no periodic expenses, and practically never need maintenance.

Then there are psychological, legal, and various other issues, such as the matter of the lack of formality, deference of the public servant to citizens, and the perception that electronic SMS and e-mail billing systems just do not have the necessary etiquette. For example, if a family receives only electronic billing from utilities and tax authorities, the question could arise that if the matter is not important enough for the sender to take the trouble of printing a formal bill, then, Why should the payer feel that it is so important to pay up?

The key to sustainability could be in configuring Information and Communications Technology (ICT), postal services and the Internet, in a way that facilitates judicious use of artificial intelligence. When social groups such as constituents use AI-driven teledemocratic methods, then the collective intelligence has the capacity to regulate the activities of the Public Sector System in benefit of the common good, and of the environment, while helping to steadily increase the level of productivity.

---