Bringing governance
innovation & power
literacy to the public
and its institutions

At the centre of our world is power – the capacity to influence others in order to materialise your will. As different desires stand in contrast to one another, struggles are a staple of human history. Those have led our species to rely on governance, or the architecture for power – that is, the norms, rules, protocols and institutions we use to make and enforce decisions, despite differences, and in the best case, enable societies perceived as just and prosperous.

It is redundant to state that societies have changed quickly and profoundly in recent years. We have all seen the exponential graphs describing how everything from population growth to emission rates is booming – in close correlation with technological advances. Yet, our governance structures have stayed remarkably intact. Whereas field after field of human activity has been impacted by digital technologies, no fundamental and agreed upon upgrades to the way we architect power have been made. Cross-pollination between the digital realm and governance design is long overdue.

FOGA was created for this reason: to bring innovation within governance to the forefront. We aim to ensure that the next chapter in the history of governance innovation can be less bloody and traumatic than the previous ones, where revolutions and wars mid-wifed many of the governance tools we rely on today.

FOGA’s role is that of a communicative link, between people with ideas and those well-positioned to advocate, prototype and implement them. FOGA, on the one hand, provides ideators with what they need: communication services, ways to package their innovations and give them reach. On the other hand, FOGA offers upskilling packages of ideas to actors within today's institutions. This includes orientating talks, workshops and advisory services.

Lastly, FOGA conducts original research in particularly promising or neglected areas where foresight and governance intersect.

The principle is simple: if you want to round up a thousand nails – or in this case, an array of insightful ideas – rather than picking them up one by one, it’s easier to use a magnet. FOGA is designed to be that magnet.

Upskilling

Tailored talks and workshops

FOGA offers bespoke educational experiences tailored to fit the needs of the specific organisation, conference or individual we work with. You can find a selection below, providing an overview of topics covered by FOGA's work.

Beyond a focus on emerging governance tools, FOGA highlights those already established. We place this emphasis on general power literacy as we recognise that a prerequisite for improving something is fully appreciating what is already in place and why it exists.

A selection of these talks and workshops are:

Crash Course on the 21st Century Tools for Control

This hypermodern Civics Studies 101 features no dates, leaders’ names or numbers of seats in whatever parliament. Instead, we walk through the core tools for governing people – mechanisms found worldwide, in small and big communities alike. The established staples are presented along with the emerging mechanisms of our dematerialised world order. Some of the latter are already pegged to be game-changers for how power is exerted, while others still fly under the radar of public discussion.

Whether you're an MP trying to grapple with the overwhelming responsibility of your role or a citizen who snoozed in civics class and woke up to a world you wanted to improve without knowing how, this exposé is a ticket to get into the empowered know. From prediction markets and radical exchanges to automated bureaucracies, distributed ledgers and predictive algorithms, this is the necessary starter kit for anyone looking to play a part in upgrading society.

Three Futures of Democracy – Surveillance States, the New East Indian Company, and a Prospect of Automated Self-Reliance

In this talk, we deep dive into the ongoing battle to preserve, expand or quench the idea that the governed should be able to influence what governance looks like. We explore three paths ahead. One where companies leverage their vast datasets to get in a position where they can predict others more than others can predict them back. We look at the ways this practice mimics, possibly even outcompetes, how asymmetries of violence have been used to support legal systems, markets and states to date. The second path explores surveillance states, focusing on China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia’s respective strategies. Including the trifecta of mass-surveillance big data harvesting, predictive algorithms and consolidated reputation scores. The third part of this talk looks at automated distributed production and the concept of opt-in jurisdictions.

LiberationTech and the Ephemeral Roadmap to Autonomy

Contrasting with the bleak landscape of daunting news and disasters, this talk describes a realist peer-2-peer based utopia, focused on how emerging technologies make previously unfathomable worlds possible. Focused not on the triumphant pleasures of the few, but on how social justice issues can be achieved with a new tool kit, we look at dignity robots, decentralised production and immersive experiences to propose a post-labour, post-suffering vision of the world. This talk is concrete, with calls to direct action, urging the global citizen to take steps moving us from consumers to producers, be it of food, physical and virtual things, or even the very metrics for success.

How to Rule Mars?

As the legal realities of space are being renegotiated, much is still uncertain regarding how settlements on other celestial bodies would be constituted. The clean slate this offers our imagination is the starting point for this workshop. Participants are encouraged to look at the full host of existing governance tools to structure the imagined future society in a manner so ideal it would feel livable to the participants themselves. We host this as a talk, workshop and – in the case of the dinner party – complete the experience with 3D-printed food and astro-aesthetics to match, an experience we developed with the musician Maria Niwa. The dinner party is suitable at the beginning of conferences or negotiations as a way to jump-start the level of bold creativity needed to tackle governance gridlocks and bring the participants back to the basic end goals of what our governance design is meant to deliver.

Get in contact!

Communication services

As ideators from every era could report, just because you have something important to share doesn't mean it will be understood or heard. So, if you are at a place where you have a concept, or perhaps a proof of concept, and want to scale it, FOGA offers a host of communicative services.

  • Branding crash courses
  • Graphics
  • Video creation
  • Speech writing
  • Editorial support
  • Web presence
  • Social media presence
  • SEO

Please note that FOGA’s services are not widely available. FOGA’s team assesses the ideas for feasibility and potential impact and only takes on clients deemed capable of taking those ideas forward.

Research

FOGA works with partners to conduct original research for new governance models and concrete applications of emerging governance tools. We prioritise projects based on neglectedness, assessed potential impact, and feasibility.

Cover of FOGA report The Paris Score

The Paris Score

Status: Whitepaper Completed

While binding agreements on a national level are generally backed by courts and the monopoly of violence, international agreements have significantly weaker enforcement mechanisms. Accountability often comes down to naming, shaming and acclaiming. Decades of insufficient action by civilisation to define issues like climate change and nuclear warfare demonstrate that this is nowhere near strong enough. FOGA has worked together with normative.io to remedy this by developing a new means of enforcement.

In this whitepaper, we use the Paris Agreement on climate change to show how a consolidated reputation system – built on transactional data analysis, just like in the FICO score and Chinese social credit systems – can be used to hold companies, states and municipalities accountable. We have the algorithms necessary to produce a score showcasing how well an entity is adapting to the carbon law and requirements of the agreement. The focus of the work, however, lies in how to use that score to control what all emitting companies need: continuous access to capital.

Cover of FOGA report Design Principles for Space Societies

Design Principles for Space Societies

Status: Study Ongoing

As private and public space initiatives indicate the 20s as the decade where our species will be multi-planetary – or at least get a base on the moon – the legal landscape of space is being renegotiated. The Outer Space Treaty, ratified by 109 countries, is still the agreement in effect. It states that celestial bodies outside of Earth are commons and that activities in space must be conducted in a way that benefits all humanity. To investigate what this could mean for actual settlements, FOGA’s cofounder Corin Ism has started to apply Elinor Ostrom's principles for the management of commons in Mars simulations. The first part of the study was completed in October 2019, when Ism lived in a simulation at Mount Everest in Nepal at 4,500 m. More simulations are scheduled for 2023.

Calls

Looking at the future of governance is no small topic. Beginning to change governance protocols is a larger order yet. As such, we are looking to partner and collaborate with actors who have competence and anchoring in many fields. We put more emphasis on culture, aesthetics and popular culture than is the norm among think- and do-tanks today: the reason being how much communication and entertainment have evolved in recent decades and how thought-leadership has emerged in previously unsuspected spaces. Currently, we are most interested in connecting with people and organisations falling into the following categories:

  • Governance ideators

As FOGA's core is supporting governance innovation, continuously learning from new ideators in the space will be one of our primary activities for years to come. Whether you work in legal innovation, you are a political scientist, or you have developed new frameworks for collaboration, we would love to know about your efforts.

  • Philanthropists

Philanthropists today move mountains and rearrange the landscape of trust as a result. Private efforts to improve society have earned a reputation of being threats to public governance. Efforts to strengthen public institutions are indeed not the most common. With the scale of threats humanity faces, however, all resources are needed, and each resourced actor's specific advantage must be leveraged. We want to connect with philanthropists who see the need to support upgrades in our shared governance structures and understand institutions as a feat of human collaboration too impressive to simply override or disregard.

  • Meme-maker extraordinaires

Memes have become a pleasant cornucopia of the 2010s. Their function as social glue is not to be understated. As such, FOGA is looking for meme curators and creators to carry forward the content FOGA will be releasing in the coming years through this powerful medium of storytelling.