Human Rights Principles – IDRC
Independence
Recognize an individual’s right to independence
Individuals have a right to their independence, regardless of any agreement, contract, pact, belief system etc. they may be part of. An individual never surrenders their right to be independent and it is always a volitional choice they alone are free to make whether to be part of any accord that affects that right.
Dignity
Treat individuals with dignity
Individuals have a right to be treated with dignity. No matter what the situation, history, or context, one never surrenders that right.
Respect
Respect the views and wishes of individuals
Individuals have a right to their views and wishes being respected and being treated with civility.
Consent
Obtain an individual’s consent when one’s words and actions materially affect them
Individuals have a right to the expectation that others should obtain an individual’s consent if their words or actions materially affect them.
Power Management Principles
The fundamental concept of Social Science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept of Physics
Bertrand Russell
Problems
- Concentration of power
- Imbalance of power
- Deprivation of power
- Unlimited power
- Unaccountable power
- Unseen power
Solutions – ADLAC
- Abstract – Create structures to abstract various facets of power
- Diffuse – Spread power over structures
- Limit – Impose caps on how much power can be wielded
- Account – Disclose the means and exercise of power
- Collaborate – Create mechanisms that encourage sharing of power
Examples
- Government – United States
- Abstract – Created a Federated Constitutional Republic that depends on Representative Democracy to exercise power through the consent of those governed
- Diffuse – Created a separation of powers that diffused power through three branches, created a bicameral legislature to further diffuse power, and divided that legislature into a Senate with concentrated power (due to just two senators per state) and a House of Representatives that diffused power via number of representatives per population.
- Limit – The separation of powers limits how much power each branch can exercise. Laws and regulations also limit power.
- Account – A more recent development but laws written in order to make government accountable by ensuring the government discloses how it obtains power and how it exercises it.
- Collaborate – The legislative process allows government and its participants to collaborate in exercising power.
- Technology Networking
- Abstract – The addresses one uses to reach websites are actually an abstraction enabled by the Domain Naming System which converts domain names (FQDNs) into IP addresses that servers respond to. The abstraction goes even further in that responses for web servers are handled by sockets in order to allow for loads. All of these technologies are invisible to the end user.
- Diffuse – Those servers are often cloud instances that have load balancers in front of them in order to handle loads and failures.
- Limit – If servers are struck by someone executing a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), essentially a passel of bots attempting to overwhelm the servers, the server and devices in front of it limit the requests.
- Account – Most devices within a networking chain are monitored and have monitoring services that allow their actions to be accounted for as well as those who interact with them
- Collaborate – Networking is by definition a means of collaborating with others and exercising whatever power they possess