I Can't Believe It's Not Gov @itsnotgov@liberdon.com

I Can't Believe It's Not Government: Collecting stories of alternatives to The State, and cataloguing them by "Government Function".

Some examples:

* Kosher Certification: https://itsnotgov.org/regulation/food-safety/kosher-certification/
* Ambulance Fleet (and damn near *the* social safety net) in Pakistan: https://itsnotgov.org/emergency-services/emergency-medical/edhi-foundation-pakistan-ambulance-service/
* "Public Transit" in Nairobi: https://itsnotgov.org/infrastructure/public-transit/matatu-private-bus-nairobi/
* And MUCH more

The site is 100% Open Source, so you can contribute (and we'd love if you did!). It's not quite a wiki, so feel free to ask for help.

Check out this 2017 episode of Planet Money about how Feeding America solved a local knowledge problem with its own internal market. This may be interesting to leftists as well, as they needed special market rules to make sure the needs of the poor were met. There's a socialist in this story.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/09/11/565736836/episode-665-the-free-food-market

https://itsnotgov.org/social-services/affordable-meals/feeding-america/

Nobody tooting from #porcfest?

An interesting view of how industry intra-policing works and/or doesn't work:

https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status/1210203758174625792

Love the site but hate the design (other than the logo)?

https://gitlab.com/orblivion/itsnotgov

Always appreciate help with the site. (Just make a quick mockup first to make sure we're on the same page, to save your time.) Overall, I'd like to keep the design simple.

#Porcfest anyone?

Vigilantes fix potholes in Santa Cruz, California, in defiance of the government:

https://itsnotgov.org/infrastructure/roads/santa-cruz-vigilante-pothole-team/

Jaden Smith and friends respond to the continued need for clean water in Flint Michigan with a mobile water filtration system.

https://itsnotgov.org/infrastructure/water-utility/the-water-box/

Food suppliers and restaurants are committing to transitioning to cage-free for their eggs, in large part due to public pressure and consumer preference. Hellmann's mayo is already cage free.

https://itsnotgov.org/regulation/animal-welfare/cage-free-eggs/

American Dental Association Seal of Acceptance. You've seen it. It's a voluntary certification of dental products verified with laboratory tests. Since 1931.

https://t.co/GallQahxag

Could use some more bolstering (or criticism) of the points here. It's just hard because almost everything written about them is from the dental industry which they deeply involved with anyway. Not much in the order of historical documents out there.

Examine.com - Helping consumers of nutritional supplements make informed choices. They tell you what the nutrients actually do, with direct citations to the scientific literature. Big focus on neutrality: No ads, no partnerships, no investors.

https://itsnotgov.org/regulation/drug-safety/examine/

Good Housekeeping Research Institute - Pioneering product testing over 100 years ago.

https://itsnotgov.org/regulation/product-safety/good-housekeeping-research-institute/

Smart Contracts - Enforcing certain contracts programmatically, without the need for force (or even a trusted third party)

https://itsnotgov.org/legal-system/contract-enforcement/smart-contracts/

(Crypto ppl: this stuff is not my forte! Any corrections, suggestions for better examples, please let me know.)

Looking for examples of uses of #SmartContract as an alternative to state enforcement of contracts. I'm not very familiar with this space.

Lot's of digital governance stuff out there. Lots of _hypothetical_ things on how to transfer titles of physical objects. Best real world example I can think of is MakerDAO/Dai.

Anybody have better examples you could point me to?

The Internet Engineering Task Force - Developing TCP/IP and other underlying Internet protocols. Standards are voluntarily adopted by industry. Funded by government until 1998, but taken over by the Internet Society since then.

https://itsnotgov.org/regulation/standardization/internet-engineering-task-force/

Saved In America - A non-profit group that helps parents find missing children when the police don't consider it a high priority.

https://itsnotgov.org/emergency-services/missing-persons/saved-in-america/

Anybody on Liberdon at Liberty Forum?