SoG Success Criteria

Only after recognizing that a unifying logical primitive, a Hoare Triple, is a grounding representation of scientific judgment can one see policy framing and governance practice as not just an art form, but also a scientific endeavor. It also marks a new era of Digital Transformation by actively applying Correct by Design methodology to not just engineer inanimate objects, but also use the same principles and tools to logically reason on ethical integrity. In a highly connected world, we should be allowed to adopt technologically sophisticated thinking tools to tackle the complexity created through systems driven by Big Data. However the data or causal relations of information must be associated with physical and social meaning, so that data could be relevant to governance.

As an emerging field of science SoG needs to be grounded and validated in the physical world and must be socially meaningful to people willing to use this theory. Data may be associated with physically observable parameters, such as timestamps and spatial markings, such as addresses and relative locations. To associate social meaning to data, one must engage with many socially relevant participants to agree on certain pieces of data. These are often called signed contracts. A signed contract often is dated and the integral date value is a timestamp. These increase the trustworthiness of the contract.

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

Symmetry breaking: Time flies like an arrow

It is time, the phenomenon that captures the unifying direction of causal relations, which breaks symmetry in our physical world. It breaks directional symmetry by forcing us into the future, never the past. Similarly, governance is about capturing opportunities in time and must use past data to inform future actions. The source of governing power comes from the advantages of having access to more relational data than the subjects being governed. Therefore, governance can be considered as a way of conscientiously exploiting information asymmetry. Without losing generality, it is defined in theoretical computing science as all data types are representable in ordered pairs, including “faulty” data or “failed experiments” are nothing but ordered pairs of data points, representable as Hoare Triples. According to Luo, computationally generated data could create novel and useful features in potential design spaces with high payoffs. Governments should innovate to explore policies in the most comprehensive design space that are practically reachable, to benefit the people, and therefore using a generic data representation such as Hoare Triple as the universal building block provides the efficacy of the design space representation.

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

For governmental purposes, one can see these basic data types as Logic Models that keep policy execution on track. Framing correct governance practices needs only one data type: the “ordered” relation. This singular data structure, graphically represented as arrows, an ordered pair of key-value data points, is a way to use discrete symbols to denote causal relations, a fundamental reason for the inevitable Digital Transformation. Arrows, ordered relations, and Hoare Triples are all scaffolded data structures that help humans and machines perceive time in logically computable terms. Only after causal hypotheses are given finite symbolic names in these logically represented formats, can correctness of prescribed policies become accountable, observable, and terminable in finite time. Governance is an intentional act, it must be encoded in data. There is an often ignored universal truth: all data encoding schemes can be absorbed into a set of ordering relations, as shown in diagrams composed of connected arrows. Executable programs of any kind, especially programs designed for public policy, are all made of nothing but arrows, because they are just causally bounded events over time.

Timestamping Hoare Triples with Blockchain

Time penetrates everywhere. Once a reliable time source is approved by many participants, complex workflow amongst these parties carries them across vast space. Blockchain should be used as the medium because it is an immutable ledger, being a permanent, indelible, and unalterable history of transactions. Since all blockchains must regularly package a “block” of mutual agreements in a fixed time interval, the process of packaging agreements makes blockchain both socially (many social agreements) and physically meaningful (each block denotes an increment of time).

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

Using Blockchain as a common ledger to share actionable code, often called a Smart Contract, both pre and postconditions of a Hoare Triple can be bound to socially agreeable physical time. In other words, a trusted timestamp system defines the temporal ordering of events. It allows “commands” or “contractualized action ” to be executed in a sequence that fulfills the functions of an arbitrary and complex workflow that must be met for agreements, all denoted by Blockchain. In the physical world, the sequential order to contract execution can be easily encoded in logical assertions bound in Pre-Conditions of other Commands. The required time to fulfill the command execution, such as payment due dates after product delivery, can be encoded in Post-Conditions. These time-bound logical statements are the essential programming constructs that make up the composition of modern workflow systems, often called the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. ERP’s most essential function is to ensure all enterprise actions across highly dispersed geographical locations follow programmatically-defined temporal ordering sequences. With Blockchains and Smart Contracts providing a trustworthy global clock (via timestamps and hashes) and custom-defined action-triggering conditions, many expensive ERP software solutions could be replaced by public computing services, sometimes referred to as the Web3 movement. Hoare Triple as the Open Format Governmental policies are codes, and codes should be represented in domain-independent and scale-free data structures such as Hoare Triples. The domain-independent and scale-free nature of the Hoare Triple provides a unifying data primitive to express and examine the process of policy construction and deconstruction, hence it is not fixated in narrow fields or physical scales. The same reasoning applies to business operations and even personal event management. Coupled with a trustworthy timestamping system, a time-bound Hoare Triple is an Open Format that constructs workflow for any application, regardless of domain and scale. Open Format is an important concept in the global Digital Transformation. The integrity of digitized governmental policies must be united in a logically invariant data type, allowing any policy to be computationally examined with computable correctness. Correct by Design provides a logical framework to connect causal structures and policy statements in a common data type that is not tied to any specific interest parties. This openness in format enables a unifying semantic realm to reason about policy consequences in one logical universe. We also encourage governmental agencies to contribute their practice in a scientific community by promoting the creation of an Open Format Repository across many government agencies, so that their governance experience can be shared and reused. This repository will catalog existing security-aware communication formats, curate these designed artifacts as Ricardian Contracts, and manage the evolutionary history of the curated content as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT). This blockchain-validated (timestamped) repository of data content composed of executable source code with textual descriptions would elevate public accessibility to the highest level possible, making Open Format knowledge reusable across application domains and shareable by various sovereignties and cultures.

Open Format for Everyone

Correct by Design enables the broadest and deepest possible interpretation of a common data format that synthesizes abstract rules with concrete results in world events administered by digitized government policies. This format should be accessible to every literate person, not just highly trained programmers. The combination of human-readable text with a specific set of executable contracts needs to have some form of technical certainty, which a Ricardian Contract fulfills. The Ricardian Contract was invented by Ian Grigg in 1996, which proposed generating a fixed-length number, called a hash code, to represent the unique composition of human readable text and machine executable contract by securing this contractual package with a hash code generating algorithm. Bitcoin uses these cryptographic codes to secure money transfer between users. Due to the uniqueness of the cryptographic key, hashes have multiple resistances to hacking, increasing the safety of the data format. The Ricardian Contract is also known as the Bowtie model because the diagram of the proposed data format looks like a bowtie.

Trustworthy and Economical Data Storage

Blockchain, as an immutable database, can be expensive to operate. It is particularly expensive to store and synchronize a large amount of data across many computers. It can serve as an economically viable notary service if it is coupled with local storage systems. As proposed in the following diagram, blockchain only needs to store the hash code of a Valid Contract, while the detailed data content of the Valid Contract can be stored in local file systems of participating parties. As long as the presented data content generates the same hash code, it can be considered valid. If any modification is made to the contact package, running through the same secure hash generating algorithm again, it will guarantee to generate a different number, notifying users that the data package has been tampered.

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

This public infrastructure, coupled with data and computing service packaging tools like microservices and microservice orchestration, provides a new breed of data services that allow citizens to own and operate data centers like large organizations. This creates a form of scale-free data sovereignty that originally was impossible. Tools such as the Personal Knowledge Container, created in Indonesia, were designed to demonstrate the feasibility of such an egalitarian data instrument.

Summary: An End-to-End Argument on SoG

It is popularly known that large-scale internet engineering follows a so-called Hourglass Model. To allow any organization to conduct self-governance in the Internet of Everything era, it is inevitable to ask what End-to-End argument can scale to cover everything. This is reflected in multiple concepts, workflow cycles, and operational models. The answer is an Hourglass Model with a common point of control. The causal cone of Past→Present→Future and the Ricardian Contract, being visually presented as a so-called Bowtie Model, both are presented in diagrams shaped like hourglasses. Also, the DevOps cycle is often drawn in the shape of a Möbius Strip, which also looks like an hourglass. These recurrences of hourglasses are not coincidences.

Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination

There is a reason that all these concepts, cycles, and models must have a common point of control. The action of control may only happen at “the present (time).” One does not “live in the past,” after all. “The present” is often short and locally small, dealing with a very large world of possibilities. Therefore, all decisions that have big impacts must condense from a significant amount of past events and expand to a wide range of future possibilities. That is why all system design patterns are eventually shaped like hourglasses. Some of them are oriented in different directions (horizontal vs. vertical), the general shape being wide on both ends and skinny in the middle. The widening and narrowing structure of an hourglass shows that data can be compressed and shaped asymmetrically. It is this asymmetry that gives utility to practical applications, and the practicality of data manipulation introduces accountable ways to deal with governance issues. It is also why the hourglass has been recognized as a geometrical pattern to show controllability in various literature. Interestingly enough, this shape also is a device that measures time.

Leverage Information Asymmetry for Self-Governance

We argue that information asymmetry exists in nature and cannot be avoided. But they can be technologically distributed by allowing more people a monopoly on their own information. By utilizing computing resources that many people of the world already privately own, individuals can obtain information in timely, accountable, and observable manners according to their interests. Alternatively, people could create information asymmetry based on their private data assets, thereby creating mutual dependency that reduces systems favoring people with more money or more computational knowledge. The people who can use the SoG are not just ones with powerful computers or high bandwidth network connections. SoG changes the power structure by helping more people know how data and causal structures can be used to create information asymmetry in their subjects of interest. Moreover, the successful ones must have timely, accountable, and observable instruments to process application specific data to adequately govern their own organizations. This is where a free and unbiased technical instrument must be created and adopted to enable correctness in governance. The creation of such a technical instrument is about pragmatic data engineering, not just theoretical science, which will not be discussed here.

SoG evolves with the technology of data manipulation

An automated process to identify causal entanglement of data over spacetime would be the ultimate crystal ball for governed outcomes. According to Han Feng, physicists such as Kofler and Zeilinger already explained the boundary of predictive powers in quantum physical terms. With new waves of the Internet of Things technologies and higher bandwidth communication infrastructures, the casual entanglement of data over spacetime still has many surprises. Because the Science of Governance is scale-free and domain-independent, abstract structures like the Logic Model, Ricardian Contract, and the Hoare Triple will continue to be employed in future scientific endeavors. Independent of the size of the organization, ordered pairs of instructions (Logic Model/Hoare Triple) are the necessary knowledge to enable self-governance that should be treasured by anyone who possesses private valuable data.