The Incubator Model

The Incubator Model

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• The Next Stage in the Evolution of Political Organizations
• Clearing the Path for Grassroots Good Ideas
• Political Organizations: Common Failures and Fixes
• Organizational Models to End the Drought of Good Ideas in Outdated Political Organizations
• Let's Fill the State with Good Ideas

Let's Fill the State (EU) with Good Ideas

• Why?
• The more good ideas are in the system - the more secured our freedom.

The Ideal Flow of a Good Idea

The Real Flow of a Good Idea

What Every "Driver" Needs

• Keys - voters' trust. Without it the engine won't start.
• Fuel - funding. The best idea won't move a metre without it.
• Licence - a validated, executable idea. Most organisations are stuck here.
• More members in the car don't help - the car still doesn't move.
• This analogy has more layers - we will return to it.

Debug: Classic Political Organisation

• Ideas appointed from the top - cooptation over contribution
• Loyalty rewarded over merit
• Local branches as gatekeepers, not incubators
• Good ideas die in committees
• One entry point: join the queue and wait
• Fixed structure - no bodies or processes designed for growth

A Few Concepts Before We Continue

An Eclectic^* Approach

* Eclectic

from Greek eklektikos - selective

• Taking what works - wherever it comes from - for better outcomes
• Drawing from different fields without committing to any single one
• The opposite of ideological purity
• Here: management and organizational theory, Declaration of Human Rights, NLP, systems thinking, open-source culture, business incubators...
• ...and decades of IT consulting - delivering software that empowered end users across very different organizational models

A VUCA World

Bennis & Nanus, US Army War College, 1987

Our current answer: political organizations still running on the same statutes as in the 19th century!?

Dilts' Triangle

Robert Dilts, Logical Levels model, NLP - based on Gregory Bateson's work, 1990s

6 Sources of Power

Eric Liu, You're More Powerful Than You Think, 2017

• Physical force - coercion, violence
• Wealth - money and resources
• State action - law and institutions
• Social norms - culture, what people consider normal
• Ideas - the one any organisation can build without money or guns
• Numbers - mass mobilisation

11 Principles

Gary Hamel, What Matters Now, 2012

5 Principles of Democracy

V-Dem Institute — Varieties of Democracy

• Electoral - free and fair elections
• Liberal - protection of individual rights from power
• Egalitarian - equal access regardless of background
• Participatory - active civic engagement beyond voting
• Deliberative - reason-based public debate

How to Diagnose a Political Organization's Soul?

Diagnostic Questions (extracted)

Proposal

https://goodideaclub.org

Why?

• What you practice is what grows - virtue or vice
• VUCA - rigid structures fail under complexity
• Dilts - environment shapes everything
• 6 Sources of Power - ideas are the lever
• Hamel - design conditions for contribution
• 5 Principles of Democracy - deliberation, not just elections
• A redesign that can start now - no waiting room for elections
• Whatever we conclude - let's get good ideas validated and empowered on their way to the system - not leave them in a turned-off car

What Is an Incubator?

• The basic unit - power flows to proven ideas
• A protected environment for a fragile "egg"
• Voluntary, one problem - no limit on how many - this is the model for growth
• Open to anyone whose competence strengthens the idea
• For discovery, not execution - stay open to learn
• Built on trust - without it, ideas rarely survive

Why 'Incubator'?

• Biology - keeping conditions for an "egg" in its most delicate state
• Startups - space, mentorship, networks for fragile ideas to survive
• Brainstorms are brief - incubators turn them into lasting solutions
• Not a committee - committees don't carry the logic incubators are meant to support

Incubator Rankings

• A league table of incubators based on performance
• Top incubators shape campaign priorities
• Their most valued contributors become candidates

Rankings: What It Is Based On

decathlon-style score across four groups

• Voter Resonance - does it address problems voters recognize?
• Idea Stewardship - developed responsibly, through iteration and merit?
• Systemic Entry Readiness - can it carry ideas into institutions?
• Dead-End Signals - is it draining resources on an unviable path?
• Objective measures + peer and validator feedback - popularity alone cannot win
• The book includes a draft ranking handbook - the internal document that will formally regulate this

Rankings: Why It Is Necessary

• Power must not concentrate - rankings let it flow toward ideas that work
• Filters the field - weak incubators fade, strong ones become engines of trust
• Candidates earn their place through contribution, not co-optation
• The organization is always election-ready

Rankings vs. Opinion Snapshots

• Rankings replace opinion snapshots with developmental evidence
• Polls measure sentiment - rankings show which ideas proved themselves through work
• Parties ask voters what they want - incubators test ideas before campaign season
• Replaces guessing with organized exploration

Services: 3xM

Money - Membership - Messages

• Fundraising - accounts, donation tools, donor campaigns, reporting
• Membership - onboarding, contribution logs, incubator registry and ranking
• Visibility - building trust through events, media, participatory formats; writing, design, multimedia for incubator ideas

Services: Operations

• Logistics - equipment, venues, software, shared tools
• Legal - central expertise and a public knowledge base
• Coordination - launching incubators, connecting people, guarding values, mediating conflicts

From Idea to Law

• Idea
• → Incubator - research, design, validation
• → Programme - published and transparent
• → Candidate - the hero of the topic
• → Institution
• → Law

The Ideal Flow of a Good Idea

Multidisciplinary from Day One

Why Multidisciplinary?

• Every real problem crosses disciplines (VUCA)
• A consilium at the start, not at the end - specialists together from day one, not after failure
• Experts and lived experience side by side - expertise is not replaced, it is complemented
• Named after the goal, not the profession - "Emergency Response Within 8 Minutes", not "Health Policy Committee"
• Problems, not ideology - VUCA challenges do not fit 19th-century left and right categories

Software Enforcement

• Rules enforced by software, not goodwill - harder to bypass
• Every output checked against a human rights framework
• AI flags potential violations - humans decide
• A good idea cannot become a bad decision just because it was popular

Proof: Open Source

• Linux was built by thousands, with no boss and no hierarchy
• Meritocracy, openness, contribution visible to all
• If it works for an operating system, it works for a political programme

Serbia: Grassroots Energy

claims from the book - proved in practice

• Citizens showed they can change the political scene
• Classic organisations failed to convert that energy into results
• Full opposition political organizations were wiped out - none in Parliament
• This raises the question of organisational architecture

The Movement Was Already Living These Principles

claims from the book - proved in practice

New Environment, New Results

claims from the book - proved in practice

• Students didn't enter old organisations - the environment couldn't grow anything new
• They changed the base of the triangle: a completely different form of association
• New environment → new behaviours → new capabilities → new values
• The model wasn't designed - people arrived at it instinctively

Classic vs Incubator (1/2)

Classic vs Incubator (2/2)

What Volt Can Do?

• Diagnose honestly - the answers will surprise
• Put incubators into the statute - redesign bodies and processes, as soon as possible
• Meanwhile practice incubator - begin now
• Build services before scaling - or they burn out
• Write rules before power arrives
• Work with early adopters, not laggards
• What you train is what grows

Why Volt Can Do It?

• The seeds already exist - European Communities are already almost incubators
• Volt is asking for this itself - Shine 29 calls for exactly this process
• Services are already being built - Volt Academy, open-source voting, comms office
• Problems over ideology - bold, pragmatic, evidence-based; the same shift the book proposes
• A culture that experiments - DreamComTrue, ECHO; already doing the hardest part

Freedom is humanity's greatest idea.

We reach that greatest idea by cultivating many good ones.

When goodness is not organized, malicious organizations rise to power.

Your Choice Is?