by Jason Sorens

The Free State Project was founded on the idea that a critical mass of dedicated activists could wield political influence out of all proportion to their numbers, especially if they had good ideas that appealed to the interests and sympathies of the majority of the population. I made some attempts to quantify that influence through voter-activist ratios drawn from different but arguably comparable contexts. In the more recent study, I argued that attaining 1% of the local population constituted a critical mass.

Until now, however, we had no direct evidence about how many Free Staters would be needed to achieve political victories in New Hampshire. The recent New Hampshire presidential primary, coming now with well over 500 Free Staters in the state, affords us the first opportunity to examine our prospects with hard evidence. In this election, there was one reasonably libertarian presidential candidate running in a statewide race: Ron Paul. While not all Free Staters supported Ron Paul's candidacy, I think it is fair to say that he was far more popular among Free Staters than any other candidate, particularly before the newsletters revelations that broke on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

My method is to examine how the ratio of Free Staters to Republican primary voters in each town affected Ron Paul's percentage of the vote in those towns, by using regression analysis. This method vastly understates the true influence of Free Staters on the election, because it is unrealistic to assume that Free Staters' primary influence on the election was solely within their own towns. However, it is not possible to assess Free Staters' influences on the state as a whole directly. We can note that according to ronpaulgraphs.com, a higher percentage of the New Hampshire population has donated to Ron Paul than of any other state, and we can also note that Ron Paul's finish in New Hampshire, 8% of the vote, is double what he has consistently polled in the rest of the country. Notwithstanding these encouraging figures, we cannot know to what degree they are attributable to the efforts of Free Staters rather than to the state's pre-existing libertarian base.

Before reporting the results of the regression analysis, I should mention a few interesting town results. Among towns with a population above 500, Ron Paul's best results were in Richmond (35.5%), which he won, Wentworth (24.2%), and Grafton (23.2%). All three towns have some Free Staters; in fact, FSP participants represent 0.9% of the population of Grafton, close to the critical 1.0% mark. I think it's fair to say that if Ron Paul were perceived as having a shot at winning the nomination or even the state's primary, his numbers would have been higher in every town, because many New Hampshire voters who liked Paul appear to have voted tactically for another candidate (more on this below).

The main result from the regression analysis is that every additional Free Stater per 100 Republican primary voters resulted in approximately 2.5 percentage points improvement in Ron Paul's share of the vote in that town. Thus, in Grafton, Free Staters represented 4% of Republican primary voters (we don't know that they all voted, or voted Republican, or even supported Ron Paul, of course), and the model predicts that if no Free Staters lived in Grafton, Ron Paul would have gotten 13% of the vote, instead of 23% (23-0.4*2.5). The margin of error of the estimated "FSP effect" is about 1.0. What that means that we definitely know that Free Staters influenced the election beyond their own votes. If we assume that, say, 75% of Free Staters voted for Ron Paul, then the 2.5 figure means that the average Free Stater Ron Paul supporter brought along two and a half neighbors to support Ron Paul as well (2.5/0.75-0.75), and they definitely brought along at least one neighbor (1.5/0.75-0.75), and could have brought along as many as four (3.5/0.75-0.75). As I mentioned above, these are only the effects that Free Staters had in their own towns. (For technical details, see the end of this essay.)

I also looked at the effects of New Hampshire "Pioneers" on the Ron Paul vote. Pioneers are New Hampshire residents who sign up on our website stating that they support the goals of the Project. They are not counted in our Participants count because they didn't have to move. I find that the percentage of Pioneers in each town has a weaker effect on Ron Paul's vote share, about 1.6 instead of 2.5. One could draw the conclusion that Pioneers, freedom supporters who did not move into the state under the auspices of the Free State Project, were less effective activists in this election than Participants who either moved into the state or signed up for the FSP before we chose New Hampshire, but another possibility is that Pioneers were as a group less likely to support Ron Paul than were Participants.

The regression results yield some other interesting insights into why Paul lost the election. I find that average home value from the Census, percentage of the town's population that lives in an urban area, per capita income in the town, and seasonal vacancy rates (proxying importance of the tourism industry in the town) are all strongly negatively correlated with Ron Paul support. In other words, those parts of the state that are doing well economically did not support Ron Paul. Paul did better in poor, rural areas without a large tourism industry.

These results match up well with exit poll results that show that Paul did best among those with incomes under $30,000 and worst among those with incomes over $100,000, better among those without a college degree than college grads, and far better among those "very worried about the economy" than those with other opinions.

In other words, Paul appealed to voters who felt very economically insecure. It seems highly plausible that the reason for this was that New Hampshire voters perceived Paul as an economic isolationist, ready to shut down international trade and immigration. The idea that Paul is basically a Buchananite with libertarian rhetoric is a common perception (misperception?) among supporters of other candidates with whom I have had contact. Since New Hampshire is a dynamic, open state with an international seaport and a border with Canada, protectionism doesn't sell in New Hampshire - at least, not any longer. The wealthy and well-educated presumably viewed Paul's proposals for a border wall and withdrawal from the WTO and NAFTA with alarm, even though Paul insists that he supports unilateral free trade.

So one reason Ron Paul lost New Hampshire is that his noninterventionist rhetoric has at times painted him as an isolationist. He has failed to stress his support for a dynamic international economy. (For what it's worth, I personally disagree with his stances on immigration and international trade agreements.)

Another reason Paul lost was tactical voting. New Hampshire voters were far more likely to oppose the war and be angry at the Bush Administration than had been Iowa voters. But Paul did worse, because the exit polls show these voters going to McCain. 49% of voters with a "somewhat favorable" opinion of Paul voted for McCain, and only 3% for Paul himself! McCain, who says he is willing to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years, did far better among voters who oppose the Iraq war than among those who support it! Part of the reason for the results has to be simple voter ignorance, but part of it also has to do with the fact that the race was perceived as a battle among McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, and N.H. voters chose the candidate they thought most likely to change the Bush Administration's policies.

Finally, Ron Paul did worse than he might have otherwise because of the huge turnout. He actually received about 6,500 more votes in New Hampshire than in Iowa, and New Hampshire has fewer than half the eligible voters of Iowa! Had turnout in Iowa been at New Hampshire levels, I suspect Paul would have gotten less than 8% in Iowa, given that Ron Paul supporters are more passionate about their candidate than are supporters of other candidates (hence all the straw poll victories). One really can't directly compare results from caucuses, which have low turnout, to results from primaries, which have higher turnout.

In conclusion, the data show that Free Staters, most of whom have only moved to their location within the last year or two, have already begun to persuade their neighbors to vote for libertarian candidates. It will be interesting to see how their numbers affect the results when there is a statewide election involving a freedom-friendly candidate who actually has a chance of winning.

(Technical Appendix. Regressions are Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions with robust standard errors of Ron Paul's percentage of the vote on Free State Project Participants as a percentage of the Republican primary vote, rural population percentage from the Census, and the natural logarithm of median home value from the Census. Each town is an observation, and each observation was weighted by the total number of Republican primary votes from the town (i.e., bigger towns "count more" in the regression). A few towns had no votes for Ron Paul, creating a corner solution in the data. Tobit regression did not change the results appreciably. Adding all of the following control variables also did not change the results appreciably: farm population percentage, per capita income*, percentage of population on public assistance, seasonal vacancy rate*, other vacancy rate*, median rent, median real estate taxes, 2004 percentage of the vote for Craig Benson, and a dummy variable for college towns. [* Indicates statistically significant.] Adding Free State Pioneers as a percentage of the vote caused both "Free Stater variables" to lose statistical significance, marginally, because of high collinearity between the two, but the coefficient estimate on the FSP Participants variable remained stable.)

For Immediate Release

January 4, 2008

NEW VISION FOR FREE STATE PROJECT, TIPPING POINT FOR LIBERTARIANISM

Nashua, NH - The first day of presentations for the 2008 Liberty Forum covered several broad themes and brought together members, speakers and activists from across the country and across the world, with attendees coming from as far away as Hawaii and Australia.

At the opening ceremonies, FSP President Irena Goddard related her own family's story of escaping Communism and the parallels of her later journey as part of the Free State Project. She then announced "FSP 3.0" which will let members decide their own threshold for making the move, be it the election of a certain statist politician, the imposition of "universal health care", or the number of participants. "The goal is to refocus on the members themselves, who are really what drives the Project and its success." said Goddard.

This initiative was modeled on the successful "First 1000" project to commit 1000 members to move to New Hampshire by the end of 2008. So far, 508 members reside in New Hampshire. The new membership thresholds will be rolled out in January.

The opening ceremonies also featured Sharon Harris, of the Advocates for Self-Government, showing how Libertarianism is a "sticky" idea that is approaching its tipping point of mass adoption. She explained how liberty is a simple, profound, credible idea, the foundation for any widespread movement. The only facet it traditionally lacks, if only in tone, is the emotional impact and appeal. She pointed out that "people care about your ideas when you care about them."

Harris reminded the audience that all great progress in history has been the story of liberating humanity, be it ending feudalism or prohibition or the separating church and state. She said, "Libertarianism is the new anti-slavery movement. Be it warrantless searches, huge tax burdens, or undeclared wars, the people are yearning to be free. The future of western civilization depends upon you, let's move liberty forward."

The Liberty Forum continues until Sunday at the Crowne Plaza in Nashua. Full details are at http://www.freestateproject.org/libertyforum

###

This profile of the FSP's very own Evan Nappen appears in the August 2007 issue of BLADE Magazine! The article is not available on line, but the publisher has provided us with the magazine pages in PDF format.

For information on how to subscribe to BLADE, contact the magazine c/o F+W/Krause Publications 700 E. State St Iola, WI 54990-0001 877.485.6426 (toll free) www.blademag.com

Read Evan's first BLADE article about the FSP Porcupine Buck Knife. FSP Buck Knife There are still some knives left in the FSP Store!

NOTE: The opinions and commentary expressed in this essay are those of the author and are an exercise of free speech. They do not necessarily represent the views of Free State Project Inc., its Directors, its Officers, or its Participants.

1. Evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

The buzzword Web 2.0 refers to certain modern (as of the year 2004, when O'Reilly Media first coined the term) web technologies and applications that significantly change the way people use the web. The term is fuzzy but useful, as it describes a phenomenon that has broken out of the technology journals to make daily headlines in the business press. Where Web 1.0 (and Bubble 1.0) was all about unidirectional 1-to-N e-commerce, Web 2.0 is about bidirectional N-to-N sharing. Look at almost any commonly cited Web 2.0 site (e.g. Tim O'Reilly's examples of eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, Adsense, and Flickr), and in each case the user is an active contributor, not a passive consumer. Indeed, ordinary users are the only contributors—there is no central provision of content! To O'Reilly's list we could now add Youtube (a content-sharing site like Flickr, but for video), social networking sites (LinkedIn, MySpace, Classmates, Facebook, Friendster, Xing, Meetup, and Tagged), dating sites, project-worker-matching sites (Elance), journals and blogs (LiveJournal, Blogger), and, most recently, contribution sites (PledgeBank and Chipin). In all cases, the site provides only infrastructure—users publish the content.

Whereas the value (connections) of a traditional 1-to-N network rises linearly with N, the value of a network where everyone can publish to everyone else rises with N squared (the network effect). Web 2.0 changes not only the mathematics, but the roles of publisher and consumer. In Web 1.0 we celebrated the ability of "anyone" to publish, but the reality was that few people could. The Web 2.0 publishing process has been made so easy that truly anyone can be heard, if they can make their voice audible over the din. In Web 1.0 it was the publisher who benefited directly from an increased network, but today it is the consumer.

Effect of adding a member to a hierarchical network	Effect of adding a member to an peer-to-peer network

2. Features of Web 2.0 Sites

1. Users create the content (in fact, they may be the content)
2. Users create a personal profile that provides their identity to the community
3. Users benefit from improved interface technology, especially AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)

1. Intrinsic benefit: At eBay or a dating site, users post their wares (e.g. themselves)
2. Payment: Users may be paid for their content-publishing efforts, but it is a small minority of bloggers who collect money. Payment is rarely the first reason.
3. Social contact: Users enjoy the contact and camaraderie of participating in a community.
4. Reputation: Volunteers contribute content for the same reasons they contribute to charitable efforts in general—maybe altruistically without any expectation of immediate payoff, but in the hopes that their generous contributions will be noted and remembered by the community.

Key to the success of a Web 2.0 site is the personal profile. The profile is a sort of mini home page that represents the user in the community, displaying various times of information, e.g. demographics, interests, skills, and affiliations. Profiles allow users to associate into groups on the basis of interests or demographics of interest. If the profile clearly displays users’ contributions (e.g. donations or content like photographs, reviews, and forum posts), they will be more motivated to contribute.

3. Virtual Movement Shared Hosting

A virtual movement (VM) is a special type of virtual community (VC) in which the common interest is the accomplishment of some social or political objective. There are two ways for a virtual movement to take advantage of Web 2.0 technology: work within an existing site or make its own site.

VCs predate the web (e.g. Lotus Notes), and their basic features are familiar to everyone. Yahoo Groups is currently the most common place to form a quick VC; its menu is a guide to the essential VC features:

In a typical scenario, someone will create a new group (e.g. "People for the Ethical Treatment of Porcupines"), search for users with related interests (e.g. "animal-lovers"), and invite them to join. People join, engage in lively discussions, post their favorite photos, and maybe even arrange occasional meetings if enough members are located near the same city.

There are two advantages in creating a sub-community within a wider existing host community. First, the new community immediately inherits the technical infrastructure of the host. Second, the new community has a ready pool of potential members from which to recruit. For an infant organization this is all very important, and the larger the greater community the better.

VCs with any special needs (e.g. non-supported languages) quickly become frustrated by the limitations of the infrastructure, which is generally outside their ability to influence. The problem for a VM is, after discovering people of interest, forming links, and chatting, what next? Unless the greater community is growing rapidly, there are eventually no more new members to be recruited. The groups do not seem to *do* anything besides occasionally "meet up". The social networking (SN) web sites rarely offer functionality to support project coordination. This author must confess that he has accounts in most SN sites only because various friends have invited him to form links. More goal-oriented sites are now appearing, e.g. PledgeBank, ChipIn, and Facebook's new Cause function. However, the former two are narrow in focus, and better off as widgets placed on others' sites, while the latter is limited to non-profit US organizations with 501(c)(3) status. Eventually a successful VM will reach a point when it needs to host its own web site. It will almost certainly maintain representational outposts at each of the major SN sites, but the bulk of activity will shift to the internal site.

4 Virtual Movement Self-Hosting

As with all other software decisions, there are three options for creating one’s own VC: make, buy, and share. Starting from zero to make a full-featured VC with the extensive above-described functionality is a daunting task that few organizations would undertake. The required personnel, budget, and time to achieve it would be simply unfeasible. Most organizations would at least acquire the primary VC pieces (e.g. the discussion forum) and build on or integrate them. Commercial VC platforms exist, but they are generally purchased by mature organizations with financial means. Most VCs on the web are built on open-source software (OSS) that has two key features: it is free of charge, and developers are free to change and add to the code.

The most common VC platforms have been OSS discussion forums (a.k.a. bulletin boards), e.g. YaBB (now SMF). Discussion forums provide the bare VC essentials: personal profiles and message posting. Users can stretch the posting mechanism to contribute other forms of content (e.g. photos and event announcements), though these usually become quickly buried.

In parallel with the evolution of web-based discussion forums, there appeared on the scene open-source web content management systems (CMS). As web sites grew in size and number of contributors, tools became necessary to management them. CMS products store content in a database and provide several typical features:

• Role-based access control
• Workflow (author, edit, approve)
• Revision control
• Authoring tools for non-web-developers
• Attribution of content to the author
• Categorization via complex taxonomies
• Navigation and search
• Automatic generation of content, e.g. common headers, footers, and sidebars

Such features make a CMS ideal for the creation of a virtual library of articles or even books. Content is both easy to create and easy to find.

Modern web CMS products have evolved to provide additional features far beyond the basics:

• Generalized notion of “content” (e.g. article, discussion forum post, images, calendar events)
• Ability to completely change the look and feel via "themes" or "skins"
• Large number of contributors (with wikis being the extreme case)
• Multiple languages
• Robust site security
• RSS news feeds, both in and out
• API for modular extensions
• Large number of third-party modules providing a rich and unpredictable array of functionality
• Large distributed developer community

• distill best practices from multiple developers
• enable developers to build sites with less effort using ready-made components
• enable developers to focus on interesting new functionality, not the basic plumbing
• assure customers of a known product with future support
• increase a developer's motivation to share contributions
• increase the chance that a developer can re-use his knowledge on future projects with other teams

The above OSS features support failing intelligently. Failure can lead to success if you

1. Fail quickly (don’t waste time, and don’t delay admitting failure)
2. Learn from the experience
3. Salvage some of your work
4. Don’t give up

Even if a web project fails, the experience, tools, and custom code developed can be reused if this is planned for in advance. Failure is tragic when a large amount time, energy, and money are expended and the result is thrown away and forgotten.

5. Drupal

From the market’s many OSS CMS products emerge clear winners. Robust, full-featured, extensible, and elegant, these platforms represent the best of the best. As of this writing, one hears most often about three CMS products: Joomla, Plone, and Drupal. Joomla is known to be the easiest and prettiest out of the box, but it is harder to modify. Joomla is thus favored by novice web administrators, and is the most popular. Where Joomla is based on PHP, Plone runs on Zope and Python; it is highly respected, but even experienced programmers need some time to learn to develop on it. A good compromise between out-of-the box functionality and flexibility is Drupal. Like Joomla, it is based on PHP.

5.1 Drupal API

The well-built Drupal API contains a library of hundreds of functions. Unlike Joomla, Drupal allows modules to interact. For example, one can create an e-commerce item out of any content item ("node"), assign any node a date to create a calendar event, and assign any node a location to that can be found by geographic functions.

• Module system (Drupal hooks)
• Database abstraction layer
• Menu system
• Form generation
• File upload system
• Search system
• Node access system
• Theme system

5.2 Drupal Modules

Drupal has literally hundreds of modules. It would be impossible to list them all here, let alone describe them, but below are the number of modules in each category:

Drupal’s architects had no illusions that a CMS could possibly be fully ready out of the box, and be all things to all people. Drupal was thus designed to be easily extensible. In that it is often described not as a CMS, but a content management framework. Developers with unique needs are encouraged to package their extensions as a module, and contribute it to the Drupal community if it will be of interest to others.

• CCK and Views: these enable developers to create new content types and display them in lists.
• Taxonomy: allows content to be categorized by multiple hierarchies of terms ("taxonomies"), which can then be used in URLs to display related content.
• Organic Groups: enables the easy creation of groups of users with their own private content.
• Internationalization (i18n): Drupal offers modules for creating multi-language web sites, and this represents an area of active current development.
• RSS feeds: these can be generated from almost any mix of content, with not just one feed, but dozens for special interests.
• jQuery: Drupal comes with the JavaScript library jQuery, which on its home page is described as "a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages." jQuery is a boon to both novice and advanced programmers alike, shortening the learning curve of the former and providing a standard set of code for the latter.

Be sure to read the main Free State Match page for important information Simple & Sweet A simpler course of fire this time. No otherworldly scourges to take care of, just straight forward shooting. We'll use letter-sized targets downloaded from this page. Two categories (.22 rifle and pistol), and two runs (fast and slow) Have fun, be safe, and let's make the world unsafe for a certain few selected pieces of paper.

To register, go to the bottom of the merchandise page and choose the categories use wish to participate in, or send a check made out to Free State Project for the appropriate amount ($1 per category) to:
Free State Match
9613-C Harford Rd
Unit 223
Baltimore, MD 21234
(This is also the target submission address or scan and email them to pdenisch@freestateproject.org)
When submitting targets, include the following information on each target:
Name, email address, match number (this is #2), category number, and run name. If you would like to include what kind of PPD you used, how wide your smile was while firing, or a dirty limerick, please feel free.

• Slow Run
  • PPD*: .22 Rifle (iron sights)
  • Targets: BigBull, Wolf, and Silhoutte
  • Position: Any non-supported
  • Distance: 75 feet
  • Shots: 5 for each target
  • Time: 5 minutes

• Fast Run
  • PPD*: .22 Rifle (iron sights)
  • Target: BigBull, Wolf, and Silhoutte
  • Position: Any non-supported
  • Distance: 75 feet
  • Shots: 5 each target
  • Time: 5 seconds

1. Art Curtis (27)
2. Antone Blansett (25)
3. Alex Denisch (16)

• Slow Run
  • PPD*: Center-fire Pistol
  • Targets: BigBull, Wolf, and Silhoutte
  • Position: Any non-supported
  • Distance: 25 feet
  • Shots: 5 for each target
  • Time: 5 minutes

• Fast Run
  • PPD*: Center-fire Pistol
  • Target: BigBull, Wolf, and Silhoutte
  • Position: Any non-supported
  • Distance: 25 feet
  • Shots: 5 each target
  • Time: 5 seconds

1. Alex Denisch (21)
2. Art Curtis (21)

*PPD: Paper Perforation Device
IS: Iron Sights
O.M.:Honarable Mention
STB: Score to beat (my score, beating it will qualify you for a small, cheapy award :)

NOTE: The opinions and commentary expressed in this essay are those of the author and are an exercise of free speech. They do not necessarily represent the views of Free State Project Inc., its Directors, its Officers, or its Participants.

Abstract

In the universe of collective-action problems (CAPs), the Free State Project (FSP) can be categorized as a collective-migration problem (CMP). Comparing the FSP with similar problems and applying well-established theory leads to some suggestions for improving its structure and thus increasing its effectiveness. In this article we start with a brief overview of CAPs and their difficulties, and continue with a description of a special type: the CMP. Finally, we compare the current FSP structure with that suggested by theory, and recommend some changes.

We find that the FSP is subject to several classic CAP difficulties, and while it has adopted some common solutions, several remain under-utilized. The FSP remains too large, monolithic, and inflexible. The large population size has caused the FSP to suffer from both a lack of communications infrastructure and game-theoretic challenges. The FSP’s minimum participant criterion requires coordination among an unrealistically large number of people, and its one-size-fits-all Statement of Intent fails to address the varied needs of its community. Fortunately, a solution in the form of virtual community software can both facilitate communication and support an enhancement that can be implemented within the framework of the existing Statement of Intent. Enabling participants to set their own minimum commitment conditions will both better serve their individual needs and reduce the number of people requiring coordination among themselves.

1. Collective-Action Problems

1.1 Types of CAPs

When the members of a community share a goal that requires contributions from each of them, they are engaged in a collective-action problem (CAP). CAPs become interesting when it is both difficult to get contributions and difficult to exclude a member of the community from benefiting from the goal when it is achieved. Examples of these are public goods like streets that are clean, policed, and well-lit. All members of the community benefit, so we expect them all to refrain from littering and to contribute to the costs of lighting and police protection. Another example of a public good is charity: when one person makes a donation, the entire community shares in the positive feeling that the cause is being supported, so we expect that each donate according to his abilities.

An easier type of CAP is a coordination problem, where the community members do not have to contribute so much as make a common decision. For example, London clubbers might not really care which club they visit, just that it be one where enough of the right sort of clubbers are. This is actually a combination of contribution and coordination, because a good time requires a minimum number of total participants, who then must all agree on the place to go. Each clubber will have his or her own preferences, e.g. on a Monday night, when the clubs are near empty, less dedicated clubbers may prefer to go to the movies.

A third type of CAP made possible by the Internet is the mass-collaboration project, in which the contributors are distributed geographically, even globally, and may never even meet in person. Famous examples of mass-collaboration projects are open-source software like Linux, and wiki-based products like Wikipedia. While the contributors all share one overall goal, they may have slightly different visions and preferences that require compromise. They all work within the project framework in order to achieve group success.

1.2 CAP Challenges and Solutions

The more participants involved in a CAP, the more difficult it becomes to solve. This results from two factors: communications costs and free riders. The number of pairwise communications paths increases with the square of the number of participants, requiring communication and coordination infrastructure whose costs may outstrip available resources. This can be solved over time, as improving technology tends to lower communications barriers, permitting more sophisticated coordination among ever greater numbers of people distributed ever more widely. The free-rider problem appears when some members of the community find that they can reap the benefits of the project without contributing their share. The larger the community, the greater the difficulty in tracking contributions, and the less likely a community member feels a sense of ownership and obligation (a phenomenon that psychologists call "diffusion of responsibility"). Furthermore, if a community member senses that the project is more important to others than to him, he may “hold out” and try to gain more and contribute less.

Solutions to the free-rider problem include the two extremes of acceptance (that some people will not contribute their “fair” share) and coercion (usually by a government), and several more creative approaches in between. If a CAP is stuck, the following solutions may get it moving:

Form a coordination agency

CAPs may start out as being self-organizing, with each individual acting on his own and communicating directly or indirectly with other community members. For example, elderly people who prefer to live in a calm area without crime or children may slowly gravitate to a neighborhood that is close to a hospital but far from schools. As the area develops a retiree-friendly reputation, more elderly people will move there. The process would be accelerated were an entrepreneur to open a retirement home in the center of the neighborhood. The American Association for Retired People(AARP) performs a similar coordination role for pursuing the gray population’s political interests on state and national scales. Such a coordination agency thus becomes a secondary CAP that requires its own contributions. The AARP solicits membership dues (which confer some modest privileges) and then pays a staff. The AARP’s younger paid workers may not even agree with the AARP’s agenda.

Collect pledges

If a minimum number of contributors is required to make a CAP feasible, the CAP can be approached in two or three phases. In the first phase, the coordination agency asks community members to make a public commitment to contribute, i.e. pledge. Alternatively, if the required contribution is money, contributions can be collected, to be returned if the minimum is not reached. Achieving the minimum pledges and/or contributions triggers the CAP’s implementation phase.

Increase reputational score-keeping

Contributors to the CAP tend to be compensated in one of three ways: satisfaction in the result, money, or reputation, i.e. status. If a CAP is stuck, satisfaction is presumably not enough, and soliciting money to pay workers is itself subject to the free-rider problem. Volunteers will often work for status (known as "karma" or "egoboo" in the open-source software community). This requires keeping track of who is doing what, and recognizing contributions.

Divide the problem into smaller problems

Solving a CAP is like pushing a boulder up and over a hill: a big, heavy, cube-shaped boulder will not roll easily. It may be possible to break it up into smaller, manageable pieces. If a CAP can be divided into a series of smaller CAPs, each individually justified on its own merits, they will probably be easier to solve. Ideally, the CAP could be divided into as many small goals as there are community members.

Divide the community into smaller groups

Smaller groups can focus on smaller problems, and they will suffer less from the issues facing large groups. Groups are most commonly formed on the basis of shared location and interest. Such sub-communities will tend to have stronger bonds and similar priorities. Coordination agencies thus frequently have a federated structure.

Acknowledge differential utility

In the initial description of a CAP, we assume that each member of the community is identical, e.g. shares the same preferences and priorities. This is of course not the case, and may be an oversimplification. There may be several distinct market segments, or an evenly spread continuum. Some community members will desire the goal more than others, and some community members will be able to pay the cost more easily than others. If enough community members both strongly desire the goal and can pay the cost, they may lead the effort, initiating a snowball effect.

In the technology world, the most enthusiastic market segments are known as innovators and early adopters. They are willing to pay a high price for new technology, and thanks to their demand the producers experience increasing economies of scale, leading to affordable prices for those who would otherwise not purchase the product. Figure 1 shows the classic technology adoption lifecycle.

Figure 1: Technology Adoption Lifecycle

The snowball effect can be slowed if there is a substantial gap between the first two segments and the rest. The popular book Crossing the Chasm describes the challenges posed by this phenomenon. This theory assumes that the five market segments are populated by people with specific personality types, but it seems unlikely that there would be such a discontinuity in personality distributions. The chasm effect might slow the snowball but not stop it, in the absence of other braking forces. One lesson can be drawn: the methods that worked in attracting early adopters may not appeal to subsequent segments.

Exclude non-contributors

An essential function of a business is to exclude non-contributors from benefiting from a collective project. Only workers are paid, and only paying customers receive a product or service. Sometimes the means to accomplish this are obvious, other times less so, bringing great rewards to the entrepreneur who can solve the problem. A related tactic is to tie a non-excluded public good to an excludable private good. For example, charities often send donors a newsletter and invite major donors to special exclusive functions. In The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Mancur Olson states that only such "selective incentives" will "stimulate a rational individual in a latent group to act in a group-oriented way." Other commonly offered selective incentives include social recognition and services such as job placement.

The boulder metaphor should be kept in mind. If the boulder is big and heavy, you can try smoothing the path, finding and motivating more pushers, or cutting the boulder into pieces that can be moved individually. The potential energy is there—its release just awaits a creative solution.

1.3 Summary of CAP Parameters

CAPs can be characterized by several parameters that describe their goal, community, and organization:

Goal
• Goal type (product, service, condition)
• Goal divisibility (monolithic all-or-nothing, divisible, or continuous)
• Goal excludability
• Goal jointness of consumption

Community
• Community number
• Community homogeneity

Organization
• Self-organizing or actively coordinated
• Coordinators paid employees or unpaid volunteers
• Federated or centralized
• Virtual or physical

2 Collective Migration Problems

A collective migration problem (CMP) is a CAP where the community’s goal is moving to live in one territory in close association. In political migration, the ultimate goal is to achieve influence over the rules governing the territory, though other motivations are possible, e.g. economic benefit or a personal preference for association with one’s own kind. The scale can vary from the extremely local (e.g. young single people, families, or old people living in an apartment house with their peers) to the national (e.g. Jews moving to Israel). The basis of association could be religious (e.g. Mormons moving to the state of Utah), racial (e.g. the migration of black Americans northward), linguistic (Spanish-speakers moving to Miami), economic (e.g. wealthy people moving to a low-tax country like Switzerland), sexual preference (e.g. homosexuals moving to San Francisco), personal habits (e.g. non-smokers moving to a smoke-free building) or one of any number of facets of human life. The migration might be coordinated or uncoordinated based on the territory’s growing reputation. If the community values speed, time-optimal migration will require active coordination.

The most important role of the CMP coordination agency is enabling community members to signal to one another their intent. Without such an agency, community members are limited to observing each other’s actual historical movements. If the migration is over a large area, e.g. internationally, these movements may be over a long time scale and not readily apparent, and the snowball effect will be correspondingly slow. The coordination agency can enable community members to not merely announce intentions, but to bind themselves in mutual commitments. Participants can make a set of related if-then commitment rules R of the form: "If condition C is satisfied, then I will perform action A," in which many of the conditions are dependent on the rules and actions of other community members.

In a CMP, the action is generally "move within preparation time period T", though it could also be "contribute time or money to the coordination agency". The trigger condition is generally, "if N other people will do the same". At the extreme end of simplicity, the coordination agency could assume a "typical" Participant, and create a single commitment rule with some average values for T and N. Of course, individuals are unique, so every individual’s true preferences would require a large set of rules to express fully. The coordination agency must find a compromise between accuracy and simplicity, with some additional refinements to the basic commitment rule being possible.

The first and most obvious such refinement would be to let Participants choose their own minimum number of fellow movers. Participants would expect a wide range of costs and benefits, and so each would have a unique threshold at which the move would make economic sense.

A possible second refinement would recognize other types of community member: Participants (who have pledged to move if their conditions are met), Committed Participants (whose conditions have been met and are now obligated to move), and Movers (who have already moved). Obviously Movers are more valuable than Committed Participants, who are in turn more valuable than mere Participants. This relates to what economists and psychologists call “discounting the future,” and what laymen describe as “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.

Each participant could be asked how many fellow Participants he or she would need to move, how many Committed participants (in the absence of other Participants), and how many Movers (in the absence of other Participants). Figure 2 illustrates the relationship among these three values. From Np, Nc, and Nm we could compute two factors kc=Np/Nc) and km=Np/Nm, which would describe how many ordinary Participants a Committed participant or Mover is worth. We would expect Np > Nc > Nm, and so km > kc > 1.

Figure 2: Participant Commitment Conditions

A third refinement would further weight or discount participants by their timing and/or likelihood of moving. A Participant with a preparation time of four years might be worth half as much as one willing to move in half the time. Participants could also have a probability attribute, based on their own self-declared likelihood of moving and/or an external assessment of their reliability.

3 The Free State Project

3.1 History

The Free State Project is an agreement among 20,000 activists to move to New Hampshire and exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property. This results-oriented mission, combined with a least-common-denominator definition of libertarianism and deferment of methods and priorities, gave the FSP wide appeal and enabled it to rapidly form a large community. The FSP was established in late 2001, and by late 2003 had already attracted 5000 participants. After two years of debate, these first signers used Condorcet Voting to select New Hampshire as the future Free State. Since that time, growth has slowed from exponential to steadily linear. Many opinions and theories have been proffered to explain why.

The FSP is a combination of all three of the previously-mentioned CAP types. It is an entirely virtual organization, providing web-based infrastructure for geographically distributed participants who meet rarely if ever (this author is typing these words in a Moscow café). The FSP solved libertarian activists’ coordination problem by defining the gathering place: New Hampshire. The FSP attempts to solve the contribution problem by actively recruiting the minimum of 20,000 participants required to be successful.

And therein we find the two FSP flaws: who set the success criteria that required 20,000 participants, and is 20,000 too large a number to coordinate? The original FSP leadership based its Statement of Intent on Jason Sorens’ initial FSP announcement in July 2001 and his follow-up December article "What Can 20,000 Liberty Activists Accomplish?" These estimated that 20,000 activists (loosely defined) could attain significant influence in a state with a population of less than 1.5 million. But is that really the FSP customers’ only relevant goal, or even their most important goal? The FSP currently assumes a uniform customer base, and ignores their individual wishes, rather like Henry Ford: “You can have any color you want, as long as it is black.” The FSP’s customers have other desires as well. It is common knowledge that the FSP’s early movers are motivated by camaraderie and the increased confidence that their efforts will pay off. Some value libertarian ideals so highly that they would move anywhere, as long as the destination had a marginally higher libertarian concentration than their current home. Others work within the FSP framework and take a “free town project” approach, hoping to achieve influence with smaller numbers at the local level.

In its June-July 2006 survey of Participants and Friends, the FSP found that the most important issues that get people to sign up are:

1. To show the rest of the country that libertarian principles can work
2. Lower taxes
3. To raise my children in a more free society
4. More gun rights

Goals 2-4 can be achieved by moving to New Hampshire today--they do not require the presence of additional libertarians, though of course the more the better. Even the first goal does not require 20,000. At the beginning of 2006, with well over 100 early movers already achieving modest successes and demonstrating significant influence, it was clear that the original all-or-nothing target of 20,000 participants was a gross oversimplification. The FSP launched the First 1000 (F1K) program, a faster and leaner effort to get 1000 activists to commit by the end of the year and move by the end of 2008. This new FSP product was akin to Henry Ford introducing a second color, white, an obvious but still inadequate acknowledgment of reality. The new product sold well, and the F1K met its target, demonstrating that there really is a variety of preferences among the libertarian customer base.

This now raises the question: what other products or styles should the FSP offer? The FSP leadership moves entirely too slowly in identifying customer preferences and formulating new product offerings. This is not surprising, since the leadership also consists of unpaid volunteers with day jobs. The leadership is extremely cautious, and leery of offering an unsuccessful program. Without extensive research it is unlikely that the leadership can know what its customers want or should want. The one-size-fits-all approach ironically does not fit libertarians, who by nature prefer to make their own choices. Ideally a mechanism would be found for mass customization, to allow the customers to choose their individual products, or at least to decouple the leadership from the details of customization. Henry Ford should not be deciding the new color of the year.

The FSP organization (a coordination agency and thus a secondary CAP) suffers from a perennial free-rider problem in its lack of volunteers, but there is free-rider problem in the movement itself. FSP signups have slowed since the state vote in 2003. This is often attributed to the lack of any further exciting and motivating milestones. In the opinion of this author, the FSP reached a size at which the communications costs and free-rider effects became significant. Enthusiastic members of the FSP community frequently underestimate commitment costs (as compared with the more obvious migration costs). While the commitment trigger will occur in the discounted future, it operates over a long period of time, constraining a participant’s pre-migration life. It leads to an unrecognized cost: risk of breaking one’s promise, with subsequent reputational damage in the libertarian community. A free-rider is better off delaying his commitment until most others have done so. This was observed in the F1K program, when most participants signed up only in the last few weeks.

3.2 Way Forward

In order to serve its diverse customer base (in particular more eager movers) and overcome free-rider problems, the FSP requires a more flexible and expressive set of commitment rules without sacrificing simplicity. These commitments can fit within the existing Statement of Intent. The FSP should deploy a new registration form with expanded trigger conditions that enable participants to express more preferences:

Furthermore, Participants should be able to change their trigger conditions until they have been met, perhaps with a short grace period after they have been notified. Perhaps they will even bid against each other, as those who commit to move earlier will receive more respect in the community.

The FSP leadership should remove itself from the business of divining customer preferences and devising new product offerings, and simply facilitate communication and self-organization among the FSP community members.

Figure 3 shows the first few records of a table of sample data, with participants’ trigger conditions. Figure 4 shows a table consolidating these trigger conditions (using only the Minimum Participants) into a count of participants sharing a given minimum, and then the cumulative number with that level of commitment or more. Figure 5 shows a graph of the data in Figure 4. Whenever the minimum number is exceeded, all participants with that minimum or less change status from Participant to Committed Participant.

If the trigger conditions are allowed to be in terms of Committed Participants, several iterations may be necessary to calculate Participants’ state, as each new Committed Participant may trigger more. This may be slowed by a notification requirement and grace period.

Figure 3: Example Participant Commitment Conditions

Figure 4: Example Commitment Condition Cumulative Counts

Figure 5: Graph of Example Commitment Condition Cumulative Counts

Since demand is on a normal curve, the early adopters will trigger the middle which will trigger the laggards, creating a snowball effect as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: FSP Community Snowball Effect

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