SCLOVE'S PROPOSED DESIGN CRITERIA FOR DEMOCRATIC TECHNOLOGIES

  1. Toward a Democratic Community:
  2. Seek a balance among communitarian/cooperative, individualized, and intercommunity technologies.
  3. Avoid technologies that establish authoritarian social relationships
    4.

  4. Toward Democratic Work:
  5. Seek a diverse array of flexibly schedulable, self-actualizing technological practices
  6. Avoid meaningless, debilitating, or otherwise autonomy-impairing technological practices
    7.

  7. Toward Democratic Politics:
  8. Seek technologies that can enable disadvantaged individuals and groups to participate fully in social and political life
  9. Avoid technologies that support illegitimately hierarchical power relations between groups, organizations, or polities
    10.

  10. To Secure Democratic Self-Governance:
  11. Keep the potentially adverse consequences (e.g., environmental or social harms) of technologies within the boundaries of local political jurisdictions
  12. Seek local economic self-reliance
  13. Avoid technologies that promote dependency and loss of local autonomy
  14. Seek technologies (including an architecture of public space) compatible with globally-aware, egalitarian political decentralization and federation
    15.

  15. To Perpetuate Democratic Structures:
  16. Avoid technologies that are ecologically destructive of human health, survival, and the perpetuation of democratic institutions