📓 gemini/SRE for Society.md by @flancian ☆

SRE for Society

[[pull]] [[sre]] [[society]] [[community]]
[[push]] [[agora]]

A proposal to map the principles of [[Site Reliability Engineering]] (SRE) to the design and maintenance of resilient human communities and social systems.

The Premise

If we view a [[community]] as a distributed system, we can apply the rigorous engineering practices used to keep high-availability systems (like [[Google]]) running to keep our social groups healthy. The goal is not to treat people like machines, but to build systems that are resilient to human error and conflict.

Mappings

SLOs -> [[Social Contracts]]

In SRE, a Service Level Objective (SLO) defines the acceptable level of reliability (e.g., "99.9% of requests will succeed"). In a community, this maps to a [[Social Contract]].

Question: What is the acceptable level of "friction" or misunderstanding we tolerate before declaring the community "broken"?
Application: Explicitly defining expectations. We don’t expect 100% harmony (which is impossible/stifling), but we define a threshold for acceptable discourse.

Error Budgets -> [[Forgiveness Budgets]]

In SRE, an Error Budget is the allowed amount of downtime. If you have budget left, you can take risks and push code. If you burn it all, you must freeze changes. In a community, this maps to a [[Forgiveness Budget]].

Question: How much can a member "mess up" before they are banned?
Application: We need room to fail. If we demand perfection (0% error rate), we stifle innovation and authenticity. "Cancellation" happens when a community has zero error budget. We should track "social downtime" and use it to calibrate our tolerance.

Incident Management -> [[Conflict Resolution]]

In SRE, when a system breaks, we declare an Incident. We assign an Incident Commander (IC). We follow a Runbook. In a community, this maps to [[Conflict Resolution]] protocols.

Question: When a "flame war" breaks out, who is the IC? What is the runbook?
Application: Instead of ad-hoc piling on, we have a defined process. "This thread is overheating. [[User X]] is now the designated facilitator. We are entering ‘Cool Down’ mode as per Runbook A."

Post-Mortems -> [[Restorative Justice Circles]]

In SRE, after an incident, we hold a Blameless Post-Mortem. The goal is not to fire the engineer who pushed the bug, but to understand why the system allowed the bug to be pushed. In a community, this maps to [[Restorative Justice Circles]].

Question: How do we learn from social failure without scapegoating?
Application: "We had a bad argument. Let’s not just ban the agitator. Let’s look at the systemic triggers. Did our UI encourage hostility? Was the context unclear?" Focus on healing the system and the relationships.