The Pirate Wheel is an overview of pirate policies as I’ve understood them from talking to pirates across the world. It’s not an authoritative source over any other, but merely my interpretation — which, in pirate spirit, is no more valid than anybody else’s.

A problem with old-style policymaking has always been that the political programs have been flat; they have been an unordered heap of opinions, where assemblies and other meetings occasionally reword or replace a section without regard to impact on other sections. In contrast, the Pirate Wheel focuses equally on what the policy is and why the policy is that way, starting with the fundamental change that has happened to society and deriving from there. Gamers will feel right at home with the model of a policy tree rather than a flat document; a tree where it is immediately clear which policies derive from which.

We start with the observation that everybody has become empowered in that everybody has been given a voice, and that this means that governments must shift from ruling with a suspicious eye to assuming good faith in people. From there, we outline eight principles: Privacy, Transparency, Ticks, Humanism, Diversity, Resilience, Swarm Economy, and Quality Legislation. These nine fundamentals — the hub of Empowerment and the eight spokes in the principles — comprise The Pirate Wheel, from which everything else can be derived.

From here, we outline a number of conclusions as we combine the principles, and move on from there to concrete policies.