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This would be interesting. I believe both in business and in military those are the group sizes typically ideal for communication and management.

I like that idea of belonging to multiple 'governments'...similar to social groups. Hrmm. Do you see these 'government groups' communicating with each other directly or would the cross membership of individuals somewhat handle that information sharing. Assuming even that is what you had in mind...I tend to picture the communicating in some way.

Yeah, that's exactly the point. The cross communication between interest groups who govern themselves creates a service corridor between providers and clients. You might be connected to the hospital in several ways, your group at the electric grid maintenance has a treaty with them to provide medical care, the interest group at the farmers market trades food for prescription services, etc.

To prevent collusion, like if all the restaurant owners in town form their own government and vote themselves a big price hike, they are also individually members of the apartment building, bowling group, college board, or volunteer fire department who will flag their restaurant group (I used to call it boycott until i joined steemit) into better behavior.

We couldn't really do this effectively before computers and the internet, but now affiliation groups can flow and change, merge and divide, while members pass into and out of them at will. Everything negotiated on the blockchain.

I'm going to write it up in my story line fairly soon, I have to put in some more background first.

I definitely like where this is going. I can't wait to see how you envision this in your story!

I've been calling a similar concept in my head "intertribes" for the way they resemble Venn diagrams interpenetrating each other, and thinking about simulations to see how much overlap would be needed to keep them from segregating the way current tribes always seem to.

Great term. I think of them as "tribes" in my head too, modeled after the various circumpolar tribespeople who establish recurring familial connections to loosely ink their separated tribes (BTW, apparently this has happened so much over millennia that the locii of the Saami, the Siberians and the Northern Plains tribes are all noticeably genetically inter-related to this day. Some of the traditions and tools show this (pentatonic music, beaded artwork, tipi construction, etc)).

As for interrelation, I agree with @sycochica that the military has worked out a lot of this already, they may even have some open data available. I've been working within a concept of complete integration by "six degrees of separation" type links (requiring multidimensional venn diagrams). I may not be in your housing affiliation group since you own a home and I'm in an apartment co-op, but since I am in a housing affiliation group, I am probably connected to you by yard care groups and/or insurance groups and/or roof repair groups, etc.

One of the papers in this colloquium lays out how complete integration (at least of a spatial kind, the way we think of real estate markets) is kind of impossible as long as the individual agents show any preferences for their own tribes. Even small preferences will lead to segregation over time. In other words, if individual agents are unwilling to be completely surrounded by people not of their own tribe, then segregation is inevitable, unless there are also larger disturbances that re-mix the system.
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_3#ColloquiumPaper

Great resource, I'll have to take some time to go through it all, I didn't see the one you're referring to yet. I was immediately struck by this one though
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_3/7257.full
Which claims that entities composed of active agents can be considered active agents themselves.

If I remember which one it was I'll post a direct link.

A quick search also shows that business has accumulated a lot of data and research on the topic