The Family Unit

As loathe as I am to start an entry with a reference to the IT industry - one of the most important parts of delivering a solution to a problem is having a good model of the problem in the first place - one based on the real world or the business process. This seems obvious.

Yet, we often use a bad model in business processes & then promulgate that mode into the rest of society - or else keep a model that is so out-dated that it loses relevance.

A classic example of this is ownership of things. Traditionally, people who owned things were those in power - the ruler, the local lord, the man of the house. Everyone else was beholden to them. This has, I believe, changed. These days, anyone can own things. More to the point, some things aren't owned by one person alone.

In everyday life, we should change our concept of who "owns" things. In the case of big things, now that people can easily own their own homes, the "persons" who own the property have to be listed & are held responsible for the loan, etc. I have already used different nomenclature in describing this scenario - persons own a property, families live in homes. Why can't families own homes?

A child may not be held responsible for a mortgage, but a family is not parents & children. Up until recently, it was next to impossible for a single woman to take out a mortgage, or two people who weren't married, whether that was a de facto relationship, siblings, or parent & child. These are all perfectly good examples of family, from societies point of view, but not examples of collections of people that a bank would consider worthy of a mortgage.

In solution modelling, you would say that an important part of the system is a person. For a mortgage, you would allow for two people - with restrictions on who those people are. Why? A marriage these days is not a permanent thing. De facto relationships are so common & lasting that they are indifferentiable from marriage to, say, the tax department or social services - & this does not even come close to relationships which are not recognised by the state (gay marriages). This still limits non-traditional groups of people who have even stronger ties - siblings, for example.
We need to model the system that allows for a certain group of people (to be specified) to act as a unit in the same way that a lord was once thought of - as a possessor of things.

Even something as simple as a credit card or a car seems to be a problem in collective ownership. A car must have one & only one registered owner (or corporate entity). Yet, in my own case, we have one car in the family - it is shared amongst three drivers. I am now the only member of a motoring association.

A family unit is hard to put your finger on, socially. I know some families where each parent & their children have different surnames - & a family from one country where each individual gets their own surname, not a family name. How do you "name" that family unit? It's not the "Daffy" family because they share a surname. It might be "Daffy's" family to some people, or "Daisy's" family to someone else. Regardless, we should be able to register a group of people as a unit - a family unit - & treat it in the same way that we currently treat individuals & (only) some relationships.

People form their family units in any way that they want to - because there can be no laws to stop them (forming a group - there are laws over what they can do within that group). We should model the system - government - in such a way that it recognises these family units & treats them with the respect that they deserve.