Open source governance

L'Open source governance è un pensiero politico che sostiene l'applicazione della filosofia dell'open source e dell'open content alla democrazia permettendo una partecipazione attiva di tutti i cittadini alla creazione delle leggi, come in una wiki. La legislazione è in questo modo democraticamente aperta a tutta la cittadinanza, permettendo a tutti di accedere al processo di costruzione delle decisioni alla politica pubblica, beneficiando dell'intelligenza collettiva di tutta la cittadinanza.

Le teorie su come organizzare tale tipo di governo sono molto varie e più o meno sperimentate, tuttavia, numerosi progetti molto diversi fra loro collaborano fra loro nel progetto Metagovernment.^[1]

Applications of the principles

Nella pratica, numerose applicazioni di questo tipo di governance sono state sviluppate nei paesi sviluppatio:

l'uso di meccanismi di open government fra cui quelli per l'impiego e la partecipazione pubblica alle decisioni, attraverso software come IdeaScale, Google Moderator, Semantic MediaWiki, dai governi - specialmente ne lRegno Unito e negli Stati Uniti, specialmente grazie alla spinta di Barack Obama
forum di politica pubblica, puntualmente wikis, dove le questioni politiche e le argomentazioni vengono dibattute, sia con la presenza di partiti politici sia senza, prendendo in genere tre forme distinte taking three distinct forms:
- Piattaforme interne ad un partito politico, in cui attraverso un forum il partito attraverso gli interventi dei suoi sostenitori definisce una linea politica, a volte veri e propri think tank. Esistono varianti apartitiche di questi think tank divenute comuni in Canada, come The Globe and Mail / Dominion Institute policywiki.
- Forme di Citizen journalism che documenta l'attività di vari think tank e di tutti coloro che hanno ruoli fondamentali nel dirigere l'opinione pubblica, come SourceWatch.
- Open party mechanisms to actually govern and operate formal political parties without the usual insider politics and interest groups that historically have taken over such parties; these experiments have been limited and typically take the form of parties run by referenda or online - none of which have achieved any representation in any parliament anywhere in the democratic world.
Hybrid mechanisms which attempt to provide journalistic coverage, political platform development, political transparency, strategic advice, and critique of a ruling government of the same party all at the same time. Dkosopedia is the best known example of this.

Some models are significantly more sophisticated than a plain wiki, incorporating semantic tags, levels of control or scoring to mediate disputes - however this always risks empowering a clique of moderators more than would be the case given their trust position within the democratic entity - a parallel to the common wiki problem of official vandalism by persons entrusted with power by owners or publishers (so-called "sysop vandalism" or "administrative censorship").

Common and simultaneous policy

Advocates of these approaches often, by analogy to code, argue for a "central codebase" in the form of a set of policies that are maintained in a public registry and that are infinitely reproducible. "Distributions" of this policy-base are released (periodically or dynamically) for use in localities, which can apply "patches" to customize them for their own use. Localities are also able to cease subscribing to the central policy-base and "fork" it or adopt someone else's policy-base. In effect, the government stems from emergent cooperation and self-correction among members of a community. As the policies are put into practice in a number of localities, problems and issues are identified and solved, and where appropriate communicated back to the core. These goals for instance were cited often during the Green Party of Canada's experiments with open political platform development. As one of over a hundred national Green Party entities worldwide and the ability to co-ordinate policy among provincial and municipal equivalents within Canada, it was in a good position to maintain just such a central repository of policy, despite being legally separate from those other entities.

Because so much information must be gathered for the overall decision-making process to succeed, however, technology access becomes a pre-requisite to participation. General adoption of tools such as wikis provide important forces leading to the type of empowerment needed for participation in this kind of government, especially those technological tools that enable community narratives and correspond to the accretion of knowledge. Prior to the adoption of such tools, however, it's unlikely that the general public would accept their output and outcomes as fully representative of the public's will. Accordingly representative democracy remains a mediator and moderator of the results, and most citizen-authored legislation remains advisory.

Open politics as a distinct theory

The open politics theory, a narrow application of open source governance, combines aspects of the free software and open content movements, promoting decision making methods claimed to be more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues. It takes special care for instance to deal with equity differences, geographic constraints, defamation versus free political speech, accountability to persons affected by decisions, and the actual standing law and institutions of a jurisdiction. There is also far more focus on compiling actual positions taken by real entities than developing theoretical "best" answers or "solutions". One example, DiscourseDB, simply lists articles pro and con a given position without organizing their argument or evidence in any way.

While some interpret it as an example of "open source politics", open politics is not a top-down theory but a set of best practices from citizen journalism, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy, informed by e-democracy and netroots experiments, applying argumentation framework for issue-based argument as they evolved in academic and military use through the 1980s to present. Some variants of it draw on the theory of scientific method and market methods, including prediction markets and anticipatory democracy.

Its advocates often engage in legal lobbying and advocacy to directly change laws in the way of the broader application of the technology, e.g. opposing political libel cases in Canada, fighting libel chill generally, and calling for clarification of privacy and human rights law especially as they relate to citizen journalism. They are less focused on tools although the semantic mediawiki and tikiwiki platforms seem to be generally favored above all others.

Criteria

Open politics can be reduced to a list of criteria:

anyone can participate, including anonymously. This is easily implemented by having a central registrar similar to DNS registrars that can ensure that nobody registers an alias more than once and black-listing their real name. Public key infrastructure already exists for this, however the open source community has not designated(or found) a central authority that can be trusted to sign keys and protect anonymity. Currently, a web of trust system is implemented wherein people sign the key of someone they trust and use the honor system which relies on individuals to revoke their own key if it gets compromised or they change names.
all participants are equals, and resolve disputes via equal power relationships. This is easily implemented by instituting egalitarian principles and consensus decision making. It would need to be written into the articles of inception.
all actions are transparent, and no one has more power to review them than anyone else. This is easily implemented with a planner/manager policy similar to the one in B.F. Skinner's book "Walden Two" and online/public publication of everything. It would need to be written into the articles of inception or membership agreement that members must work as a planner, manager, and worker on a rotating basis or as needed. There would also need to be a recall mechanism.
all contributions are recorded and preserved, and these records cannot be altered. This is easily implemented with svn.
all deliberation is structured, or can be put in structured form to resolve disputes. This is easily implemented with forums and moderators.
all content is re/organized and refactored by participants. This is easily implemented using svn, each community has their own fork/branch or else uses the trunk as a starting point and forks from there.
partisan behavior is limited by the format, rules set by factions themselves, and laws extant in the society or community which will be affected by the political decision. This is easily implemented using svn.
control of the forum can, at least in theory, pass to the most trusted users, not the ones who started the forum. This would need to be written into the articles of inception or membership agreement as a recall mechanism, voluntary self-nomination for control, and democratically(or by consensus) elected controllers/moderators.

Some expertsTemplate:Who apply strict criteria of democracy, rootedness, legality, equality of access, and even ecological integrity, so as to ensure that there are absolutely no rights lost in moving polity into an online arena. In other words, they wish to expand participation to mobile and remote persons, including disadvantaged ones, and undo some of the inequities inherent in using electronic media. This can be accomplished by using open source software and having a browser interface compatible with GNU accessibility standards and mobile devices.

Underlying preferences and ideals

Underlying all such criteria in turn are ideals and preferences that resemble those of other democratic political movements:

decentralization of authority: giving the widest and most potent franchise to citizens is thought to minimize what economists call the principal-agent problem, or the tendency for managers to abuse authority.
centralization of information: the use of information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process.
equality of opportunity: anyone can participate in deliberation, with the expectation that people themselves select to participate on issues in which they have the greatest stake, expertise or both. Open politics treats the expert and the citizen as equals, implying that the experts are obliged to convince the citizens directly, rather than using representatives as intermediaries/brokers of policy. This use of peer review is emphasized as the best method to determine what is true or good (with the understanding that this should change over time).
encouraging diversity of thought, such that multiple positions and arguments are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.

Some theorists describe the ideals as similar to libertarian and green politics with the emphasis on peer review and scientific method within political science. However, the idea that political science could apply falsificationism is controversial, and despite an invitation to contradict and counter arguments, the rigorous application of scientific method is not part of every open politics service.

History

Open politics theory grew from earlier work in online deliberation and deliberative democracy, which in turn drew on research in issue-based argument and early hypertext and computer-supported collaboration research of the early 1980s.

The "Imagine Halifax" project was designed to create a citizens' forum for elections in Halifax, Nova Scotia in fall 2004. Founded by the widow of the late Tooker Gomberg, a notable advocate of combining direct action with open politics methods, IH brought a few dozen activists together to compile a platform (using live meetings and email and seedwiki followup). When it became clear that candidates could not all endorse all elements of the platform, it was then turned into questions for candidates in the election. The best ideas from candidates were combined with the best from activists - the final scores reflected a combination of convergence and originality. In contrast to most such questionnaires, it was easier for candidates to excel by contributing original thought than by simply agreeing. One high scorer, Andrew Younger, had not been involved with the project originally but was elected and appeared on TV with project leader Martin Willison. The project had not only changed its original goal from a partisan platform to a citizen questionnaire, but it had recruited a previously uninvolved candidate to its cause during the election. A key output of this effort was a glossary of about 100 keywords relevant to municipal laws.

The 2004–05 Green Party of Canada Living Platform was a much more planned and designed effort at open politics. As it prepared itself for an electoral breakthrough in the 2004 federal election, the Green Party of Canada began to compile citizen, member and expert opinions in preparation of its platform. During the election, it gathered input even from Internet trolls including supporters of other parties, with no major problems: anonymity was respected and comments remained intact if they were within the terms of use at all. Despite, or perhaps because of, its early success, it was derailed by Jim Harris, the party's leader, when he discovered that it was a threat to his status as a party boss. The Living Platform split off as another service entirely out of GPC control and eventually evolved into openpolitics.ca and a service to promote wiki usage among citizens and political groups.

The Liberal Party of Canada also attempted a deep policy renewal effort in conjunction with its leadership race in 2006. While candidates in that race, notably Carolyn Bennett, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, all made efforts to facilitate web-threaded policy-driven conversations between supporters, all failed to create lateral relationships and thus also failed to contribute much to the policy renewal effort.

References

^ Metagovernment Member projects

External links

General resources

Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture. Berry, D. M & Moss, G. (2008). Canada: Pygmalion Books. PDF
Programming a direct-democracy, a 2007 article on Efficasync. A Method of Open-Source Self-Governance
Us Now - A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet.
Open Source Democracy by Douglas Rushkoff, 2004
What's Wrong With Politics and Can Technology Do Anything To Fix It? by Mitchell Kapor, October 7, 2004
Berry, D M.& Moss, Giles (2006). Free and Open-Source Software: Opening and Democratising e-Government's Black Box. Information Polity Volume 11. (1). pp. 21–34

Specific projects

Metagovernment — An umbrella group of numerous open source governance projects; now using the term collaborative governance
- Related projects — An extensive list of projects around the world, most of which are building platforms of open source governance.
Aktivdemokrati (Swedish) — Direct democratic party, running for the parliament of Sweden.
DemocracyLab — A Portland Oregon based nonprofit organization seeking to connect the values people hold to their positions on issues and the policies they advocate. Currently partnering with the Oregon 150 Project to help high school students create a collaborative vision for Oregon's future.
Open Politics, Spanish Open Politics
Votorola — Software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels.
White House 2 - Crowdsources the U.S. agenda, "imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people on the internet."
Wikicracy, developing a Mediawiki-based platform respecting most of Open politics criteria

Government initiatives

Future Melbourne — A wiki-based collaborative environment for developing Melbourne's 10 year plan, which, during public consultation periods, enables the public to edit the plan with the same editing rights as city personnel and councilors.
New Zealand Police Act Review — A wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.

[1] Metagovernment Member projects

[1]