Open source governance
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Open source governance advocates the application of the philosophies of the free software movement to democratic principles, to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of new policy as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry in this way, allowing policy development to benefit from the collected wisdom of the people as a whole.
The core principle is the concept of 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 periodically released 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. Because so much information must be gathered for the overall decision-making process to succeed, however, technology may 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.
The metagovernment project
http://metagovernment.org/wiki/Main_Page
The objective of the Metagovernment project is to enable individuals to be much more involved in their own governance, instead of relying on career politicians to take care of the important decisions in their life.
To that end, we are supporting the development and use of internet tools which enable the members of any community to fully participate in the governance of that community. We are a global group of people working on various projects which further this goal.
We expectgovernance software to be adopted first in small communities, and then to spread outward with the potential to gradually replace many institutions of representative democracy with a new kind of social organization called collaborative governance.
They have an excellent list of related projects too!
- most notably Candiwiki
Other projects
- Efficasync
- Programming a Deliberative Direct-Democracy - A Method of Open-Source Self-Governance by Michael Mussman
- Campaigns Wikia
- Debatepedia
- OpenPolitics
- DiscourseDB
- IdeaTorrent
