Open Source Government
Open Source Government applies the idea of the free software movement (also known as the open source movement), applying it to democratic principles. The idea seems, at first, rather simple: allow any interested citizen to add to the creation of new policy -- rather like 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. It is unclear the degree to which such an approach could be instituted on a national level, but on a smaller more localized scale it may be easier to implement. Some suggest it as a post-national "virtual state" governing structure, where policy-setting is decoupled from territorial management. In any event, the idea demonstrates the still untapped potential of how open source philosophies can merge with government.
In a sense, BambooWeb herself experiments with this form of government, as described at BambooWeb:Policies_and_guidelines. One of the notable differences is that secret ballots are not used; instead each vote is stated publically, with the voter employing use of a pseudonym to protect privacy if desired. Policies in this system arise in a bottom-up basis, with support and backing of the policy derived from popular support, rather than from top-down imposition by a governing body's authority. In this way, it follows the ideals of Servant leadership or Emergent democracy.
The Indymedia news network is another example of this form of distributed community governance. Indymedia is of particular note due to its role in economic and political activities throughout the world. Each Independent Media Center (IMC) is autonomous, yet decisions can be reached that affect the entire network.
The core principle is the concept of a "central codebase" that everyone contributes proposed changes to. In the form of an open source government, this takes the form of a policy-base that are maintained on a public registry, but that are infinitely reproduceable. "Distributions" of the central codebase are periodically released for use in localities; these localities may apply patches to the core to customize the policies 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. This makes the system highly robust, able to "route around failure" and quickly adapt to changes.
This contrasts with the deeply hierarchical, centralized, and often corporate-dominated governance structures common in the industrialized democratic nations of today, where the roles of the average individual in government is limited to casting a few votes on issues or candidates, signing petitions, or sending letters to representatives.
The main criticism for this concept is that it is new and unproven, and may simply be a 'fad' outgrowth of the open source movement, with no underlying theoretical basis and little practical evidence. There may be a limited number of projects which can utilize the concept, and it is unknown the degree to which smaller and more local governments may be effectively capable of actualizing the theory. It can be viewed as "guilessly utopian" and inadequately accounting of reality, assuming a level of cooperation between members that is unrealistic in the real world.
A criticism of the post-national "virtual state" concept is that by separating territorial sovereignty and political governance, such a government would be incapable of defending its people against military threats, and thus would simply dissolve at the first sign of armed force. A similar argument against separation of territory and governance is that many core government functions relate to how land is used, such as zoning laws, police jurisdictions and patrol routes, utilities operation, and so forth.
See also
