Open source governance
Encyclopedia
Open-source governance is a political philosophy
which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open-source
and open-content
movements to democratic
principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki
document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry. The concept behind democracy, that the collective wisdom
of the people as a whole is a benefit to the decision-making process, is applied to policy development directly.
Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this vary however as much as any other political philosophy or ideology. Accordingly there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. Governance can employ different degrees of public consultation and participation, ranging from non-participation (the community is unaware of any decisions taken), informing (telling the community what is planned and to understand problems, alternatives and solutions), consultation (to obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions), collaboration (to partner with the public to develop alternatives, identify preferred solutions, and make decisions), to empowerment (placing final decision-making into the hands of the public). Collaborative governance is governance with characteristics of both collaboration and empowerment.
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").
"virtual state" governing structure, where policy-setting is decoupled from territorial management. A more common view is that of the 'open politics in force' framework that "rootedness" is a desirable goal and that this implies geographic control and sensitivity but that this competes with other goals (legality, equal power of participants, accountability to those most affected by a decision, clarity so that new participants can join in) and should not necessarily be always the most over-arching goal of any given open-source system.
" 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 is 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.
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 market
s 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.
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.
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.
Some models of collaborative governance have been criticized as allowing ad hoc deliberation to drown out minority opposition.
Numerous very different projects related to open-source governance collaborate under the umbrella of the Metagovernment project; Metagovernment uses the term "collaborative governance", most of which are building platforms of open-source governance.
Aktivdemokrati
is a Direct democratic
party, running for the parliament of Sweden Democracylab.us is a Portland Oregon nonprofit (501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, partnered with the Oregon 150 Project, building an online public think tank in which the votes of users determines policy, seeking to connect the values people hold to their positions on issues and the policies they advocate. Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels. The 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 has developed a Mediawiki-based platform using most of Open politics criteria These grassroots
efforts have been matched by government initiatives that seek similar goals. Future Melbourne is a wiki-based collaborative environment for developing Melbourne's 10 year plan. During public consultation periods, it enables the public to edit the plan with the same editing rights as city personnel and councilors. The New Zealand Police Act Review was a wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open-source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
and open-content
Open content
Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....
movements to democratic
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry. The concept behind democracy, that the collective wisdom
Collective wisdom
Collective wisdom, also called group wisdom and co-intelligence is shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups.Collective intelligence, which is sometimes used synonymously with collective wisdom, is more of a shared decision process than collective wisdom...
of the people as a whole is a benefit to the decision-making process, is applied to policy development directly.
Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this vary however as much as any other political philosophy or ideology. Accordingly there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. Governance can employ different degrees of public consultation and participation, ranging from non-participation (the community is unaware of any decisions taken), informing (telling the community what is planned and to understand problems, alternatives and solutions), consultation (to obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions), collaboration (to partner with the public to develop alternatives, identify preferred solutions, and make decisions), to empowerment (placing final decision-making into the hands of the public). Collaborative governance is governance with characteristics of both collaboration and empowerment.
Applications of the principles
In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by actual democratic institutions in the developed world:- open governmentOpen governmentOpen government is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest construction it opposes reason of state and racist considerations, which have tended to legitimize...
mechanisms including those for public participation and engagement, such as the use of IdeaScale, Google ModeratorGoogle ModeratorGoogle Moderator is a Google service that uses crowdsourcing to rank user-submitted questions, suggestions and ideas. It was launched on September 25, 2008. The service allows the management of feedback from a large number of people, who can vote for the top questions that they think should be...
, Semantic MediaWikiSemantic MediaWikiSemantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki...
, and other software by actual ruling governments – these mechanisms are well developed especially in the UK and the USA. - open politics forums, invariably wikiWikiA wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
s, where political issues and arguments can be debated, either within or between political party constraints, taking three distinct forms:- Political party platform development, in which ideas are solicited from anyone or almost anyone and openly discussed to a point but the ranking and devotion of resources to developing ideas is reserved to party members or supporters. While almost all political parties use threaded forums, few give them formal status, and only one has ever run on a platform wholly developed in a wiki (see below), and that only once. A variant is the non-partisan think-tank or citizen advocacy group platform development as has become common in Canada, for example the Dominion Institute policywiki.
- Citizen journalismCitizen journalismCitizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...
forums obeying stricter rules to ensure equal power relationships than is typically the case in blogs, strictly designed to balance libel and free speech laws for a local jurisdiction (following laws strictly is part of the open politics ideal). The best known of these is SourcewatchSourceWatchSourceWatch is an internet wiki site that is a collaborative project of the liberal Center for Media and Democracy...
. - 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").
Geographic sensitivity
Some, usually those without much actual political experience, envision this form of governance as a post-nationalPostnationalism
Postnationalism describes the process or trend by which nation states and national identities lose their importance relative to supranational and global entities...
"virtual state" governing structure, where policy-setting is decoupled from territorial management. A more common view is that of the 'open politics in force' framework that "rootedness" is a desirable goal and that this implies geographic control and sensitivity but that this competes with other goals (legality, equal power of participants, accountability to those most affected by a decision, clarity so that new participants can join in) and should not necessarily be always the most over-arching goal of any given open-source system.
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. "DistributionsDistribution (business)
Product distribution is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. An organization or set of organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user.The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing,...
" 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
Green Party of Canada
The Green Party of Canada is a Canadian federal political party founded in 1983 with 10,000–12,000 registered members as of October 2008. The Greens advance a broad multi-issue political platform that reflects its core values of ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and...
'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 is unlikely that the general public would accept their output and outcomes as fully representative of the public's will. Accordingly representative democracy
Representative democracy
Representative democracy is a form of government founded on the principle of elected individuals representing the people, as opposed to autocracy and direct 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 softwareFree software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
and open content
Open content
Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....
movements, promoting decision-making methods claimed to be more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest
Public interest
The public interest refers to the "common well-being" or "general welfare." The public interest is central to policy debates, politics, democracy and the nature of government itself...
with respect to public policy
Public policy
Public policy as government action is generally the principled guide to action taken by the administrative or executive branches of the state with regard to a class of issues in a manner consistent with law and institutional customs. In general, the foundation is the pertinent national and...
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
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...
, participatory democracy
Participatory democracy
Participatory Democracy, also known as Deliberative Democracy, Direct Democracy and Real Democracy , is a process where political decisions are made directly by regular people...
and deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which public deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere...
, informed by e-democracy
E-democracy
E-democracy refers to the use of information technologies and communication technologies and strategies in political and governance processes...
and netroots
Netroots
Netroots is a term coined in 2002 by Jerome Armstrong to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that set 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
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
and market methods, including prediction market
Prediction market
Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions...
s and anticipatory democracy
Anticipatory democracy
Anticipatory democracy is a theory of civics relying on democratic decision making that takes into account predictions of future events that have some credibility with the electorate...
.
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
Political libel
The criminal statutes protecting nobility from criticism in 16th and 17th century England eventually evolved into various categories of political libel . Cases of political libel and eventually damages actions were handled by the infamous Star Chamber until its abolition in 1641...
cases in Canada, fighting libel chill generally, and calling for clarification of privacy and human rights law especially as they relate to citizen journalism
Citizen journalism
Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal 2003 report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information...
. They are less focused on tools although the semantic mediawiki
Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki...
and tikiwiki
TikiWiki
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, originally and more commonly known as TikiWiki or simply Tiki, is a free and open source wiki-based, content management system and Online office suite written primarily in PHP and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License license...
platforms seem to be generally favored above all others.
Criteria
Open politics can be reduced to a list of criteria:- Anonymous participation is enabled 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.
- Participants are equals, and resolve disputes via equal power relationships, by instituting egalitarian principles and consensus decision-makingConsensus decision-makingConsensus decision-making is a group decision making process that seeks the consent, not necessarily the agreement, of participants and the resolution of objections. Consensus is defined by Merriam-Webster as, first, general agreement, and second, group solidarity of belief or sentiment. It has its...
. It would need to be written into the articles of inception. - Actions are transparent, and no one has more power to review them than anyone else, implemented with a planner/manager policy similar to the one in B.F. Skinner's book "Walden TwoWalden TwoWalden Two is a utopian novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, first published in 1948. In its time, it could have been considered to be science fiction, as the methods employed to alter people's behaviour did not yet exist....
" and online/public publication of everything. Members must work as a planner, manager, and worker on a rotating basis or as needed, with a recall mechanism. - Contributions are recorded and preserved, and these records cannot be altered. This is easily implemented with software versioning and revision controlRevision controlRevision control, also known as version control and source control , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files...
systems. - 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 software versioning and revision control systems. 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, using software versioning and revision control.
- 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.
- Participation of mobile and remote persons, including disadvantaged ones, may be enabled 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:- decentralizationDecentralization__FORCETOC__Decentralization or decentralisation is the process of dispersing decision-making governance closer to the people and/or citizens. It includes the dispersal of administration or governance in sectors or areas like engineering, management science, political science, political economy,...
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 technologyInformation technologyInformation technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
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 reviewPeer reviewPeer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
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 argumentArgumentIn philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...
s are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.
Some theorists describe the ideals as similar to libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
and green politics
Green politics
Green politics is a political ideology that aims for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, social liberalism, and grassroots democracy...
with the emphasis on peer review and scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
within political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
. 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 deliberationOnline deliberation
Online deliberation is a term associated with an emerging body of practice, research, and software dedicated to fostering serious, purposive discussion over the Internet...
and deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy is a form of democracy in which public deliberation is central to legitimate lawmaking. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere...
, which in turn drew on research in issue-based argument and early hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
and computer-supported collaboration
Computer-supported collaboration
Computer-supported collaboration research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships...
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
Tooker Gomberg
Tooker Gomberg was a Canadian politician and environmental activist.A native of Montreal, Quebec and a liberal-arts graduate of Hampshire College , Gomberg founded one of Canada's first curbside recycling programs in Montreal, and later moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he created educational...
, a notable advocate of combining direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the 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
Andrew Younger
Andrew Younger is a Canadian politician, who was elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly in the 2009 provincial election. He represents the electoral district of Dartmouth East as a member of the Liberal Party....
, had not been involved with the project originally but was elected and appeared on TV with project leader Martin Willison
Martin Willison
Martin Willison was the Green Party candidate in the riding of Halifax West, Nova Scotia, during the Canadian Federal elections on June 28, 2004. He lost to Liberal Geoff Regan, receiving 1,456 votes ....
. 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
Glossary
A glossary, also known as an idioticon, vocabulary, or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms...
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
Canadian federal election, 2004
The Canadian federal election, 2004 , was held on June 28, 2004 to elect members of the Canadian House of Commons of the 38th Parliament of Canada. The Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin lost its majority, but was able to form a minority government after the elections...
, the Green Party of Canada
Green Party of Canada
The Green Party of Canada is a Canadian federal political party founded in 1983 with 10,000–12,000 registered members as of October 2008. The Greens advance a broad multi-issue political platform that reflects its core values of ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and...
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
Anonymity
Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual's personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.There are many reasons why a...
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
Jim Harris (politician)
James R. M. "Jim" Harris is a Canadian author, environmentalist, and politician. He was leader of the Green Party of Canada from 2003 to 2006, when he was succeeded by Elizabeth May.-Early life and Green activism:...
, 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
Liberal Party of Canada
The Liberal Party of Canada , colloquially known as the Grits, is the oldest federally registered party in Canada. In the conventional political spectrum, the party sits between the centre and the centre-left. Historically the Liberal Party has positioned itself to the left of the Conservative...
also attempted a deep policy renewal effort in conjunction with its leadership race in 2006. While candidates in that race, notably Carolyn Bennett
Carolyn Bennett
Carolyn Ann Bennett, PC, MP is the Member of Parliament for the riding of St. Paul's, a constituency located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, and was formerly a candidate for its leadership....
, Stéphane Dion
Stéphane Dion
Stéphane Maurice Dion, PC, MP is a Canadian politician who has been the Member of Parliament for the riding of Saint-Laurent–Cartierville in Montreal since 1996. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons from 2006 to 2008...
and Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011...
, 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.
Some models of collaborative governance have been criticized as allowing ad hoc deliberation to drown out minority opposition.
Numerous very different projects related to open-source governance collaborate under the umbrella of the Metagovernment project; Metagovernment uses the term "collaborative governance", most of which are building platforms of open-source governance.
Aktivdemokrati
Aktivdemokrati
Aktiv Demokrati is a Swedish political party that wants to enable direct democracy mixed with representative democracy based on demand by each individual through safe digital solutions like the Internet, telephones or automated teller machines....
is a Direct democratic
Direct democracy
Direct democracy is a form of government in which people vote on policy initiatives directly, as opposed to a representative democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives. Direct democracy is classically termed "pure democracy"...
party, running for the parliament of Sweden Democracylab.us is a Portland Oregon nonprofit (501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, partnered with the Oregon 150 Project, building an online public think tank in which the votes of users determines policy, seeking to connect the values people hold to their positions on issues and the policies they advocate. Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels. The 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 has developed a Mediawiki-based platform using most of Open politics criteria These grassroots
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
efforts have been matched by government initiatives that seek similar goals. Future Melbourne is a wiki-based collaborative environment for developing Melbourne's 10 year plan. During public consultation periods, it enables the public to edit the plan with the same editing rights as city personnel and councilors. The New Zealand Police Act Review was a wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.
See also
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Electronic voting Electronic voting is a term encompassing several different types of voting, embracing both electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of counting votes.... Emerging Virtual Institutions Emerging Virtual Institutions are patterns of organized culture; such as forms of government, business models, or social norms, that develop endogenously within a virtual world... Collaborative e-democracy Collaborative e-democracy is a democratic conception which combines key features of direct democracy, representative democracy, and e-democracy... Netroots Netroots is a term coined in 2002 by Jerome Armstrong to describe political activism organized through blogs and other online media, including wikis and social network services. The word is a portmanteau of Internet and grassroots, reflecting the technological innovations that set netroots... Open content Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software.... |
Open Government Initiative The Open Government Initiative is an effort by the administration of President of the United States Barack Obama to "creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government." . The directive starting this initiative was issued on January 20, 2009, Obama's first day in office.The philosophy of the... Panarchism Panarchism is a political philosophy emphasizing each individual's right to freely join and leave the jurisdiction of any governments they choose, without being forced to move from their current locale. The word "panarchy" was invented and the concept proposed by a Belgian political economist, Paul... Polycentric law Polycentric law is a legal structure in which providers of legal systems compete or overlap in a given jurisdiction, as opposed to monopolistic statutory law according to which there is a sole provider of law for each jurisdiction. Devolution of this monopoly occurs by the principle of... Radical transparency Radical transparency is a management approach in which all decision making is carried out publicly. The term was used by Daniel Goleman in his book... |
Further reading
- Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture. Berry, D. M & Moss, G. (2008) (at Google Books). Canada: Pygmalion Books. PDF
- Programming a direct-democracy, a 2007 article on Efficasync. A Method of Open-Source Self-Governance
- Us NowUs NowUs Now is a documentary film project "about the power of mass collaboration, the government and the Internet" The New York Times describes it as a film which "paints a future in which every citizen is connected to the state as easily as to Facebook, choosing policies, questioning politicians,...
– A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet. - Open Source Democracy by Douglas Rushkoff, 2004
- Power to the (wired) people 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
External links
- Open Democratic, Internal system to run a political party democratically and with transparency.
- Open Politics, Spanish Open Politics
- Metagovernment
- Open Source Democracy; WeMatter.org