Open-source governance

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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.^[1]

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.^[2]

Applications of the principles

In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by actual democratic institutions in the developed world:^[3]

• open government mechanisms including those for public participation and engagement, such as the use of IdeaScale, Google Moderator, Semantic MediaWiki, and other software by actual ruling governments – these mechanisms are well developed especially in the UK and the USA.^[4]
• open politics forums, invariably wikis, 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.^[5]
  • Citizen journalism 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 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").

Geographic sensitivity

Some, usually those without much actual political experience, envision this form of governance as a post-national "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. "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 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.

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.^[6]

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:

• 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-making. 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 Two" 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 control 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:

• 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^[7] 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.^[8][9] 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.^[10]

Numerous very different projects related to open-source governance collaborate^[11] under the umbrella of the Metagovernment project;^[12] Metagovernment uses the term "collaborative governance",^[13] most of which are building platforms of open-source governance.

Aktivdemokrati is a Direct democratic party, running for the parliament of Sweden^[14] Democracylab.us is a Portland Oregon nonprofit (501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, partnered with the Oregon 150 Project,^[15] 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.^[16] Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels.^[17] 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."^[18] Wikicracy has developed a Mediawiki-based platform using most of Open politics criteria^[19] 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.^[20] The New Zealand Police Act Review was a wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.^[21]

See also

Collaborative governance Collaborative innovation network Direct democracy E-democracy e-government E-participation

Electronic voting Emerging Virtual Institutions Government 2.0 Collaborative e-democracy Netroots Open content

Open Government Initiative Open Voting Consortium Panarchism Polycentric law Radical transparency

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 Now – 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

Citations

1. ^ Open-source democracy: how online communication is changing offline politics by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Demos. Page 56 et al
2. ^ Resolving environmental disputes:from conflict to consensus; Roger Sidaway, Earthscan, London, 2005
3. ^ Service-oriented architecture governance for the services driven enterprise; Eric A. Marks
4. ^ Knowledge governance: processes and perspectives; Snejina Michailova, Nicolai J. Foss, Oxford University Press. Page 241 et al
5. ^ As one experiment ends, a new one begins for Policy Wiki The Globe and Mail / Dominion Institute policywiki
6. ^ DiscourseDB
7. ^ Decision Making Handout
8. ^ Liberal Party of Canada Renewal Commission, Notes from Task Force on Women Meeting
9. ^ Liberal Party of Canada
10. ^ Fung, A. (2002), "Collaboration and Countervailing Power: Making Participatory Governance Work", Am. Sociol. Assoc., Chicago, Ill., Aug 17, http://www.archonfung.com/papers/CollaborativePower2.2.pdf 
11. ^ Related projects
12. ^ Metagovernment Member projects
13. ^ collaborative governance
14. ^ Aktivdemokrati (Swedish)
15. ^ Oregon 150 Project
16. ^ DemocracyLab
17. ^ Votorola
18. ^ White House 2
19. ^ Wikicracy
20. ^ Future Melbourne
21. ^ New Zealand Police Act Review

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