Open-source governance
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Open-source governance(also known asopen governanceandopen politics) is apolitical philosophywhich advocates the application of the philosophies of theopen-sourceandopen-contentmovements todemocraticprinciples to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with awikidocument. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing theircollective wisdomto benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.[1]
Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this participation vary. Accordingly, there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. There are a wide array of projects and movements which are working on building open-source governance systems.[2]
Manyleft-libertarianandradical centristorganizations around the globe have begun advocating open-source governance and its related political ideas as a reformist alternative to current governance systems. Often, these groups have their origins indecentralizedstructures such as the Internet and place particular importance on the need for anonymity to protect an individual's right to free speech in democratic systems. Opinions vary, however, not least because the principles behind open-source government are still very loosely defined.[3]
Applications of the principles
[edit]In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by democratic institutions:[4]
- Open-governmentmechanisms including those for public participation and engagement, such as the use ofIdeaScale,Google Moderator,Semantic MediaWiki,GitHub, and other software by actual ruling governments – these mechanisms are well-developed, especially in the UK and the US,[5]or by civil society and citizens directly for example, Opengovpioneers[6][7]in the UK, and the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers[8]in Scotland.
- Open-politicsforumsandwikis,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. A variant is the non-partisan think-tank or citizen-advocacy group-platform development as has become common in Canada, for example theDominion Institutepolicywiki.[9]
- Citizen journalismforums obeying stricter rules to ensure equal power relationships than is typically the case in blogs, strictly designed to balance libel andfree speechlaws for a local jurisdiction (following laws strictly is part of the open politics ideal).
- 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 referendums or online. An example of this is Italy'sFive Star Movement.
- In theCalifornia Assembly,Crowdsourced legislationvia a 'wiki bills' website is being initiated via an online wiki, with an introduction deadline of early February, 2015.[10][needs update]
- 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.Dkosopediais 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 ofofficial vandalismby persons entrusted with power by owners or publishers (so-called "sysop vandalism" or "administrative censorship" ).
Common and simultaneous policy
[edit]Some advocates of these approaches, by analogy to software code, argue[citation needed]for a "central codebase" in the form of a set of policies that are maintained in a public registry and that areinfinitely 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 theGreen Party of Canada's experiments with open-political-platform development.[citation needed]As one of over a hundred nationalGreen partyentities 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.
Difference from prior initiatives
[edit]Open-source governance differs from previous open-government initiatives in its broader emphasis on collaborative processes. After all...
...simply publishing snapshots of government information is not enough to make it open.
History
[edit]The "Imagine Halifax" (IH) project was designed to create a citizens' forum for elections inHalifax, Nova Scotiain fall 2004. Founded by Angela Bischoff, the widow ofTooker Gomberg,a notable advocate of combiningdirect actionwith 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 leaderMartin 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 aglossaryof about 100 keywords relevant to municipal laws.
The 2004–05Green Party of Canada Living Platformwas a much more planned and designed effort at open politics. As it prepared itself for an electoral breakthrough in the2004 federal election,theGreen Party of Canadabegan to compile citizen, member and expert opinions in preparation of its platform. During the election, it gathered input even fromInternet trollsincluding supporters of other parties, with no major problems:anonymitywas respected and, if they were within the terms of use, comments remained intact. Despite, or perhaps because of, its early success, it was derailed byJim Harris,the party's leader, when he discovered that it was a threat to his status as aparty boss.[citation needed]The Living Platform split off as another service entirely out of GPC control and eventually evolved into OpenPolitics.ca[11]and a service to promote wiki usage among citizens and political groups.
TheLiberal Party of Canadaalso attempted a deep policy renewal effort in conjunction with its leadership race in 2006.[12][13]While candidates in that race, notablyCarolyn Bennett,Stéphane DionandMichael 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.
Numerous very different projects related to open-source governance collaborate under the umbrella of theMetagovernmentproject;[14]Metagovernment uses the term "collaborative governance",[15]most of which are building platforms of open-source governance.
- Aktivdemokratiis aDirect democraticparty, running for the parliament of Sweden[16]Democracylab.org is a Seattle Washingtonnonprofit(501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, partnered with the Oregon 150 Project,[17]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.[18]Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels.[19]The White House 2 was a project which crowdsourced 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[20]Thesegrassrootsefforts have been matched by government initiatives that seek similar goals. A more extensivelist of these and similar organizationsis available externally.
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.[21]
The New Zealand Police Act Review was a wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.[22]
Atlinux.conf.auon January 14, 2015, inAuckland,New Zealand,AustralianAudrey Lobo-PulopresentedEvaluating Government Policies Using Open Source Models,agitating for government policy related knowledge, data and analysis to be freely available to everyone to use, modify and distribute without restriction — "a parallel universe where public policy development and analysis is a dynamic, collaborative effort between government and its citizens". Audrey reported that the motivation for her work was personal uncertainty about the nature and accuracy of models, estimates and assumptions used to prepare policies released with the 2014 Australian Federal Government Budget, and whether and to what extent their real world impact is assessed following implementation.[23]A white paper on "Evaluating Government Policies using Open Source Models" was released on September 10, 2015.[24]
Open politics as a distinct theory
[edit]The open-politics theory, a narrow application of open-source governance, combines aspects of thefree softwareandopen-contentmovements, promotingdecision-makingmethods claimed to be more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in thepublic interestwith respect topublic policyissues. 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 fromcitizen journalism,participatory democracyanddeliberative democracy,informed bye-democracyandnetrootsexperiments, 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 ofscientific methodandmarket methods,includingprediction marketsandanticipatory 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. opposingpolitical libelcases in Canada, fightinglibel chillgenerally, and calling for clarification of privacy and human rights law especially as they relate to citizen journalism. They are less focused on tools although thesemantic mediawikiandtikiwikiplatforms seem to be generally favored above all others.
See also
[edit]Citations
[edit]- ^Open-source democracy: how online communication is changing offline politicsbyDouglas Rushkoff,published byDemos.Page 56 et al
- ^"Related projects".Archived fromthe originalon 2018-07-24.Retrieved2009-02-05.
- ^Bodle, Robert (2011)."Upholding online anonymity in Internet governance: Affordances, ethical frameworks, and regulatory practices".
- ^Service-oriented architecture governance for the services driven enterprise;Eric A. Marks
- ^Knowledge governance: processes and perspectives;Snejina Michailova,Nicolai J. Foss,Oxford University Press.Page 241 et al
- ^"Open Government Pioneer Project".opengovpioneers.miraheze.org.Retrieved2017-05-19.
- ^"Open Government Partnership Scottish Action Plan - gov.scot".www.gov.scot.Retrieved2020-12-29.
- ^"Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers – Grow, Restore, Prosper".NatureScot.Retrieved2023-04-09.
- ^As one experiment ends, a new one begins for Policy WikiThe Globe and Mail/Dominion Institutepolicywiki
- ^(Jan 8, 2015) "Gatto Promotes 'Wiki Bill' project"Crescenta Valley Weekly6(19) p.1,8 accessdate=2015-01-14
- ^Decision Making Handout
- ^"Liberal Party of Canada Renewal Commission, Notes from Task Force on Women Meeting"(PDF).Archived fromthe original(PDF)on 2007-08-02.Retrieved2011-04-22.
- ^"Liberal Party of Canada".
- ^"Active projects".Archived fromthe originalon 2017-05-27.Retrieved2010-06-28.
- ^"Collaborative governance".Archived fromthe originalon 2017-08-03.Retrieved2010-01-02.
- ^Aktivdemokrati(Swedish)
- ^www.oregon150.org."Oregon 150: Public Information".
{{cite web}}
:CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^"DemocracyLab".
- ^"Votorola".
- ^"Wikicracy".
- ^"Future Melbourne Wiki".
- ^New Zealand Police Act ReviewArchived2008-04-10 at theWayback Machine
- ^Audrey Lobo-Pulo."Evaluating Government Policies Using Open Source Models".Retrieved15 January2015.
- ^"Evaluating Government Policies using Open Source Models"(PDF).Phoensight.
Further reading
[edit]- 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 Democracyby Douglas Rushkoff, 2004
- Power to the (wired) peopleWhat'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 PolityVolume 11. (1). pp. 21–34
- Smari McCarthy's work on theShadow Parliament ProjectandCitizens Foundation