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How about Lessig's Code 2.0? It's cyberlaw's pathbreaking book, and it's written in a very accessible way. It's free online at http://www.codev2.cc/.

"Technology is so intertwined with politics these days that you can't unwind them."

Great post. Lawrence Lessig says in his book "Code 2.0" that there are at least four ways to influence behavior (a key issue in politics). The are rules, norms, prices, and (computer and other) architecture.
http://codev2.cc/

Good points. Still, in Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig makes the point that the processes that govern us include rules, norms, prices, and architecture. So, there are other aspects of control outside what lawyers normally do:
    http://codev2.cc/

It was said by American financier Jay Gould: "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

I wonder is someday someone might say, "I can hire one-half of the lawyers to disenfranchise the other half"?

Then, just repeat that process about ten times... :-)

Just like it's essentially being repeated with other professions...

I think you have to start by making a distinction between the institution of government and the process of governance in which government, business, and civil society all participate. The idea is, a FOSS-inspired change in the process might improve governance decisions.

I think of it as government of the ones who show up, and it already happens, to some extent, everywhere. In democracies, most of the decisions aren't made by elected officials, but by bureaucrats. The people doing the work. I recently spoke with a young woman who was a junior staffer in one of the highest offices of the executive branch in the George Bush administration. She said that most of the decisions made in the US capitol were actually made by people in their early twenties, just out of college, who were willing to work long hours for peanuts. If these young folks had majored in CS and Math instead of PoliSci and History, they'd have been coding instead of drafting legislation. (Joel Reidenberg and Laurence Lessig have both written cleverly on the parallels between code and law.) In authoritarian states, like for example China, the bureaucracy plays a similar role (wish I could find a reference quickly).

Most existing government structures keep some people away from the decision-making process. Law-makers hide the code of governance (the law) until it's ready to be shipped. Some of us (I don't know the metagovernment people, but I like the way they think) who are interested in both law and code think there's something to learn from FOSS. Maybe the process can be opened up. Let's acknowledge the underlying process of governance, which doesn't have much to do with voting, and more to do with people making decisions by default, because they're in the room when the question comes up.

There are plenty of problems with ideas like this. Of course, you probably don't start tinkering at a national level, but at a local level where the stakes are lower. Maybe the analogy between governance and coding is a false one. But you can't know until you give it a go, see what problems there are, and try to fix them.

There's a tendency, in US at least, of assuming that the Bill of Rights covers all possible contingencies. As Lessig laid out in Code 2.0, laws were designed with contemporary or foreseeable contingencies in mind. In the late 18th century, they wouldn't have anticipated a scenario in which one private organization was in a position to accumulate enormous amounts of publicly available data, index it thoroughly, and make it available to anyone anywhere instantly.

We're in a new situation, and need to have a rational and democratic discussion of what new principles and rules we should have.

This might already be in here somewhere -- but Lawrence Lessig's Codev2 is an obvious link to this post, covering the parallels between legislation and, well, code. http://codev2.cc/