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The Rise of Open-Source Politics
Incognitius writes "There's a great article in this week's The Nation about the rise of open-source politics. Never before has the top-down world of presidential campaigning been opened to a bottom-up, networked community of ordinary voters. Applied to political organizing, open source means opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. What do you guys think, is open source a good model for politics?"
Although its not a forefront issue is one that is brought up. Generally the left parties support open-source, a good example (though possibly co-incidence) is that the George W Bush website ran IIS but Kerry's ran Apache/Linux.
s .php?p=16#pt14 , Open Source section) they very specifically say that they will ban proprietary software in government unless there is no OSS alternative, they will say that everything must be done in open, standard formats, they say that anything developed by the government will be open source. They are one of the few parties that makes a big deal of it, and although they have 7% of the popular vote they don't have concentrated enough support to win seats in the House of Commons. They are one of the small parties, I don't see any big parties (Liberal, Conservative, Bloc Québécois, NDP) doing this, and that might be because they have realized that this doesn't win votes.
Though, to the average voter it doesn't matter, many think Microsoft is the best thing since sliced bread and really wont be told otherwise. (These are the same people that say Firefox is auwful before even trying it). And those that don't like Microsoft generally still consider many other political items to be much more important, and to an extent they are correct. If I was American (not Canadian) I would have voted Kerry, but if Kerry liked Microsoft and George W liked Linux I still would have voted for Kerry. I really think nuclear war is a bigger deal than Microsoft vs. OSS; and many would agree with me.
The Canadian Green Party (http://www.greenparty.ca/) is an example of a party that support OSS, if you look at their technology policies (http://www.greenparty.ca/platform2004/en/policie