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?"

Comments

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[mind21_98]

A large voter bloc that always comes out to elections is seniors. To candidates, it's more efficent to cater to the issues of seniors than to many of the other issues out there (not to mention the AARP's enormous influence in politics). And contrary to what you might think, seniors care more about whether they'll have Medicare tomorrow than whether the DMCA is repealed. Maybe if more young people voted this might change.

We can only see good from this

[mind21_98]

For instance, open-source style politics was the reason Howard Dean was leading before the primaries. It allowed him to reach out to more people than he otherwise would have. In general the Internet is causing the voice of the people to be heard, and we should expect more Howard Dean-style campaigns in the future.

Re:We can only see good from this

[danheskett]

open-source style politics was the reason Howard Dean was leading before the primaries

Dean's supporters and staff fell into the trap of the ultimate echo chamber: blogging. You take a group of like minded people, throw them into constant communication for months on end, and suddenly you start to think that you are the majority.

Dean never won a majority of the votes in primary, save maybe Vermont. They had a few thousand extremely active users and it really got people into thinking that everyone else was on board. Add in a few early polls and all the sudden Dean is front runner who has never caught any votes.

Blogging is great. And politics that are more open are great. But let's be real here for a minute. Blogging is not a way to influence people's minds. It is a way to connect to like minded people.

I am convinced that is what happened with Dean. You had a sizeable but still minor portion of the population on board with him. The echo's got very loud, and convinced everyone he was the guy to beat.

It's not dissimiliar to the rest of the OSS minority. Some OSS apps have made great inroads, as have some companies. Get people together that use the apps, and all you get is how the players are going down.

It's like the constant stories/comments about how "5 years from now MS will not exisit as it is known today", despite the fact that MS has increased units shipped and profits consistently and that although it's relative market share isn't necessarily growing in all segments, its absolute users clearly is. Yet none of that matters. Because a large plurality of the users use non-MS products at least somewhat often, therefore, MS is losing users left and right, and MS is doomed.

Whenever you discuss events online, and get involved in a community you always have to recognize that you are dealing with like-minded individuals more than you expect.

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The simple answer is that Republicans take in a lot of money from the Media corporations and Democrats take in a lot of money from Media personalities (actors and executives). The computer industry is nearly universially pro-Patent and spreads money to both parties. Even big Linux-backers like IBM and HP are known for their patents.

Futhermore, you are fighting the Great Myth of the American Inventor, and the idea that the patent/copyright system are the foundations of American Industry and its cultural influence.

Most engineers, songwriters, and filmmakers support the IP system as it stands. This is only an issue on GNU/Lunatic Fringe places like slashdot.

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[slashname3]

Open source software does not generate millions of dollars that can be funneled into a politicians pockets. As such it will never be an political issue, unless it threatens some proprietary software vendors enough. Then the politicians will pass laws to regulate open source software which will in effect make it illegal to write and dissiminate free software.

Unless you are a special interest with lots of money to buy a politician your pet issue will not have a voice in government circles. That is the way the system works.

If you want to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront you will need to pass the hat and collect a sizeable wad of cash which may eventually attract a politician that you can sway to push your issue.

So pass the hat and start looking for a congress critter of your very own.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

Ok, I saw no mention in the article of the echo chamber that Democrats lived in for the last 4 years. If we're going to take back the country, we need to instill some discipline: STOP ACTING LIKE THE GUY ACROSS THE DIVIDE IS AN IDIOT. Until we get every single Democrat repeating that in their sleep, nothing's gonna change.

Open-Source Politics means: "I think Republicans are idiots. What's this? Lord Omlette says I shouldn't treat Republicans as idiots? FUCK THAT NOISE! I'ma ignore him and surf a different website. Oooh look, this blog agrees w/ me that Republicans are idiots. Hurray for the Internet!"

All the nifty tools and new communications paradigms are not going to change a goddamned thing until we get back to recognizing that the opposing force are Americans, same as us.

Simple answer

[Chuck Chunder]

Why isn't protection for open source software and limitation of intelectual property law a political issue?

It's too bloody confusing. Half of Slashdot seemingly doesn't understand the difference between copyright and patents. The vast majority of the general public wouldn't relate to it at all. (Though this is one area where projects such as Creative Commons may help in the long term.)

What can we do to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront?

Your best bet would be to find a section of the bible pointing out that software patents are bad.

Not with our voting system...

[adam31]

Not until you change to a "vote for as many as you like" style voting system, where candidates have to compete for the greatest-common-cross-section of opinions. Now it's a system where the politics have led people to believe that how you feel on 1 or 2 issues determines how you feel about everything. How do you feel about taxes? How do you feel about abortion? Alright, here's the entirety of your other political opinions.

They've even convinced us that it even goes down to the very fabric of our being... Who are you? A Liberal, or A Conservative? So it's vitally important to *them* that *they* be the ones to draw the line... make the definition. But of course it's not true. You can believe whatever you want about any different issue. Son of Reagan shows up at the DNC to promote stem cells... and people are SHOCKED.

But no politician has to worry about the lines being blurred when it's a battle of Us or Them. Not until you destroy that paradigm can you begin to have influence.

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[Drantin]

George W Bush website ran IIS but Kerry's ran Apache/Linux

While you may have a point that the people that designed Kerry's site were better informed about the technology they were using(as evidenced by the html comments in the site...), do you really think that Bush asked his webmasters/designers to go make sure his site was hosted on a Microsoft machine? It was probably more along the lines of a friends recommendation "yes mr. president, sir. I've used this company before and whenever the site goes down they're always right there fixing it..."