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

What I'm wondering is...

[students]

Why isn't protection for open source software and limitation of intelectual property law a political issue? I never heard it discussed in the presidential election. What can we do to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront? Don't we want to put all the FUD behind us?

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[students]

Now that's cynical.

One of the great (and sometimes (as in spam) awful) things about the internet is it can be used to reach many people cheaply and quickly.

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[slashname3]

Is it cynical or just having lived long enough to learn how things really work?

When you live through a few more elections and watch the way things play out you will realize that virtually every politician out there will say what ever they have to say to get a vote. The whole election process has been reduced to producing a few select sound bites and photo ops and bombarding the electorate with negative ads saying just how bad the other guy would be if you voted for him.

I have often wondered if the same thing was done back when Lincoln was elected or if this is something that has occured in the last 50 years.

Either way the only real way you can get your views acted on by the government is either to adopt the views pushed on you by one of the two political parties or to buy a congress critter of your very own.

I suspect that you can currently buy a Democrat at all time low rates, at least for the next couple of years. And it all comes down to money no matter what they say. If you can provide a number large enough you can get politicians to do what ever you want. If they say no to something that just means that someone else is paying them more than you offered.

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[Anonymous Coward]

60% turned out to vote in 2004, that's the highest it's been since 1968. What percentage votes in other countries, those that get a chance to vote that is?

Re:What I'm wondering is...

[kcbrown]

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.

It's even worse than that: the media corporations own -- surprise -- the media! That means that they control most of what voters see and learn about candidates, and that means that all candidates have to please the media corporations, otherwise they'll quickly find themselves the victim of the "Dean Scream" treatment. And since the media corporations almost certainly sell (in whatever form) their influence over candidates to other corporations, the end result is that almost no candidate in office will act against the wishes of the corporations. And big corporations like restrictive "IP" laws (because it gives them additional power over those with less money), so you'll find very few viable candidates that are in favor of less restrictive "IP" laws (unless they're less restrictive only for the big corporations).

This situation has no resolution short of violent revolution, and that can't succeed with the firepower advantage (thousands to millions to one, depending on which weapons you want to count, on a per-soldier versus per-civilian basis) the military has over the civilian population.

Better get used to more and more draconian "IP" laws (and other laws, for that matter).

Deja Vu

[Lord Kano]

I feel like I'm reading a Jon Katz story.

Enough with the buzzword bingo, please!

LK

Too many "experts"

[moofdaddy]

Like it or not, modern day politics is a game for professionals. In open source technology related things, people who don't know what they are doing stay out of it. In politics though, everyone thinks they know what they are doing and everyone has an opinion.

Re:Too many "experts"

[bstarrfield]

The essential, defining characteristic of a democracy is the demos, loosely, the people. It's proper that each of us has an opinion, and each of us assumes that we know the best way to run the government. The marketplace of ideas, in action.

True, the US is a republican (little r) government - with elected leaders given a higher degree of responsibility. Our Founding Fathers assumed that those elected leaders would be smarter, would be wiser than the average person. Funny though, it seems that our system is rapidly evolving into a means of electing those who are disinterested in reality, or who do not wish to understand the world.

Proffesional politicians, and their staff, are contributing to the death of our democracy.

The job of the political expert (spin doctors, media consultants, pollsters, etc.) is quite simple and direct: elect a particular candidate to public office. Nothing more, nothing less. True, the various experts may have some political opinions, but at the end of the day that political opinion is subjugated to the task at hand. Understanding problems - now that really doesn't seem to contribute to electability.

Candidates refuse to take strong positions as their advisiors (rightly) point out that strong positions may alienate those who hold differing opinions. Candidates simplify complex issues to avoid confusing voters and ensure that the sound bites are ready for the evening news. For goodness sake - candidates are essentially selected by political professionals to guarentee some vanishing measure of "electability." If you know to much, you're an "egghead", you're out of touch with the common man, you're elitist, etc. Which is how we wind up with anti-intellectuals in charge of the government. (Actually fake anti-intellectuals - look where they went to school.)

True, the world is a complex place, but the professional politician and his staff often seems disinterested in understanding complexity. Each person has an opinion about politics - and that's the way it should be.

The era of top-down politics ... is over?

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

Funny.

I thought that was what the guys who wrote the US Constitution said when they were done?

Are we just saying we mean it for real this time, or are we just fooling ourselves?

Eternal vigilence is the only real way to keep the politics bottom-up.

It does help when the leaf nodes in the socio-political processes have as much access to the technology that controls information as the root nodes, of course.

I wonder how it is that we moderns have access to that technology when so much of history is full of examples of political and social systems where it was assumed that the masses must be strictly guarded to access to it.

Or are we fooling ourselves?

Here in Australia

[darnok]

... the two major political parties work very differently. The Liberal Party (who are the more *right*-leaning) have a top-down model broadly similar to how both major US parties work - decisions are made by the man/men at the top, and filter down to the underlings whose job it is to make them happen.

The Labor Party have a bottom-up model, where various factions (e.g. trade unions) push ideas, solutions etc. upwards to the man at the top. Infighting within the Labor Party is very much out in the open as the various factions try to win out, whereas infighting in the Liberal Party is almost exclusively carried out behind closed doors.

One thing that has been a pattern is that, when the Labor Party has been running the country, their leaders have almost always been extremely charismatic people. Keating, Hawke, Whitlam (and now we're back 30 years) have had very strong public personas. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, has had "grey men" in charge whenever they've been in power - nobody ever accused Howard, Fraser, McMahon, Holt or Gorton of being particularly visionary in the way they went about doing things (OK, Gorton is a slight exception, but he was nowhere near as charismatic as any of the Labor guys).

Here's my point, at long last: if you equate the open-source (bottom up movement) with the Australian Labor Party (bottom up model), maybe the thing that's missing is a highly charismatic leader for the open-source movement. Maybe FOSS needs someone who can present the vision, paint the future as rosy, etc. etc., while managing to galvanise the hard-headed FOSS coders behind the scenes to buy into the same vision. Someone who can stand up and convince a room full of sceptical businessmen and politicians that he knows what their problems are and FOSS can address them, while being able to stand up in a room full of C++ and Java coders and convince them his coding and design skills are on a par with theirs.

From what I've read, Miguel de Icaza would possible be the foremost candidate for that type of role at this particular instant, but I've got no idea if that's a role he sees himself filling at any point in the future.

Fundamental Differences....

[DJ XpL0iT]

Ok...Given that the article talks about using open source as a model to galvanise the 'grassroots' supporters, I don't see this as a model that can be applied so easily to politics.

Open Source as a paradigm relies pretty much on two things, a desire to participate, and the belief that well reasoned argument based on merit will ensure the implementation of the best solution.

In Politics, I think both things are lacking from the general populace (as opposed to the, for the want of a better word, intelligentsia(sp?)).

Joe Everyman doesn't vote based on a rational discussion of ideas and policies - he votes along pretty much strict party lines. And that's when he bothers to vote at all.

Open Source is about informed intelligent participation, and I think that sounds too much like hard work for Joe Everyman.

As examples, I don't think anyone could argue that between Kerry and Bush, or Latham and Howard, that either of them won or lost on their MERITS

...or maybe I'm just cynical...

True open-source..

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Allow laws to be publicly editable via the web (in a Wiki style). The only power elected lawmakers would have would be to approve for a version of the page.

CivicSpace Labs

[turnstyle]

"But the majority of internet infrastructure is based on open source software. That doesn't have a wide impact?

Time to mention CivicSpace Labs, a project started by Zach Rosen who had been with the Dean campaign (along with a few others who I don't know).

Quoting from the site:
"CivicSpace Labs is a funded continuation of the DeanSpace project. We are veterans of the Dean campaign web-effort and are now building the tool-set of our dreams. We are busily completing work on CivicSpace, a grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters."

Agreement and Journal Entry plug

[Allen Zadr]

You are right, because there is nothing in open source that doesn't also get implimented by a closed source company. Similarly, there's very little created in closed source, that doesn't eventually become and open-source implimentation.

I've actually been experimenting with open politics a bit myself. See my Journal. It turns out, I've started defining a political platform. I'd love some wider comments on it.

Re:It was supposed to elect the Democrats, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the Fox News affect and consider that the GOP had a kick-ass IT infrastructure and was counting votes down to the block level all across the country.

Using "IT" to photoshop a Hitler mustache onto a picture of Bush at Moveon.org can't compete with that.

The "Open Source" analogy is quite apt, because a million message board flamers means absolutely squat in the real world.

Cart before the horse...

[venomkid]

Open source is just a programming "contexted" facet of the regular behavior of information (Open/Free).

The fact is that, under real, tremendous stresses (like this election), this kind of information gets out anyway.

It has nothing to do with your software movement. Your software movement is a small acknowledgement of something bigger.

jury system

[bcrowell]

I think the closest thing we have to open-source culture in politics is the jury system, especially the original jury system in Ye Olde England: round up everybody who was nearby when the crime occurred, and have them vote.

Similarities:

• The jury system is decentralized. The open-source movement is decentralized.
• On a jury, you don't get to vote without having sat through a trial and a discussion of all the issues. In open source, your opinions don't count unless you actually contribute to the project.
• There are no secrets. Nobody says, "I can't reveal my evidence that (the defendant is guilty|Iraq has WMD)."

Most voters don't have a clue about the issues they're voting on, and couldn't state a coherent political philosophy if you put a gun to their head. I'd really like to see something more like the jury system used more broadly for political decision-making. Here's a straw-man proposal:

1. Everybody picks a personal representative in whom to entrust his franchise. To become a representative, you need to have at least 100 contituents, and you can have no more than 300.
2. The personal representatives form a jury pool. When an important political issue comes up, a jury is empaneled at random, and after a period of online discussion, they vote.

Participatory Democracy

[Rockin' Az]

As someone said earlier - open source politics is what democracy is supposed to be about. More properly, open source politics is what particpatory democracy is supposed to be about.

In Australia, the first mainstream example of participatory democracy was the Australian Democrats. They have party members elect their leaders, and even require party policies to be balloted by members. As such, they were probably the first member driven party since the early days of federation (the ALP probably began as a very member driven party - but that has changed).

Now, for those of you that follow Australian politics, you will no doubt have noticed that the Australian Democrats are not in a very healthy state at the moment. At the last federal election they received their lowest level of support since their inception and lost all three of their senators that were up for re-election (including OSS advocate Brian Greig).

The decline in support for the Australian Democrats can be traced partly to their support of the GST, which alienated a lot of left-leaning voters, but most substantially to a major public brawl within the party back in 2001 (I think). This brawl included the dumping of then party leader Natasha Stott-Despoja - an individually who was both popular within the Democrats and the electorate at large.

This public spat shows the biggest difficulty faced by advocates of participatory democracy. Democracy is both beautiful and ugly. It involves the resolution of sometimes diametrically opposed positions. Such resolutions are not always peaceful and rarely ever private. As such, when the Democrats faced such an ugly moment it was became the political drama du jour and was lapped up by the press.

Now here is the kicker - if you have a public spat, voter very quickly stop voting for you. The media portrays you as "deeply divided" and "unlikely to recover". Politically that is the coup de grace.

Politics is not like software. In software if you have an idea you can demonstrate that idea in practice and you can debate the technical merits of that idea using quantifiable data. This does not preclude personal ambitions etc getting in the way, but OSS development is the development of a technical product.

Politics is only part technical. For the main it is philosophy, morality, expediency, ambition etc - none of which are the subject of technical discussion. The GNOME-KDE flamewars might sound nasty, the kernel VM flamewars might sound nasty, but they are nothing in comparison to political disagreements.

Open source politics is great - but it is painful. Unless voters accept that it is painful, and ugly, and personal, open source politics will lose out to the great political cathedrals every time.

Old horse -- we need real freedom of speech

[PrettyGoodPersonage]

Until we have a robust "Internet website" location where anyone can post information without threat from any government, or anyone, with the information permanent (unlike the spineless archive.org project) and freely accessible, we will not have the very foundation for a liberal society. Where there are places to hide, the corrupt will do so. Think back on even just the most recent media exposes. Only because of whistleblowers (who suffered the old rule that no good deed goes unpunushed) did we learn of widespread abuse/exploitation. We need protection of information and true privacy. If the smart geeks only focused their efforts instead of getting caught doing stupid hacking stints, maybe we would one day get the robust P2P high-performance "freenetproject" that humanity truly needs. This resource must not reside anywhere physically, or be personally identifiable. It is the most important challenge that the capable among us must absolutely strive to create. Without this, humanity cannot move forward.

Re:Democracy is SUPPOSED to be open source

[PrettyGoodPersonage]

The point is that this is starting to happen. The next step is figuring out how to ensure the elctorate are EDUCATED despite themselves. I am not saying FORCING them to eat propaganda. I am saying what is the trick/tool/process to encourage voters to 1) learn and 2) vote. Democracy only works when people know what they are being democratic about. And by the way the Democrat party does not necessarily equate to democracy (note how many governments around the world have the word "Democratic" in their names, despite being facist, communist, or otherwise totalitarian).

My turn to by cynical...

[students]

If all politians say what ever it takes to be elected, they would all say, "Watch me kiss my wife. Watch me be just like you but also a great leader. Watch me shoot people trying to shoot you. Watch my oponent do the exact oposite of what I do."

Then they would be identical, and no one would bother to vote.

I think there would be more interest in this topic if someone was paying the politians to take a stand on it, even if it was Microsoft.

I'll tell you why

[JumperCable]

We don't make it a noticeable issue. This past election I went to EFF.org to see what candidates they endorsed. I couldn't find any. I even bothered to e-mail them to see if they advocated anyone. No response. I did a bit of hunting around and could not find anything on it.

All the other issue groups rate the candidates & grade their past voting records. e.g. http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_rating_category.ph p?can_id=CNIP0616

Until we start doing the same & start getting the information out to the public, it will continue to fly under the radar screen.

OK. You might say with all the other issues going on in the world why would any sane person make their decision based on EFF issues? It's easy, no candidate is ever a perfect match. EFF ratings would be one more thing to consider when rating a candidate. I know on one candidate race I was looking at information like that would have changed my vote.

Re:zerg

[jrexilius]

Actually I think the problem is that Democrats spend all their time postulating about their superior intellect and obvious rightness and looking for excuses for why people disagree with them. They lost this election because they became the "hate mongers" that they were so righteously condemning as evil.

Open-source approaches may or may not have helped with that issue but, being one myself, foaming-mouth linux fanatics haven't really helped OS adoption.

What really pisses me off is the assumption that because I dont agree with every thing you say that I dont want the same things as you and that you have a monopoly on both compassion and intelligence. I try very hard to remind myself that just because I think you may not see all of the picture of an issue doesn't mean you are ignorant and without morals or compassion. The same respect would go a long way.

Regarding your points about Air America and other windmills that Democrats are battling, I would say that they are not lacking for media attention, sympathy, and bias, nor are they lacking pop-culture icons on their campaign trail.

What I would like to see is Democrats understand that on many issues both sides agree on the objective, we all want peace, we all want to get along with the world, and we want everyone in our country to have good lives. Now lets debate how we get there. What are pragmatic approaches to solving the problems we agree on? And lets solve what we can, and then debate what we disagree on.

Open-source decisions

[jon_oner]

Yes, but the instant dissemination of information renders the whole "enlightened leader" concept of democracy obsolete. No single group of people should have the burden of making decisions. If politics were really "open-sourced"(as in perpetual referendums), the current system of management would not be able to compete with it. The quality and quatity of ideas would be far greater if the masses were allowed to directly make decision, instead of just a few elected (closed-sourced) politicians. Open-source democracy is truly the will of the people - they get to decide instantly what gets done and what doesn't.

I call BS.

[elmegil]

Never before has the top-down world of presidential campaigning been opened to a bottom-up, networked community of ordinary voters.

And not even RIGHT NOW. Idiot. If the campaign cycle were truly open source, Dean would have been the candidate.

Re:Not even a blogging gay Jesus...

[bayvult]

You're right, and in states that had the lowest broadband internet penetration the vote turned out handsomely for Bush. Real world social organizations trumped virtual networks.

The echo chamber did for Dean (especially when he sent in the Perfect Storm: 2000 volunteers with orange helmets with blue propellers on each one.) There's a nice rant on this at El Reg

Even if Jesus set up a blogging cafe in the center of Rockport, Texas and extolled the virtues of a woman's right to choose while snapping pictures of gay weddings with his Nokia, it would have made no difference to this election. All of the bloggers would have told themselves about the miracle, while Bobby and Bobby Sue went right along with their business ... George W. Bush kicked your blogging ass.

What if moderate Dems joined the Republican party?

[jayveekay]

Currently, the moderate vote is split between dems and repubs. So, a moderate Republican like McCain can't get nominated because his party is dominated by the more extremist fringe. But if all the moderate registered Democrats switched to the Republican party, wouldn't moderate Republicans have a better chance of getting nominated?

The phrases that come to mind are:

If you can't beat them, join them.

Embrace and extend (the Republican party into a more moderate future.)

Re:PR people with Che Guevara on their wall

[mattkime]

Any point that movie was trying to make is completely lost because you know that if Moore had found evidence to the contrary of what he wants to believe, he wouldn't show it. How could any sane person trust someone like that as a source of information.

Has Bush been open with the American people about his failure to find the WMDs? Hell no. He just repeats that there was a certain threat. Based on what? He won't talk about it. Now why should people trust our president if he doesn't show us the other side of the argument?

I've read the rebuttals on F911 and the only points I can concede are based on tone. I think a lot of people didn't want to hear that the president did something wrong - after all, America only stands for good things. Now, if people write it off because its too far from what they want to believe, I'm not sure what the right thing to do it. Say the president only lied a little bit? Billion dollar no bid contracts to the VP's former company are okay?

Its absolutely silly to say that F911 "is the most blatant display of propaganda they have ever seen in their lives". How many americans have ever come across Rush Limbaugh? Ever read the New York Post?

Unlike your North Korea Korean war museum example, you CAN do research to find the truth about Micheal Moore's assertions. Perhaps too many Americans are too lazy to do it, but even the most anti-Moore people haven't be able to counter the claims I've made in my previous post.

If Americans are too lazy to find the truth, we're all fucked.

Evolutions that can be delayed, not stopped

[Anonymous Coward]

Some evolutions of society can't be stopped, they can be delayed.

Human rights and republic have been something people dreamt about for a long time before they were used.

We'll have some countries making advances (Latvia?) and some era of obscurity (now?), but "you can't stop an idea whose time has come" (quote from someone else). Open Source politics are just another form of transparency, and that will not kill dishonesty in the circles of politics. It will just make them invent new form of dishonesty (such as denouncing corruption of africa's government backshish created new ways of backshish through making african leaders invest in occidental companies that were granted huge federal contracts)... Can you say pushing the limits?

Re:We can only see good from this

[Anonymous Coward]

Another, problem I see with democrats(people not the news media and the politions but the people I work with.) in general is that they are much louder then republicians. While, I am a republician, I don't think most people at work know this. I keep to myself, and even more so when it comes to politics. I know many other republicians who are like me in this sense. I will listen to some democrat talk about how Bush stole the election and then walk on because the other person just asumed I agreed with him. Earlier, I have tried to discuse politics with others and made to feel like my opion did matter and that what blah, blah said must be the truth because he knows best. This makes it a waste of time to discuse politics with them. I do discuse politics with my rightwing and right leaning friends, but I don't think it is as meaningful as discusing it with someoen who disagrees with my but who listens to what I have to say.

Is Open Source a good model for politics?

[mwood]

Yes. Will the party bosses allow it to happen to them? No way. Bottom-up politics is going to have to create itself *from the bottom up* until it is powerful enough to toss the top onto the scrap heap of history.

(And a generation later the most effective bottom-uppers will be the bad guys at the top and become the targets of a new generation of bottom-uppers.)

The Founding Fathers design lacked scalability.

[tamrood]

When the structure of American government was designed, the Founding Fathers never imagined:
1. That America would ever have 300 million people.
2. That the government would grow so large that it would employ 1 adult in 5.
3. That every adult over 18 would have the right to vote.
The gigantic disconnect between the government and the people is due to the reduction of the participation in government decision making per person. In other words, there are so many of us, that none of us can be heard above the crowd. If the Open Source Model is applied to govenment, it will provide that missing voice, and return control of our nation to the will of the people.

Did EVERYBODY miss the point?

[mcrbids]

Is there anybody here who actually RTFA!?!? Did EVERYBODY see the words "Open Source Politics" in the parent article and start blathering immediately about patents in a conditioned-response fashion?

1) It's not about gcc,

2) It's not about abolishing software patents,

3) It's not about mandating open-source software in govornment installations,

4) It's not about the DMCA.

Folks, It's about using the open-source organizational method in the political realm.

To which I can only say - in representative democracies, such as the U.S., politics has always been "open source"!!!!

Now, the recent rise of the "blogosphere" is starting to change the balance of power in various nations. Improved collaborationa and moderation methods result in a quicker method of collecting and filtering huge amounts of data, which has typically been the job of the media. (CNN/NBC/CBS/FOX) The "media" won't go away, but it's power is definitely dwindling. How far, only time (and the media) can tell.

The core concepts of end-user involvement, as seen in open-source circles, is the point of representative democracies!