The Relationship Between FOSS and Democracy

An anonymous reader writes "Free software is about freedom. So it shouldn't be any surprise that the ideals behind the free software movement have spread to the place where freedom is most affected: government. The old definition of e-democracy is, basically, 'using computers in politics and governance.' So a politician sending out a batch e-mail is e-democracy. The new movement is about removing the power from politicians and making governance collaborative. The analogy to FOSS is remarkable: think of the current governments as the old guard computing companies, and the collaborative governance movement as the geeks with crazy notions of a different way of organizing things. FOSS looked like an impossible pipe-dream when it started. Tell that to the Apache group today."

Comments

Who's going to clean toilets and guard prisoners?

[elrous0]

Are we going to use Twitter and Facebook to arrange a schedule when we're going to all take turns guarding the prisoners, patching the roads, cleaning the sewers, and all that stuff that government does through that old-fashioned bureaucracy? I mean, we're "making governance collaborative," overthrowing the old-guy system of doing things, right? So from now on, we'll just send out a tweet when someone robs a bank, and handle the police work on it *collaboratively*.

Surely everyone is willing to do some actual *WORK*, right, instead of just lazily shooting your digital mouth off on a blackberry or iPad keyboard? Surely we all realize that *REAL* governance takes actual time and effort, no?

Wait, what is that? ...is that crickets I hear?

Government is not about freedom

[El_Muerte_TDS]

You cannot fork government, you are not free to change to your liking; You cannot use a different government than your neighbor does, you are not free to pick.

The form of democracy used in most countries is everything but freedom. Sure, you are free to vote on some guy that might share opinions/thoughts/ideals, based on the propaganda they put out. But after that, the person you voted on has free play till the next elections. At that point, you handed over part of your freedom.

Re:Who's going to clean toilets and guard prisoner

[killmenow]

No, the point is FOSS will help us become an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We'll take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more...

And in other ways...

[MarkRose]

And in other ways, FOSS and democracy are opposites. The biggest aspect that pops into mind is force: nobody is forced to use FOSS against their wishes. FOSS is almost always compatible with proprietary implementations (that is, a proprietary implementation can re-implement whatever FOSS does). With democracy, there is always the tyranny of the majority: if 50% + 1 want something, everyone must go along by force. That strikes me much more like proprietary software than FOSS, where a single implementation is the only implementation (such as needing perfect MS Office compatibility).

FOSS is much more like liberty or anarchy than democracy. No one forces you to use FOSS, but you are free to do so.

Re:Who's going to clean toilets and guard prisoner

[grcumb]

The "point" to me sounded like a bunch of bullshit cyberspeak about how the internet is going to turn government into a big drum circle where we all join hands and sing songs of peace and love.

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of Progressive activism does suffer from its (often impractical) idealism. That said, the assertion that the Internet, with its FOSS-style approach to standards and its preference for unmediated communication, really is a democratising force.

The problem is, the powers-that-be are becoming aware of this fact, and they don't like it. I may be getting cynical in my old age, but recently all I've been seeing is how susceptible to coercion modern networks are. I've written a series of newspaper columns and blog posts on the topic. Here's the basic take-away:

We can take two closely related lessons from this:

• Centrally controlled communications resources are, in times of social crisis, extremely vulnerable to compromise; and
• Information networks that rely on the ‘End to End Principle’ – that is, networks that join two end points without particularly caring how those two points connect – are still subject to compromise, but the damage can be mitigated either by routing around trouble spots or by connecting to different end points.

In short, the core design principle of the Internet, the concept of the ‘end to end’ network, is inherently democratic, empowering the individual at the expense of central control.

Will the revolution be twittered? If Egypt is any example, it's increasingly likely that it won't. That said, Internet protocols and FOSS philosophy still hold some important ground. They can be used to organise groups and share experience/intelligence. Not all hope is lost.