Open-source governance
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Open-source governance (also known as open governance and open politics) is a
Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this participation vary. Accordingly, there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. There are a wide array of projects and movements which are working on building open-source governance systems.[2]
Many
Applications of the principles
In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by democratic institutions:[4]
- Open-government mechanisms including those for public participation and engagement, such as the use of IdeaScale, Google Moderator, Semantic MediaWiki, GitHub, and other software by actual ruling governments – these mechanisms are well-developed, especially in the UK and the US,[5] or by civil society and citizens directly for example, Opengovpioneers[6][7] in the UK, and the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers[8]in Scotland.
- forums and wikis, where political issues and arguments can be debated, either within or between political party constraints, taking three distinct forms:
- Political-party-platform development, in which ideas are solicited from anyone or almost anyone and openly discussed to a point but the ranking and devotion of resources to developing ideas is reserved to party members or supporters. A variant is the non-partisan think-tank or citizen-advocacy group-platform development as has become common in Canada, for example the Dominion Institute policywiki.[9]
- free speechlaws for a local jurisdiction (following laws strictly is part of the open politics ideal).
- Open party mechanisms to actually govern and operate formal political parties without the usual insider politics and interest groups that historically have taken over such parties; these experiments have been limited and typically take the form of parties run by referendums or online. An example of this is Italy's Five Star Movement.
- Political-party-platform development, in which ideas are solicited from anyone or almost anyone and openly discussed to a point but the ranking and devotion of resources to developing ideas is reserved to party members or supporters. A variant is the non-partisan think-tank or citizen-advocacy group-platform development as has become common in Canada, for example the
- In the California Assembly, Crowdsourced legislation via a 'wiki bills' website is being initiated via an online wiki, with an introduction deadline of early February, 2015.[10]
- Hybrid mechanisms which attempt to provide journalistic coverage, political platform development, political transparency, strategic advice, and critique of a ruling government of the same party all at the same time. Dkosopediais the best known example of this.
Some models are significantly more sophisticated than a plain wiki, incorporating semantic tags, levels of control or scoring to mediate disputes – however this always risks empowering a clique of moderators more than would be the case given their trust position within the democratic entity – a parallel to the common wiki problem of
Common and simultaneous policy
Some advocates of these approaches, by analogy to software code, argue[
These goals for instance were cited often during the Green Party of Canada's experiments with open-political-platform development.[citation needed] As one of over a hundred national Green party entities worldwide and the ability to co-ordinate policy among provincial and municipal equivalents within Canada, it was in a good position to maintain just such a central repository of policy, despite being legally separate from those other entities.
Difference from prior initiatives
Open-source governance differs from previous open-government initiatives in its broader emphasis on collaborative processes.
...simply publishing snapshots of government information is not enough to make it open.
History
The "Imagine Halifax" (IH) project was designed to create a citizens' forum for elections in
The 2004–05
The Liberal Party of Canada also attempted a deep policy renewal effort in conjunction with its leadership race in 2006.[12][13] While candidates in that race, notably Carolyn Bennett, Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, all made efforts to facilitate web-threaded policy-driven conversations between supporters, all failed to create lateral relationships and thus also failed to contribute much to the policy renewal effort.
Numerous very different projects related to open-source governance collaborate under the umbrella of the
most of which are building platforms of open-source governance.- nonprofit (501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, partnered with the Oregon 150 Project,[17] building an online public think tank in which the votes of users determines policy, seeking to connect the values people hold to their positions on issues and the policies they advocate.[18] Votorola is software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels.[19] The White House 2 was a project which crowdsourced the U.S. agenda, "imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people on the internet." Wikicracy has developed a Mediawiki-based platform using most of Open politics criteria[20] These grassroots efforts have been matched by government initiatives that seek similar goals. A more extensive list of these and similar organizationsis available externally.
Future Melbourne is a wiki-based collaborative environment for developing Melbourne's 10-year plan. During public consultation periods, it enables the public to edit the plan with the same editing rights as city personnel and councilors.[21]
The New Zealand Police Act Review was a wiki used to solicit public commentary during the public consultation period of the acts review.[22]
At linux.conf.au on January 14, 2015, in Auckland, New Zealand, Australian Audrey Lobo-Pulo presented Evaluating Government Policies Using Open Source Models, agitating for government policy related knowledge, data and analysis to be freely available to everyone to use, modify and distribute without restriction — "a parallel universe where public policy development and analysis is a dynamic, collaborative effort between government and its citizens". Audrey reported that the motivation for her work was personal uncertainty about the nature and accuracy of models, estimates and assumptions used to prepare policies released with the 2014 Australian Federal Government Budget, and whether and to what extent their real world impact is assessed following implementation.[23] A white paper on "Evaluating Government Policies using Open Source Models" was released on September 10, 2015.[24]
Open politics as a distinct theory
The open-politics theory, a narrow application of open-source governance, combines aspects of the
While some interpret it as an example of "open-source politics", open politics is not a top–down theory but a set of best practices from
Its advocates often engage in legal lobbying and advocacy to directly change laws in the way of the broader application of the technology, e.g. opposing
See also
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Citations
- ^ Open-source democracy: how online communication is changing offline politics by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Demos. Page 56 et al
- ^ "Related projects". Archived from the original on 2018-07-24. Retrieved 2009-02-05.
- ^ Bodle, Robert (2011). "Upholding online anonymity in Internet governance: Affordances, ethical frameworks, and regulatory practices".
- ^ Service-oriented architecture governance for the services driven enterprise; Eric A. Marks
- ^ Knowledge governance: processes and perspectives; Snejina Michailova, Nicolai J. Foss, Oxford University Press. Page 241 et al
- ^ "Open Government Pioneer Project". opengovpioneers.miraheze.org. Retrieved 2017-05-19.
- ^ "Open Government Partnership Scottish Action Plan - gov.scot". www.gov.scot. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
- ^ "Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers – Grow, Restore, Prosper". NatureScot. Retrieved 2023-04-09.
- Dominion Institutepolicywiki
- ^ (Jan 8, 2015) "Gatto Promotes 'Wiki Bill' project" Crescenta Valley Weekly 6(19) p.1,8 accessdate=2015-01-14
- ^ Decision Making Handout
- ^ "Liberal Party of Canada Renewal Commission, Notes from Task Force on Women Meeting" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-08-02. Retrieved 2011-04-22.
- ^ "Liberal Party of Canada".
- ^ "Active projects". Archived from the original on 2017-05-27. Retrieved 2010-06-28.
- ^ "Collaborative governance". Archived from the original on 2017-08-03. Retrieved 2010-01-02.
- ^ Aktivdemokrati (Swedish)
- ^ www.oregon150.org. "Oregon 150: Public Information".
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "DemocracyLab".
- ^ "Votorola".
- ^ "Wikicracy".
- ^ "Future Melbourne Wiki".
- ^ New Zealand Police Act Review Archived 2008-04-10 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Audrey Lobo-Pulo. "Evaluating Government Policies Using Open Source Models". Retrieved 15 January 2015.
- ^ "Evaluating Government Policies using Open Source Models" (PDF). Phoensight.
Further reading
- Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture. Berry, D. M & Moss, G. (2008) (at Google Books). Canada: Pygmalion Books. PDF
- Programming a direct-democracy, a 2007 article on Efficasync. A Method of Open-Source Self-Governance
- Us Now – A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet.
- Open Source Democracy by Douglas Rushkoff, 2004
- Power to the (wired) people What's Wrong With Politics and Can Technology Do Anything To Fix It? by Mitchell Kapor, October 7, 2004
- Berry, D M.& Moss, Giles (2006). Free and Open-Source Software: Opening and Democratising e-Government's Black Box. Information Polity Volume 11. (1). pp. 21–34
- Smari McCarthy's work on the Shadow Parliament Project and Citizens Foundation