[Bas]

I think we should stop worrying so much about voting and start caring more about open source governance:

Proponents of open source governance call for creating democratic, wiki-like online platforms which consist solely of user-generated content. For instance, a local community could govern itself and all members of the community can contribute to a particular policy by adding on to it. The three aforementioned critical elements of citizen journalism – open publishing, collaborative editing and distributed content – are vital to this system. This is not some futuristic concept, but it is happening now.

A Swedish political party called Aktiv Demokrati, aiming for the national parliament, believes that “all citizens from different parts in the society should be able to influence important issues both directly and indirectly straight into parliament through an internet based democracy system.” And they’ve enacted such a system for their own party already.

Another example of this is the Trots Op Nederland (TON) (Proud of The Netherlands) party founded by Rita Verdonk, a prominent Dutch politician. The party doesn’t use the traditional membership system, as is common in The Netherlands, instead the party invites people to participate using its Wiki-system. This Wiki-technology is also the basis of popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. “In the Wiki of TON, you can deliver your own contribution to the first eight main themes that TON is focussing on.” (TON) In this way Dutch citizens can contribute to the party’s political programme. The party is currently not part of the Dutch parliament, as Rita Verdonk founded it after a post-election boot from her former party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. Although prognosis at one point were that TON would be the second biggest party if elections were held at that point, the party has now dropped to a prognosis of becoming one of the smallest parties in the parliament.

A final example of this type of e-democracy is the global Metagovernment project which is involved in developing open source (‘free’) software “which will run the Metagovernment and potentially any other community wishing to govern itself through open source governance.” It “makes the basic assumption that the participating parties are on some level willing to cooperate with each other and work towards common solutions, at least to the extent that they recognize they are members of some common community.” If the participating parties meet up to that, the software should “make discussion within and among large communities viable and effective.”

Taken from an essay: Politics 2.0


I don't really believe in voting. I believe in participating.