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The Rise of Open-Source Politics
Posted by
michael
on Sun Nov 07, 2004 09:01 PM
from the so-2003 dept.
from the so-2003 dept.
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?"
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What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Informative)
No amount of change in the behavior of the existing electorate will really heal much so long as turnout remains so pitifully low.
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Informative)
Iceland: 85%
Brazil: 79%
Italy: 81%
Germany: 79%
Sweden: 80%
Norway: 75%
The U.S. is particularly bad when you take into account registration versus eligibility. Most other comparable countries differ by just a couple percent between the two metrics, whereas the United States generally differs by 20-30%. So, while the U.K. may have 60% turnout--that actually represents roughly 60% of eligibles, whereas in the United States a 60% turnout is really only 40% of eligibles. In 2000, for instance, we had 63% turnout, but it was only 46% of eligibles, which oddly enough is almost exactly the same as experienced in Burkina Faso, which is not exactly something to cheer over.
Go to www.idea.int for more info on this. Participation in the U.S. is in fact quite painfully pathetic, like it or not.
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Funny)
"How do you compile open source politics?"
Ask Diebold. 8^)
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:4, Insightful)
IP law is like lawyers: for every one on the right side, there is another one on the wrong side.
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Most musicians (the performers, many of whom are also songwriters) recognize that the current system of IP severely overvalues the minor contribution of record companies while largely screwing the people who actually make the music happen. They just grit their teeth because they feel that they ha
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 sa
Re:My turn to by cynical... (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Simple answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is half the problem with the laws in the first place.
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Informative)
Though, to the average voter it doesn't matter, many think Microsoft is the best thing since sliced bread and really wont be told otherwise. (These are the same people that say Firefox is auwful before even trying it). And those that don't like Microsoft generally still consider many other political items to be much more important, and to an extent they are correct. If I was American (not Canadian) I would have voted Kerry, but if Kerry liked Microsoft and George W liked Linux I still would have voted for Kerry. I really think nuclear war is a bigger deal than Microsoft vs. OSS; and many would agree with me.
The Canadian Green Party (http://www.greenparty.ca/) is an example of a party that support OSS, if you look at their technology policies (http://www.greenparty.ca/platform2004/en/policie
Parent
Re:What I'm wondering is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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..."
Parent
Agreement and Journal Entry plug (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually been experimenting with open politics a bit myself. See my Journal [slashdot.org]. It turns out, I've started defining a political platform. I'd love some wider comments on it.
Parent
Re:Agreement and Journal Entry plug (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have to disagree with that. What about:
1) device drivers
2) proprietary video/audio codecs
3) ArcGIS
4) AutoCAD
5) Statistica
6) many games
Numbers 1-2 stopped me from migrating my Dad to linux, while numbers 3-5 keep me locked into a Windows world.
I've found that some people believe that specialized software will remain proprietary. Others choose to live in a self-imposed "island of freedom", limiting what they can do on a computer. In any case, I don't think its accurate to say all types of software are headed to be open-source. Its a nice myth, but unfortunately not the case currently.
Parent
CivicSpace Labs (Score:3, Interesting)
Time to mention CivicSpace Labs [civicspacelabs.org], 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 organi
Deja Vu (Score:3, Interesting)
Enough with the buzzword bingo, please!
LK
We can only see good from this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We can only see good from this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
The era of top-down politics ... is over? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:The era of top-down politics ... is over? (Score:3, Insightful)
If the individual becomes powerful enough to threaten existing power structures through technology, I'm sure your questions will all be answered. Until then, what harm can be done increasing the power of the individual?
zerg (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:zerg (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:zerg (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that differentiating themselves from Republicans has been a losing strategy, not winning strategy. Republicans have a fixed top-down message that is easily and often repeated. You can't fight it with having a more complex opinion on anything. If it took you more than 5 seconds to explain your position in a witty quip you lost the sound-bite war and are immediately cast as an effette ivory tower liberal who is "out of touch" because apparently "in touch" means supporting simplistic nice-sounding policies that get votes today without any regard for long term effects.
Hasn't this election been a refutation of "open source politics"? Republicans got out their base, and although they did do a lot of grassroots politicking, the message was still based on agenda bullet points. It was still the Cathedral, not the Bazaar. Democrats are the Bazaar with a lot of disparate and less clear cut factions, without strict adherence to absolutist positions. The Cathedral is going to win over. More people attend and are influenced by Cathedrals in this country than Bazaars.
I think it is clear that to compete Democrats have to start fighting this Noise War. That's why they started Air America to compete with conservative talk radio. But to compete they need to stick to a very few, very well-defined, divisive, and visceral positions, and just hammer them relentlessly. Frankly I think that goes against the grain of the whole left which has rested on the notion that the truth will set them free, and if people just know the truth they'll vote correctly. But truth is not always simple and not always sound-bite-ready, and I don't know if it is a winning strategy. The only way it could be is if they somehow astro-turf crazily but that's dishonest.
Parent
Re:zerg (Score:4, Insightful)
A radio station devoted to leftwing propaganda, hosted by all the people who the Right love to hate, when they've already got a good chunk of the center convinced that the gays and the blacks are trying to take over the country, and make people accept gay marriage, etc. (suckers, buying into all that fearmongering) - but you see, Air America worked AGAINST their own cause, by galvanizing the Right even more.
What the Left (or really, the Center) in America needs, is simply a place to air the truth. Not leftwing propaganda, or anti-right hate. Just a place to call out facts, and very strongly backed-up facts (like the al QaQaa issue, etc. - - not the TANG story, because though it's very compelling, there's just plain not enough hard facts to conclude anything). The corporate-dominated media is weak right now. Not just on bias in story selection, but also in their utter lack of fact-checking. Air America could have gone a long way in making the truth obvious and apparent to Americans - but instead, they fell for Rove's divisive tactics, and just played the other side, attacking people for their beliefs, calling them stupid rednecks- and gawd, that one woman had to say something about being a Lesbian every single day. That's supposed to win-over voters in the center?
Parent
Re:zerg (Score:4, Informative)
Kerry would repeal tax breaks for the rich, work to build international alliances, provide stem cell funding, seek gas alternatives, protect a woman's right to abortion, select supreme court justices that feel similarly, work to expand health care cover, and more.
Also, people who typically cite Kerry for not providing a reason to vote for him often do not fault Bush for what the Democrats see as his many faults. (poor economy, no bin laden, no WMDs and therefore no justification for war in Iraq, cheney's haliburton connections, silly stem cell stance, heavy handed foreign policy, prisoner abuse problems, tax cuts for the rich)
I believe we had plenty of reason to speak out against the actions of our president over the past four years.
I hope I'm not annoying you with this, but I believe in what is currently the Democrats cause. I don't think they need to change their goals, just educate people such as I am attempting to do here.
I do think Bush was more effective in communicating with people - his message is painfully simple. Kerry needed to take more of a stand and leave the nuance for later.
Parent
Re:PR people with Che Guevara on their wall (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Democrats need Republican votes (Score:4, Insightful)
They put the Republicans on the defensive which resulted in Bush being re-elected, the Republicans getting a larger margin in the house and senate and the minority leader losing his job. The first time that's happened in 50 years.
I think the problem was that the Democrats thought they were in the majority judging by all the various polls and world opinion and they didn't need "idiots" voting for their guy. Turns out they really were the minority.
Parent
Democrats and Republican need better candidates (Score:5, Informative)
You want some rational arguments against Bush?
- He spends money with more abandon than any liberal in history
- He lies to the American public
- He lauches unprovoked attacks into third world countries
- He can't figure out how to win them once he's started them
- He shows no respect for the constitution
- He shows no respect for civil liberties
- He uses legal loopholes and questionable logic to rationalize going against pretty much every American Ideal, from "innocent until proven guilty" and "seperation of church and state" to "the right to a fair and speedy trial"
- He routinely places the good of corporations over the good of individuals
- etc., etc.
Before any Democrats reading this get to smug, ask yourself: was Kerry the best you could come up with? "I have a plan" and "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong"? Both parties have any number of sensible, credible people they could have run...and the real problem is they ran Bush and Kerry. The race was so close for so long mostly because neither one of them was worth voting for, except as a way to keep the other from winning.-- MarkusQ
Parent
Here in Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Here in Australia (Score:3, Informative)
However, the point still stands; the two parties have been run on a totally separate basis, and maybe the incidents in the Labor Party that you've highlighted have been an attempt to change that model. I could see how a Labor politician could be driven crazy by having to ensure that they'r
Emphatically, yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Politics is, in many ways, what grass roots politics is supposed to be. In the current system I think it has turned into the national parties manipulating the local people, though I speak only for my own locale.
The Republicans are just coming to terms with the notion that their base is comprised, to quote one Republican polster, of "theocrats" - people who believe not that a theocracy is desirable, but that the separation of Church and State has been overemphasized to the nation's detriment. That's who won the 2004 election, and it will be very hard to deny that movement. Democrats should not make the mistake of dismissing the theocrats or ignoring the intellectual and numeric strength of the movement.
The Democrats need new intellectual vigor, and tapping in to the Open Politics movement seems like a natural for them.
If the Republicans embrace Open Politics, I don't know what effect that will have. If neither major party embraces it, then a huge vacuum is opened up for one of the minor parties to fill.
Memeset propagation, not campaigns, most important (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.hnn.us/articles/1244.html
http://ww
So before you can get a "candidate of the people" you need to have the voters already aware of a set of ideas that reflect his politics. What you need is a Leftwing Meme Propagation Machine which needs to be up and running YEARS before the campaign.
If you want to get a real liberal (as opposed to faux liberals like Kerry, Dean, Edwards, et al., you need to sell the idea of progressive politics to the public.
Rightwingers here on
Fundamental Differences.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not with our voting system... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Politics? We already have an idea (Score:3, Insightful)
The two projects could have merged long ago if only they didn't have such different models at the time. Can they merge now? Doesn't seem like it. And that division would seem to mirror the kind of division we might see in "open source politics" of the future.
I can only imagine that two camps out there might have "the best answer" to global warming, renewable energy, clear air, keeping the nation's unemployment rate down, managing terrorist threat, you name it.
I can see an open source model for research projects, however. The trouble is, people with money care more about profit than progress... then again, that's how they become people with money now isn't it.
I think the idea has merit but I can also see where it would be supressed or at the very least competed against by commercial interests so it wouldn't be enough that OS public activities would be competing against themselves but also against commercial interests. Is it a good idea? Yeah... I think so. If for no other reason than to maintain and incentive to keep politics close enough to the people that it's never completely out of the public's reach.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Score:5, Informative)
Now the news and editorials come from everywhere. We can discuss the same issue with hundreds of people in a day. Opinions can be formed with the help of a diverse and eclectic group of people. While this system scares traditional news outlets like daily papers, local tv and radio stations, it works very well. It is the bazaar.
Even though I don't think when Eric wrote his landmark article about the history of GNU/Linux it could or would be applied to politics, I think parts of it fit this issue quite well.
The Internet and FOSS have truly changed the way we live. Is it any surprise that it's also changing politics too? BTW, if you haven't read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" read it soon. It's great stuff.
Cart before the horse... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Similarities:
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:
What is old is new (Score:4, Insightful)
Democracy is SUPPOSED to be open source (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway personally I wonder what the point is - this election was supposed to show the rise of the bloggers, digerati and all the rest of it. What's the point when Dubya just gets voted back into power?
Re:Open Source? (Score:3, Funny)
Sure, as long as we're allowed to fork.
Re:Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
"The Nation" mag is centrist in Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
And in most western european countries, all citizens are entitled to healthcare. Here in America. 45 million go without, and someone goes bankrupt from medical costs about once every seconds (or thereabouts). In NW Europe, students do not get out of school loaded down with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and have to work at McDonalds after that. In most NW Europe countries, their tax dollars go to things like state f
Re:Too many "experts" (Score:3, Interesting)
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 syste