Open-source Governance - Applications of The Principles

Applications of The Principles

In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by actual democratic institutions in the developed world:

• open government mechanisms including those for public participation and engagement, such as the use of IdeaScale, Google Moderator, Semantic MediaWiki, and other software by actual ruling governments – these mechanisms are well developed especially in the UK and the USA.
• open politics forums, invariably 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.
  • Citizen journalism forums obeying stricter rules to ensure equal power relationships than is typically the case in blogs, strictly designed to balance libel and free speech laws for a local jurisdiction (following laws strictly is part of the open politics ideal). The best known of these is Sourcewatch.
  • 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 referenda or online – none of which have achieved any representation in any parliament anywhere in the democratic world.
• 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. Dkosopedia is 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 official vandalism by persons entrusted with power by owners or publishers (so-called "sysop vandalism" or "administrative censorship").