Transition: Phil Windley, who has the peculiar distinction of having been a successful dot-com CEO and CTO for a state government (in his case, Utah), has been a source of boundless wisdom, gathered from real work in the trenches of both business and government. One day recently, Phil said, "Democracy is the first open source application." In the context, he made it clear that maybe, finally, several thousand years after XX brought up the idea, we're finally learning to apply it.
Tim: comms is the primary tool for democracy. need dem coms to tear down the walls of . free exchange of ideas. in the days of fidonet. nubmer of goves that couldl not communicate.
The wire is so critical. If yuou can change layers two nd three then you can do p2p much easier. democracy is a p2p application. But i
http://barwn.org/
Micah: Is this technology less co-optable?
It's still very early. Yet already the pile of data to examine, about the fresh phenomenon of
Yet one year later, something did happen. Many open source community members found a cause. Had become active. Were doing something.
Howard Dean.
What happened?
Activism vs. Passivism (see personal source)
What makes activism of an engaged sort possible? How can we do stuff that isn't futile? That doesn't come from victim mentality?
A few days ago
Government isn't the problem. People need to bring solutions to government. Government is dying for answers. Bring some and you'll get somewhere.
I don't have experience with the government stonewalling me at all. I experience interest and cooperation at every level, as long as I bring solutions and not only problems.
A lot of helpless people want government to solve their problems or to carry their spear on one issue or another. That reflects an ignorance of how the whole ecosystem actually works. If you're constructive, you can participate in that ecosystem.
Democracy is the first open source project. - Phil Windley
Esther: I want to see
Patrick Gregston on offering help. Real solutions.
How open many
Britt on Open Republic: http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/2004/03/20.html
The news I'm about to examine will be old by the time you read this, but the reasons it's news are as durable as dirt. Those reasons have little to do with their subjects' worthiness as facts, and everything to do with their serviceability as stories.
"Democracy is the first open source application"\\\
Your choices:
Start a movement
Consider the case of MoveOn.org.
In late March (right as I'm finishing this piece) Larry launched a new book: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004). The book is his GNU Manifesto.
Blogs as tools. Also blogware.
"Blogs are Web all the way down. They're not like, some kind of browser front end on a dreadnaught-class enterprise app like Lotus Notes, where when you pick up a bag of it, the thing weighs a ton. Well, now the Web is penetrating all the way inside organizations. It used to be, "When you get the output, reformat it in HTML and send it out." And that was your "Web app." Which turned out to be wrong. Now we're pushing the Web deeper and deeper into the applicaiton until you turn the application inside out, to where the guts of the application are as distributed as the front end."
Could it be that's what's happening with Democracy?
"It's like Linux," says Trippi. "The more people collaborate, the more likely we'll build a better thing."
Well, not just by themselves. America had tech support, and it's getting more all the time. Two actors make that tech support possible. One is technologists, obviously. The other is the Internet. If the Dean campaign got credit for nothing else, it was for knowing how to "use" the Internet. That started with Joe Trippi, whose long career path included a tour of duty with Progeny, working with Ian Murdock, the co-originator of Debian. It's not just coincidental that Joe called Dean's an "open source campaign", and said "It's like Linux. The more people collaborate, the more likely we'll build a better thing."
Most of the tools involved in the campaign -- MeetUp, the campaign site, the campaign blog, DeanSpace -- were either open source or built on open source foundations. MeetUp runs on Linux. So does the campaign site and its servers. The campaign blog was made with Moveable Type. DeanSpace was built on Drupal, a fact its campaign hackers promoted.
Of course, all the candidates, including President Bush's, use open source tools. It would be hard not to, at this point in history.
Sources: Open Source Democracy: How online communicaiton is changing offline politics, by Douglas Rushkoff <http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/opensourcedemocracy_page292.aspx>
Greater Democracy <>