What is Open Source Government?

"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness." Edvard Teller

Open source development projects, where members of the general public volunteer time and energy toward a common goal, have given the world Firefox, Linux and many other excellent products. The source code of the program in development is not locked or encrypted but is openly available to the public so that people might read it and improve upon it.  Amazingly, people do.

The results of an open source project, no matter how valuable, belong to "the people" and will always remain free for unlicensed common use.  Without the benevolence of the programmers behind these and other great free products, there is no doubt that we would all be suffering from further price gouging for computer software in a market dominated by monopolies and cartels. Competition is virtuous, no?  But what prompts these hackers to act so magnanimously?  I think that they do so by simple virtue of their humanity.

Politics 2.0?

"Just as eBay turned people into active buyers and sellers, the new tools will turn people from passive consumers of politics into active participants. If you want to change something, you can start a campaign. And as people see more people doing that, they will realize: 'Oh, I can do that, too.' You will have the long tail of politics, not just the long tail of commerce, which is eBay. The long tail of politics is, 'I can find out what my town dogcatcher is up to.' " - Esther Dyson June 29, 2007 

The future is here. With the internet, community organization is more facile than ever. Let's use this tool to increase the quality and frequency of direct participation in our representative system of government.  I think an open and transparent system that allows anyone to easily monitor the business of our government would be the best way to secure Liberty for the average citizen.

I think that the human race can employ these new tools to improve our governments, our countries, and our lives. Why would we do anything else? There is no doubt that the freedom and opportunity inherent in open source projects is the key to their success. It only seems right that government, a not for profit activity that is designed to secure our Liberty and expand our Freedom, would stand to benefit from the virtues of open source theory.

...government of the people, by the people, for the people...

Open Source Theory fits perfectly with one of the fundamental precepts in our great American experiment: autonomous rule through self-government.  I am not the first one to introduce the idea of applying Open Source theory to our system of governance, in many ways the Founders themselves were employing open source principles, but never before have we been able to pool our collective resources more effectively. There is no doubt that We the People are supposed to control our government, not the other way around.  Similarly, open source projects are controlled by the agreed upon wisdom of the community, and the community isn't controlled by any "owner" of the project. You are an equally valuable participant in the shared project of increased prosperity through honest government.

The internet has impacted collaborative efforts in a way that means we can affect change more quickly. The efficiency and speed of contemporary collaboration is light years beyond where it was at the time of any other large scale project in human history.  Why aim small?  We can all see the troubles on the horizon.  Let's all do our part to improve our American Government by starting in our own neighborhoods.  Slowly, or quickly, we can improve our lives and our world by engaging more citizens in the process of self-government.