Recently reading a blog post from crowdSPRING about their crowdsourced projects they hosted for federal buyers, I was interested in one specific concept, a bit of word choice that set a small bomb off in my head: could there be a part of the government, if not the general practices of government, that could be open sourced? What trade secrets in legislature are being protected that aren’t going to be on the ballot anyway?
Transparency in the federal level of government, and more so on local government, is a highly-debated topic now, with a lot of back office deals and pork barrel incentives creating an entire microeconomy within the government that trades thousands, sometimes millions, of taxpayer dollars for loyalty. Is it all good business if the one that is trading is your representative? What about those who want to be in on the trade, specifically get their state or local district some federal dollars, but can’t because they don’t have a representative in on the deal?
Let’s consider what would happen if representatives, these senators and house reps who think so highly of themselves, were instead moderators of an open source community. They would take submissions of updates on legislature, evaluate them for compatibility, post a beta test (which would consist of a brainstorming period where people find loopholes and plug them or accept them), post a vote for approval of the legislature edit, then implement.
Wow, what a concept. Government that speaks directly to is constituents, enacts tested and voter-approved legislature, and is visible to all, freely and without boundaries.
Could this work? The answer would be more complicated than health care reform.
Woah, there’s a tangent. What about health care legislation? What if that were open sourced? Therein lies the black spot on open source, where provider legislation would probably have to have a longer lifespan for each version of legislation so as not to drastically alter supportive systems. Think of the horror in finding out that within three years government changed HOSPICE care legislation a dozen times to where your elderly relatives were either eligible for covered cost or not eligible depending on when their HOSPICE care started. You would need HOSPICE care after you got the bill; your credit alone would be terminal.
So let’s settle on controlled open source, sort of a semi-open source where the updating and development process was open but managed by government infrastructure to facilitate testing, votes and data management. Sure, it wouldn’t get rid of the deals and closed-door negotiations here and there. And I am sure that some legislation would be hard to enact in that manner (think of the beta testing for abortion laws). But it would be closer to a government of the people. It would ensure better representation of the majority. District and state representatives are likened to landowners of monarchy, rulers of a geographic location in which the needs of the rep’s people are brought to a council of lords. If we are truly to be a democracy, that vertical hierarchy must be broken down a bit.
What do you think about creating an open source government? I would love to hear your comments.
