Imagine you are in the future. You wake up, get some coffee and sit down on your network appliance. You have an energy bill to review.
You open the summarized description of the bill, read how it could affect your country’s diplomatic relations, but how it would also be good for the economy. You browse what other citizen’s comments are. Finally you make up your mind. You press the “approve” button and immediately watch a graph of what the rest of the country thought. You dress up and go to work.
Welcome to the open source democracy.
As you might remember from high school, democracy is a Greek word that roughly translates to “government of the people”. In four thousand years, the model has not changed drastically. The pinnacle participatory event is still the gathering of the people (or at least the ones who are elligible to vote) and asking them which one of a list of candidates represent them the best. But once this candidate is elected, we have no more influence on what happens next. Yes, we can participate in polls, and call our state representative, but it’s not a real participation on deciding what’s best for the country.
The influence of social media in getting a candidacy
This week’s Time magazine revealed in an article just how much money Obama raised through the web.
Obama didn’t merely shatter all previous records. He made them irrelevant. In 2000, John McCain sent ripples through the political world by raising around $6 million on the Web. Four years later, Howard Dean was considered a high-tech revolutionary when he took in $27 million in e-bucks, while John Kerry raised an impressive $84 million. Remember, those figures are for entire election cycles; in one good month, Obama topped them all combined.
Obama’s presence on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and his brilliant website made it easy not only to hear his message, but to participate in the creation of community leaders that reached almost every single town in the United States.
This was lucky timing for Obama. Four years ago, the web was not as socially mature as it is now.
Just think for a moment how a candidate is normally nominated to his party. You needed to start with loads of clout that you either got from your years of participation in public office or you came from a very rich family. Then you would reach out to more wealthy families or groups and ask them for donations, have benefits, dinners or concerts, raise more money, and just when you surpassed the $20 Million dollar mark in the bank, you could finally say it out loud: “I’m running for President”.
But now it’s possible for a young man, with a good amount of intelligence, fair understanding of politics, and the power to inspire people, to become a presidential candidate, even if he didn’t have a wealthy family or was VP for someone else. You could potentially be running for 2012 if you use YouTube and Twitter in a smart way, and put out your ideas and reasons of why you should be elected. You could set up a blog, sell T-shirts and in a matter of weeks buy your first TV ad on NBC on a Thursday night.
The web as a platform for citizen voice
In the 1980s, the French government, through it’s postal service, built a network called Minitel that allowed people to operate a network appliance to get information. This was years before the Web was mainstream.
According to this article in Wikipedia: “France Télécom estimates that almost 9 million terminals — including web-enabled personal computers had access to the network at the end of 1999, and that it was used by 25 million people (out of a total population of 60 million). The terminals allowed users to access white and yellow pages, airline and train ticket purchases, mail-order shopping and message boards.”
Now imagine for a moment that we could develop something similar to this for those households that don’t have the possibility of buying a computer, allow users to download a secure government application for those who have, and then network everyone via Google Airwaves. We would have instant access of the people to their government and make citizen participation a reality.
Education as an integral part of democracy
There’s a saying “Every country has the leader it deserves”. This is very true statement because poorly educated people will elect officers that talk to them promising very basic needs, but that are, themselves, not great leaders per se. With the power of participation comes great responsibility, and we need to make sure that the people participating in this new democracy be highly educated.
Big Media has played a part in this “sheep herding” as well, and in the past, an appearance on a televised debate made (or broke) a potentially good candidate to have a chance of becoming a President, or the inclination of news networks favoring one candidate or another (Fox vs. CNN). Educated voters are less prone to be sold by lies or constant promotion.
The government, a project management role
In a poignant moment during CNN’s election night coverage, Alex Castellanos, a Republican Consultant, spoke about Obama’s potential role as “a new generation leader” that could work under an open source model; a model where things are built using the wisdom of the crowd.
If you think about how any open source software is built, and how our daily issues with economy, healthcare, energy and others, could potentially be thought of as “bugs”, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine a “Government Bugzilla”, where experts in those areas could assist the Government in dealing with them. Obama made it clear that it’s up to all Americans to bring about this change he has promised, echoing JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you” speech.
This is a historical time. Not because of race, but because of the opportunity we all have to make things right.
For further thoughts on this subject, you can read the free e-book “Open Source Democracy” by Douglas Rushkoff. There’s also an interesting article by Dr. Mark Drapeau, an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Mashable.com.
Update: Found out about a site called Govit that allows users to vote on legislation, contact congress by email, and compare your voting record with your representatives.
