Open Source Democracy ?
A chance meeting recently, with a Swedish activist/politician, had me reflecting a bit, on why voter turn out are so low. According to recent statistics, the percentage of eligible voters that ignored the major elections stood around 40 % in the US and and 49 % in the EU .
Some authors postulate that the low voter turn out are due to:
- Access/voting rules
- Time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting
- Not feeling as your voting makes a positive difference
I believe we are in an era where we have the technology to solve these challenges, and we will explore some potential solutions below (P.S. if you are a star trek fan there are a few Easter eggs😊).
TLDR: We have the technology to engage the population and have a government that is actually of the people by the people and for the people.
* Mobile voting could engage a larger part of the population
* Voting for ideas not people … those elected are there to execute the will of the people.
* Social media opens avenues for us to connect, but we also need to be critical of what we read.
Mobile voting
The beast at Tanagra: The first two points (Access and cost involved) can actually be solved by use of mobile smartphones. There is a lot of red tape around a persons identity and eligibility to vote. However, all this information is in government databases and in most developed countries are actually online. For example, in Denmark the use of NemID which is a digital signature, enables a citizens to access government records, banking and health records all from your smartphone. Likewise, having the option to vote at your fingertips, removes the burden of having to find time of work, which is a major factor for low income families.
A few countries are giving the idea of mobile voting a go. I suspect if trials for mobile/online voting are successful in the US and other countries, it will build the case deployment of this technology.
Citizen voice
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagr: The question is how do we work together and engage a larger portion of people in the democratic process.
I tend to agree with this authors sentiment about those who don’t vote: “Theirs is not an act of apathy — for they are often intensely political — but of disgust. It is also a politicized expression of the extent to which politicians do not seek to represent them.” So the question is how do we give the disenfranchised a voice ?
Tony Benn also shares a similar sentiment, “but once they’ve granted their support then they’re expected just to sit back for five years and watch the great and the good they’ve elected governing the country. That is not democratic in the proper sense, but it’s better than not being able to get rid of people who govern you. So it’s a very imperfect democracy”. Democracy needs to be a lot more participatory, open and transparent to scrutiny.
It is in this vain we could learn a “thing or two” from the open source community. Some of the best frameworks and systems out there today are opensource ones (Wikipedia, WordPress, Linux, Apache, LibreOffice, GIMP, Mozilla …). In most open source projects, software(projects), features (ideas) and bug fixes(disaster control) are iterated upon much quicker by mainly volunteers and stay true to the original ideals of the project (at-least until a fork) … this is a lot better than the “noble intentions” we see in politics.
Now imagine a political framework that caters to collaboration, debate and consensus building on larger issues. Citizenlab and Decidim have working products that aim to reach more citizens. Using an open-source participatory model, it is possible to manage ideas efficiently, and make decisions based on real-time data, for cities and organizations. It is possible using technology to engage with citizens and have a “true democracy”.
Challenges
Shaka, when the walls fell: On the road to this vision there will be failure and there will be challenges.
- Internet access and electricity (A universal basic income should be a non issue)
- What if the system is hacked (I believe blockchain technology has a part to play and I believe the banking system has solved most of these issues)
- Fake news driving a particular narrative (e.g Cambridge analytics )
- Any democracy hinges on an educated electorate that can think critically (Free education)
- How to deal with spam, bots and low quality submissions (something that not even reddit has solved)
- Who are the gate keepers of the technology that governs our democracy … it should open sourced and not controlled by a private entity (We should go for the former).
- Due to the power of lobbyist in the US open source democracy will never be a reality given the current structure.
