Open-source governance

Open-source governance (also known as open governance and open politics) is a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open-source and open-content movements to democratic principles to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy. Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this participation vary. Accordingly, there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. There are a wide array of projects and movements which are working on building open-source governance systems. Many left-libertarian and radical centrist organizations around the globe have begun advocating open-source governance and its related political ideas as a reformist alternative to current governance systems. Often, these groups have their origins in decentralized structures such as the Internet and place particular importance on the need for anonymity to protect an individual's right to free speech in democratic systems. Opinions vary, however, not least because the principles behind open-source government are still very loosely defined. In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by democratic institutions: Open-government mechanisms including those for public participation and engagement, such as the use of IdeaScale, Google Moderator, Semantic MediaWiki, GitHub, and other software by actual ruling governments – these mechanisms are well-developed, especially in the UK and the US, or by civil society and citizens directly for example, Opengovpioneers in the UK, and the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers in Scotland. Open-politics forums and wikis, where political issues and arguments can be debated, either within or between political party constraints, taking three distinct forms: Political-party-platform development, in which ideas are solicited from anyone or almost anyone and openly discussed to a point but the ranking and devotion of resources to developing ideas is reserved to party members or supporters.