Please distribute to others who may be interested... You are hereby invited to a seminar in our twelfth interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> (ECCO 2015-2016)
Time: Friday June 17, 14h-16h Place: *room * *D.1.07*, building D, VUB ------------------------------ Can We Fork the State? Open Source Legislation for the Government of Earth Nathalie Mezza-Garcia <http://[email protected]> (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick) Abstract: In recent years the principles of Open Source have been extrapolated to the field of politics to address specific aspects of governance. Douglas Rushkoff (Rushkoff, 2003) spoke about a networked democracy, where participation in internet forums could enhance democratic practices; Matthew Burton (Burton, 2010) proposed that governments should have their own corps of coders, just as they now have peace corps; and Douglas Schuler described the example of e-liberating (Schuler, 2010), an online platform for deliberating that still presents many of the shortcomings of deliberating in person, like the need for a quorum. Despite the advances of the later in their quest to extend political participation, increase transparency in governance, and democratise collaboration, the Government 2.0 trend that frames most of the contemporary authors that lead the discussion on the matter remains short. One reason is that increased participation, transparency and collaboration do not necessarily translate in better possibilities for exploration of the space of solutions of a problem. Additionally, political representation continues to be the last instance of decisionmaking even with the use of independently-created online collaborative tools to fed governance practices. Lastly, no matter how open the design of the tools and practices are, they still rely on closed deliberation practices and decision-making processes that take place as black boxes, in isolated chambers of politicians, with no interaction with the environment. Thus, the action capacities of citizens continue to be mostly reduced to feeding the system with what it needs, unless they form part of the government or an influence group. From this critical angle it seems that no matter how many software and services offered today by governments point towards openness, use open platforms or even benefit from open source technologies, governments will never be open unless individuals have direct participation in every stage of the decisionmaking and law-making process. This talk will present a thought experiment to discuss openness in governance. The focus will be on the political implications of open source outside of the software production framework. The discussion will revolve around how can the community dynamics and governance of open source projects be used to produce legislation at a global scale. Relevant political aspects of open source such as forking, global communities, nonlinear structures and interactive information processing are taken in order to define how would open source legislation be. Further readings: Burton, M. (2010). A Peace Corps for Programmers. In D. Lathrop, & L. E. Ruma, Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency and Participation in Practice (pp. 1-9). Sebastopol, CA: O´Rilley. Heikka, T. (2015). The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation. Policy & Internet,, 7(3), 268-291. Rushkoff, D. (2003). Open Source Democracy. How online communication is changing offline politics. London: Demos. Schuler, D. (2010). Online Deliberation and Civic Intelligence. In D. Latrop, L. Ruma, & Eds., Open Government. Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice. Sebastopol, CA: O´Rilley. ------------------------------ Upcoming Seminars See also the ECCO/GBI calendar <https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=azMyN252aWluM2JoMnU3MXY5OGt2ZzliOGdAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ> . You can add this calendar to your calendar application through here <https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/k327nviin3bh2u71v98kvg9b8g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics> More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> -- Evo Evo Busseniers - Seminar Coordinator ECCO Group (VUB) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/1> Email: [email protected] Website: http://vub.academia.edu/EvoBusseniers <http://be.linkedin.com/in/weaver9/>
