Open Source Government

Para la versión original de este artículo en español da clic aquí.

Some days ago, as I was listening to the conference "Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization", I realized most of the solutions presented by the speaker were based on crowdsourcing. It may sound as a fancy and complicated concept but it's just the massive collaboration of people through the Internet. When people tell each other where the drunkometer in Mexico City is, using Twitter, they are doing crowdsourcing. When millions of people post videos on YouTube and other millions share them, rate them, etc., they are doing crowdsourcing. This interesting concept has lame uses ofcourse but can also be used for stuff that matters following the idea that crowds will always be "smarter" than experts. Some great examples of crowdsourcing used for good and that are actually changing the world are:

• Wikipedia: The best example of collaboration would be the greatest information repository in history. All Wikipedia contents are edited by volunteers and are available free to everyone. Anyone can edit the Wikipedia as well.
• Disaster response: In order to respond to the disasters in Haití, a lot of platforms using  crowdsourcing  to identify red spots were reveled. This tools were amazingly effective on accelerating the people with which people got helped.
• Software: Great projects like Linux, Libre Office and Firefox are just examples of software perfectly stable and developed with the collaboration of thousands of people, also available for free.
• Digitalization and translation of books: Do you remember this annoying window that shows up in some websites were you got to write the characters that appear in an image to prove you are a human and not a robot? Well, it's called captcha and what most people don't know is that by doing that they are helping to digitalize books. They have also other projects for helping translate books while you are learning a foreign language.
• Moon missions: The project Open Luna is really amazing, this is crowdsourcing to the limit. The project consists on retrieving all the knowledge required and develop everything needed to actually get to the moon... three times. Everything open source and based on collaboration.

All this are fascinating projects that help democratize knowledge, democratize software, democratize languages, services, etc. So, why not democratize democracy?

Our goverment systems were developed in ancient times and implemented, at least in Mexico, around 100 years ago. The model is based on peoples representation by a congress because it's impossible that every citizen get's a chair in the chamber. But this situation is changing thanks to the strong citizen interaction through internet. So, why not represent ourselves? When I first got this idea, I did what anyone with a revolutionary idea would do... I googled it. And of course, someone else had already thought about it. Tim O'Reilly, the creator of the term Web2.0 and CEO of  O'reilly media Inc, has been pushing the idea of a Government 2.0. The vision is of a Government as a platform and not just as a service provider. Using this platform, citizens can collaborate and create applications, share information, create and use services and improve their community.

Tim O'Reilly says, we see the government as a "vending machine", we insert our taxes (if any) and we want schools, hospitals, streets, infrastructure, etc. And the only idea of collective action we have (if any) is, collective complain, which is somehow like shaking the vending machine. What we haven't understood yet, specially in Mexico, is that the government requires intense collective action to be efficient and transparent. In other words, a Government 2.0 would be a DIY (Do it yourself) government, or as Tim calls it, a Do It Together Government.

This concepts have been already accepted in some countries. The White House for example has recently launched his new site based on an Open Source CMS which allows more citizen collaboration and the launch of the site Data.gov confirms the intentions of the american Government of creating a new generation of government in which the information sharing and collaboration are the keystone. We could say that a lot of tools are already available, for our governments to start using them.

Imagine now if we could use this technology to develop a brand new model of government and laws that actually work and could be evaluated and measured. Imagine every Biologist in Mexico evaluating and biology problems in their free time, Security people creating new public security models or even information security. Architects, teachers, renewable energy experts, civil engineers, scientifics, etc., everyone working on  their area of expertise and putting their knowledge in action to develop laws and government mechanisms that really work.

How long would it take us to review the Mexican Constitution if 100 persons where helping? And if 100 thousand help? And what if the 1.5 million people following the Mexican President in twitter help? (we kindly ask the almost 4 million people following @Anahi not to get involved)

How long would it take us to review the 2390 initiatives our congress has pending with all this people working in parallel? Or, would we really need a parliament as we know it, if we are now capable of representing ourselves? How much money would we save if we reduce the amount of the number of members of the parliament? I mean reducing it temporary so they keep representing the people without the tools to collaborate in this new government, until they all have them. Imagine the efficiency of a government based on active citizen collaboration organized through online applications and services.

But active citizen collaboration is not meant for Mexicans right? So, we should just let our government NOT do their work, and we can just keep chilling...