The British government should look to the open source movement for more than its software, an influential think tank said on Wednesday. Wide Open, a pamphlet published by Demos, suggests that habits of sharing knowledge through loose communities of interest, such as the Wikipedia encyclopaedia, could improve law-making, standards in the media and health education.
But first, says co-author Tom Steinberg, the British government must relax its obsession with stopping things going wrong and become less risk averse.
Steinberg is a director of Mysociety, the charity behind pioneering British websites such as www.FaxYourMP.com and the recently launched www.NotApathetic.com, a site where people not intending to vote can post their reasons why.
Demos avoids the temptation to talk of ”open source government” — the term open source should be limited to software. Instead, it proposes three new terms: open knowledge, open team working and open conversations. These ”open methods” are tools to encourage the evolution of good ideas and to spread their benefits more quickly. What they have in common is that ”they give people back forms of power they have either lost, or never had”.
Examples of open methods are Mysociety websites such as www.TheyWorkForYou.com, an annotated, open knowledge version of Hansard.
Another project along these lines is TalkEuro, an annotated version of the European Cconstitution. Such sites cross the boundary between activism and officialdom, Demos says, to the discomfort of some British politicians and officials.
However, ”just as in the case of open source development projects on the internet, the involvement of more players tends to improve the quality of what is done, without necessarily reducing the room for leadership”.
Steinberg says that experience with sites such as TheyWorkForYou shows that most people act responsibly when posting annotations on the web. However, the British government’s instinct is to cater for trouble makers. The former civil servant says it should be bolder about experimenting rather than following its instinct ”to put up barriers to ensure quality”.
One of Demos’s suggested roles for open methods is in drafting new laws. Although the British government publishes draft Bills on the web, these are mainly for the benefit of specialists — and are posted in ”such obscure ways that they may as well never have been put online”.
Wikipedia-style drafting need not be a free for all, Demos says. Contributions could be categorised, allowing citizens, academics, judges, politicians to comment and have their contributions clearly marked. (It also notes that even Wikipedia has had to lock certain entries, such as that on President George Bush.)
However, if the process achieved enough scale and legitimacy, ”one can even imagine parliamentary processes being adapted to make consideration of the contributions via the open system obligatory”.
More immediately, local bylaws could also be drafted according to open principles. ”With very high levels of internet penetration, it is entirely conceivable that these could evolve in a semi open source way, enabling anyone living in the area to propose changes and, subject to structured discussion, amendment and voting protocols, to have new bylaws agreed.”
Steinberg stresses he is not talking about sidestepping local elected members. ”As with many kinds of very local democracy, there would need to be some backstop powers to prevent abuse, discrimination or rules that directly threatened the competence of higher level bodies.”
Although Steinberg agrees that drafting laws with open methods is ”one of the more way-out ideas”, he sees no reason why society should not immediately try out the open source model of working in such areas as health care.
One idea would be to help front-line British National Heralth Service staff share radical ideas to improve treatments or cut costs. A public open collaboration might provide an entirely open space on the web for such brainwaves. ”There would be no limits on who could contribute. There would be visible recognition and sometimes reward for ideas that are widely taken up.”
The recently launched Teachers TV digital channel could provide a platform for similar processses in education.
Elsewhere in society, e-marketplaces could allow small businesses to employ people for short periods. Set up on an open working model, these would incorporate a system of scoring workers for reliability and ensure they knew what sort of organisations they were dealing with. A consortium of local authorities in London has recently received funding to test e-marketplaces as a way of employing casual staff among people unable to work more than a few hours a week.
What is needed now, Demos says, is a period of experiment and argument: finding out what works. Obviously, the open methodology is not applicable to every situation, Steinberg says. ”You wouldn’t want to do experimental surgery on an open source approach, but there are areas in life where it doesn’t do any harm to be exposed to more openness and criticism.” – Guardian Unlimited Â