Came across this inspiring talk by Clay Shirky. He raised the question if we can use Git for open legislation. Just jot down my favorite quotes below
- The people experimenting with participation don’t have legislative power and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with openness. There’s no democracy worth the name that doesn’t have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens.
- A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is when they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by review, voting, peer review, now this (Git).
- Programmers take this capability (of readily tracking who did change what) for granted. No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money.