Doug Ross @ Journal

An open-source platform for real-time Democracy

In the age of wikis, community-based news sites like Digg, discussion forums and blogs, is it natural to expect a change in how Democracies operate sometime soon?

Consider our current form of Representative Democracy. Here in the U.S., we elect Congressional proxies who ostensibly vote on our behalf. But one downside of this approach is the centralization of power in the hands of a very few parties. This power can be abused -- one could point to William J. Jefferson of Louisiana or Tom Delay of Texas as examples.

In the U.S., the mitigating means to control the potential for corruption is a Constitutional Democracy, which layers a set of institutions -- the Executive and Judicial Branches of Government -- onto the Legislative Arm as checks and balances.

With the advent of the Internet, could a Direct Democracy be in the offing?

A comment in this TechDirt article (entitled, "Isn't Competition Supposed To Lower Rates? on the topic of net neutrality) sparked the thought:

...People knock democracy as an impossible concept. Even the Greeks gave up on it. Everybody likes to point out how we don't actually live in a democracy but rather an oligarchy... [This] oligarchy has a kind of stability built in to it, usually just a slowly reciprocating slide between left, right, and back to left again over a few decades. A truly dynamic democracy abandons all notion of the two part see-saw. Maybe there is still hope for true democracy. If the Diebold voting machines weren't rigged [Ed: Ha!] and there was really a credible method for massive quickfire referenda on a number of... issues can you imagine how dynamic and interesting participatory democracy in real time might be? I would happily give it a shot over the current system of special interests paying for laws behind closed doors...

Would there ever be room for an "Open-source Platform for Democratic Government": an Internet-enabled direct Democracy that would transfer power to the people in a way never envisioned by the Framers?

Somehow I doubt it, but it's interesting to contemplate.