by Bengt Feil
Almost all e-democracy projects are combinations of social activity and some sort of web based technology. And in many cases, the people developing these technologies want to share their ideas and advances with the greater e-participation community.
To achieve this, some of them publish the work as open source projects which can be reused under some sort of open licence, like the GNU General Public License (GPL – http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). This raises the question of how useful and well-adjusted open source technologies are in the field of e-participation and e-democracy.
The open source development philosophy is based on communication and sharing, and assumes that collaboration among many people will produce the best solutions to given projects. In the field of software development this concept has been adopted by many and the results can be seen in a range of successful open source applications such as the web browser Firefox, programming languages like Python and even whole operating systems like Linux.
But how does the open source approach fit with e-participation and e-democracy?
The first point one has to acknowledge is that open source software provides the backbone to almost all online projects. A vast number of projects are hosted on Linux based servers running Apache, and almost all are programmed in open source programming languages and often use open source frameworks (the Sunlight Foundation website promoting political transparency online in the US, for example, uses the Python framework ‘Django’).
So much of the infrastructure for e-participation and e-democracy already relies on open software.
However, if we turn to look at actual software built to implement the many different types of e-democracy, the picture becomes fuzzier. Many such projects could be clustered into groups, such as e-petitioning systems or vote matching websites, and within these groups projects could gain a lot from co-operation and perhaps even the construction of an open source solution to solve the similar problems they all face.
On the other hand many, perhaps even the majority, of e-democracy projects are very specific to a certain place or problem. For these projects, software has to be adjusted in such an intensive way that the use of finished software does not offer such obvious advantages than in the examples mentioned before. The use of open source frameworks and infrastructure, on the other hand, still seems to be extremely promising.
The need now is to start an open discussion about where it makes the most sense to use open source technologies in the field of e-democracy, and how it can be used in the most efficient way possible. I would like to hear people’s thoughts on this matter at our PEP-NET weblog (http://pep-net.eu/wordpress/?p=141), which is, as you might have guessed, running on open source software.
NOTE: Bengt Feil is an e-Participation Consultant at TuTech (http://www.tutech.de), a knowledge transfer company set up by the higher education bodies in Hamburg and co-ordinating body for EU e-participation project PEP-NET (http://www.pep-net.eu).
