like partners than parents.

In doing so, they will leave the certainty of 20th century political
ideologies behind, and admit to the open-ended and uncertain process
of societal co-authorship. Whatever model they choose must shun static
ideologies, and instead acknowledge the evolutionary process through
which anything resembling progress is made.

Chapter 5

Open source: Opening up the network democracy

One model for the open-ended and participatory process through which
legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the
'open source' software movement. Faced with the restrictive practices
of the highly competitive software developers, and the pitifully
complex and inefficient operating systems such as Microsoft Windows
that this process produces, a global community of programmers decided
to find a better development philosophy for themselves. They founded
one based in the original values of the shareware software development
community, concluding that proprietary software is crippled by the
many efforts to keep its underlying code a secret and locked down.
Many users don't even know that a series of arbitrary decisions have
been made about the software they use. They don't know it can be
changed. They simply adjust.

By publishing software along with its source code, open source
developers encourage one another to correct each other's mistakes, and
improve upon each other's work. Rather than competing they
collaborate, and don't hide the way their programs work. As a result,
everyone is invited to change the underlying code and the software can
evolve with the benefit of a multiplicity of points of view.

Of course this depends on a lot of preconditions. Participants in an
open source collaboration must be educated in the field they are
developing. People cannot expect to be able to understand and edit the
code underlying any system until they have taken the time and spent
the necessary energy to penetrate it. Very often, as in the case of
computer software, this also depends on open standards so that the
code is accessible to all. But it is also true of many other systems.
If those who hope to engage in the revision of our societal models are
not educated by those who developed what is already in place, they
will spend most of their time inefficiently reverse-engineering
existing structures in an effort to understand them. Progress can only
be made if new minds are educate