d in the current languages, exposed to
the rationale for all decisions that have been made and invited to
test new methods and structures.

Those who are invited to re-evaluate our social and political
structures in such a way will stand the best chance of gaining the
perspective necessary to see the emergent properties of such systems,
as well as avenues for active participation in them. If no one is
invited then the first harbingers of emergent paradigms will be those
who have been motivated to train themselves in spite of the obstacles
set in front of them by those who hope to maintain exclusive control
over the code. The new models they come up with may, as a result, end
up looking much more like old-style revolutions than true
renaissances.

The implementation of an open source democracy will require us to dig
deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth
it in the new context of our networked reality. It will require us to
assume, at least temporarily, that nothing at all is too sacred to be
questioned, re-interpreted and modified. But in doing so, we will be
enabled to bring democracy through its current crisis and into its
next stage of development.

But, like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not
impossible to control once they are unleashed. Once people are invited
to participate in, say, the coding of a software program, they begin
to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for
discussion. They used to see software as an established and inviolable
thing - something married to the computer. A given circumstance. With
an open source awareness, they are free to discover that the codes of
the software have been arranged by people, sometimes with agendas that
hadn't formerly been apparent. One of the most widespread realizations
accompanying the current renaissance is that a lot of what has been
taken for granted as 'hardware' is, in fact, 'software' capable of
being reprogrammed. They tend to begin to view everything that was
formerly set in stone - from medical practices to the Bible - as
social constructions and subject to revision. Likewise as public
awareness of emergence theory increases, people are beginning to
observe their world differently, seeing its principles in evidence,
everywhere. Formerly esoteric subjects such as urban design or
monetary policy become much more central as the public comes to
recognize the power of these planning s