In a recent article in Tim O’Reilly’s Radar he mentions source code version control as a service we often take for granted and have yet to fully appreciate. Could source control lend provenance to amendments and insertions into legislation by special interest groups?
He concludes:
…despite the many successes of our form of government, it’s definitely creaking at the seams. The founders, for all their foresight, didn’t plan for a nation of 300 million people, most of whom don’t care to vote, they didn’t foresee the extent to which the bureaucracy would become a fourth seat of power. I don’t have any great prescriptions for politics, but I do have prescriptions for technology. We all need to think hard about how the future will not be like the past, focusing our efforts on that future and being willing to change course when faced with discontinuities that render our past thinking obsolete.
The future we face is one of massive collaborative systems. How we design those systems, and how we build critical freedoms into them, shaping their architecture to support either participation or centralized control, is one of the great challenges facing the technology community today.
(See also: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/why_congress_ne.html )
(See also: http://radar.oreilly.com/ )
(See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 )
(See also: http://subversion.tigris.org/ )