Escapable Logic

That’s what Yule Heibel wrote in a comment over at Doc Searls‘ “Understanding Infrastructure” column on 4/19 at Linux Journal. Yule’s plaint followed the kind of laundry list everyone has, and which most have given up on:

Here in Victoria, we’re looking at a $1.2 billion infrastructure project for sewage treatment, and the 2 levels of government (local and provincial) are feuding because both say that the other side didn’t tell them about information that was wanted. Walled garden? It’s a bloody fortification…

Then there are those infrastructures that are supposed to support social programs, including mental hospitals and detox facilities — they’re not working, either, and our homeless now include not only poor people, but people who should be in some pipeline of institutional support because they’re mentally ill or addicted (or both, typically).

It all gets off- or downloaded to citizens now, as if we could individually step into the breach, without infrastructural support.

Maybe government is where we need open source most of all — as a way of thinking and as a way of “architecting” infrastructure.

My three readers (fortunately including Doc) know that this Open Source Society theme has been my meme for time out of mind, and that I call it OSS2, differentiating it from Open Source Software, or OSS1.

Another of my readers is Phil Windley, a “republican friend” whom Doc refers to in his reply to Yule’s despairing comment:

Thanks, Yule. You’ve made my week. Or perhaps longer.

I am taken lately with the belief that understanding infrastructure is critical not only for building and maintaining civilization’s essentials, but for bridging chasms of opinion that make constructive discourse impossible.

A few years ago a republican friend from Utah said two things that have stuck in my mind. One was “There are two parts to democracy. Elections and governance. And governance is where the work actually gets done.” The other was, “Most people, regardless of political philosophy, just want the roads fixed.”

At Berkman, over two years ago, I wrote:

What about an Open Source Society? Only the first exists, but we can imagine two OSS movements:

OSS1 = Open Source Software (a result, but also a movement)

OSS2 = Open Source Society (a dream that needs movement)

And they both need organizational tools. OSS1 has a perfect match of organizational needs and organizational tools because the developers wrote them as they became a movement. SourceForge and Trac are great examples. OSS1 wouldn’t exist without the community’s organizational tools. But there’s more. OSS1 Developers use dozens of disparate tools and websites to organize their work…

…But the developers of OSS2, whose work we desperately need, to escape from the political specialists who’ve hijacked governance, don’t behave like that. The OSS2 developers we seek to serve are ready and able to form groups and describe their pain and hopes. But, just like OSS1 developers, they need an organizing environment suitable to their skills: a collaboration mall with all the tools they might need as they become more engaged.

I called it a collaboration mall because the Open Source Society engineers are regular people, who won’t even blog, unless tricked into it, and need a UI as user-friendly as the malls that have worked so well, regardless of sophisticates’ sniffing at them as proletarian.

OSS2 engineers are people who don’t know they need to collaborate to re-engineer society, and sure won’t if you tell us that’s what you want from us.

But if some of us are persistent enough to build hundreds of expandable little collaboration malls, located where they (we) will try them and engage our neighbors and find it easy to shop for hope there, then we’ll become the unwitting designers and producers of little patches on our governmental structures. Taken together, all those patches can comprise a Patchy government OS, as resilient and resourceful as Geronimo.

Doc Searls reported on Larry Lessig’s talk at Berkman last Friday. The talk is part of the launch of Lessig’s and Joe Trippi’s initiative, Change-Congress.org.

Toward the end of his talk, Dr. Lessig pointed out that project has no board and no structure yet, prompting Doc to write a “Note to selves: a lot of what Larry wants here is what Britt Blaser and friends are working on.”

Fair enough. I’ve kept Doc informed on the Independence Year project that my partners and I have been slowly hatching: a comprehensive back-channel for governance. Our back-channel will attempt to set straight the erosion of features as our United States Operating System (USOS) lost so much usability as it devolved from Version 1.0 (1789) to V. 2.0 (2008).

The founders of the USOS implemented the following vision, with the Congress in charge and the chief executive “presiding” over the federal functions:

1789: USA, Version 1.0: The Founders’ Design

That was fine with the owners but, like so many managers who hijack the organizations they have been trusted with, things have changed a lot 22 decades later:

2008: USA, Version 2.0 - From Presider to DECIDER,
A Management Takeover

At last count, 81% of the country is longing to put things back where they were. Lessig says that, of course, change must come from the outside and, for starters, Change-Congress wants people to pressure their congresspeople to adopt four initiatives:

This is where the going always gets tricky. What specific mechanisms would compel a majority of congresscritters to do that? There’s no shortage of online outrage and cries for reform. How do we make Change-Congress.org more than simply another howl of anguished outrage? What mechanism transforms “Yes we can” to “How we can”?

What my friends and I continue to work on is a purpose-built web-based framework supporting about a thousand nodes, all communicating with each other. Yes, we’d prefer it was simpler for us, but that’s the only way to make it simple for the voters. It’s simpler for the constituents of a representative or senator to go to their own hyperlocal site than to pressure their politicians from a general site.

Here’s our plan for the oversites needed to reign in our politicians and agencies:

2009: USA, Version 3.0 - We The People, Re-Founding US Governance