Re: [ox-en] Collective Consciousness
- From: "Nadav Har'El" <nyh math.technion.ac.il>
- Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 00:57:25 +0200
On Thu, Dec 13, 2001, paul.7.saunders bt.com wrote about "RE: [ox-en] Collective Consciousness":
For the last couple of years I have been giving consideration to an open
government. The kind of system that would be one step above a democracy.
All sorts of ideas have popped through my head like making the working week
shorter and requiring everyone to contribute to an open project. The
How do you define an "open" project? Does your definition work with
requiring people to work on such a project? I'm asking this because currently
most people that are involved in free software projects are there because
they *wanted* to participate, not because they were forced. Even people
that get paid to write free software (sadly, there are less and less of
them nowadays) usually first started to write the free software, and then
got on somebody's payroll (e.g., when that somebody wanted to ever-so-slightly
push development towards a certain direction).
As I see it (and please don't flame me, I'm no political scientist) one of
the things that went wrong with Communism was that the Equality-Liberty
balance was tipped too much to the Equality side, and too little personal
liberty, like choosing your job, remained. Forcing people to work on free
software projects looks to me (and again, it's just my opinion) like a step
in the wrong direction.
government could run pseudo normally, but consist heavily of people working
on government open projects. The government itself would be constantly in
ebb and flow with the people best suited to the Ministry of ???? being
appointed and reappointed via yearly web votes (conducted in a secure way of
course).
Do you mean that the government beaurocracy, not only the ministers themselves
get voted? The question then would be how such a government will be able to
carry out long-term plans, with the people executing these plans changing
and trying to please the public all the time (so they get voted again).
I thought that democracies chose representative democracy over direct
democracy (like they had in ancient athens) because the latter is too messy
once the number of citizens and number of government employees grow.
It's less messy to elect one minister, and have him or her appoint the rest
of his ministry's people.
--
Nadav Har'El | Friday, Dec 14 2001, 29 Kislev 5762
nyh math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |If Barbie is so popular, why do you have
http://nadav.harel.org.il |to buy her friends?
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