WEBVTT 00:00:00.276 --> 00:00:02.221 I want to talk to you today about something 00:00:02.221 --> 00:00:05.236 the open-source programming world can teach democracy, 00:00:05.236 --> 00:00:06.871 but before that, a little preamble. 00:00:06.871 --> 00:00:08.691 Let's start here. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:08.691 --> 00:00:12.086 This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot 00:00:12.086 --> 00:00:14.107 who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute. 00:00:14.107 --> 00:00:16.800 A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog 00:00:16.800 --> 00:00:19.673 called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera 00:00:19.673 --> 00:00:21.953 with her every day to school to document 00:00:21.953 --> 00:00:23.967 her school lunches. 00:00:23.967 --> 00:00:25.856 Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter) 00:00:25.856 --> 00:00:29.610 And, as sometimes happens, 00:00:29.610 --> 00:00:32.200 this blog acquired first dozens of readers, 00:00:32.200 --> 00:00:33.880 and then hundreds of readers, 00:00:33.880 --> 00:00:36.466 and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in 00:00:36.466 --> 00:00:38.134 to watch her rate her school lunches, 00:00:38.134 --> 00:00:39.659 including on my favorite category, 00:00:39.659 --> 00:00:43.251 "Pieces of hair found in food." (Laughter) 00:00:43.251 --> 00:00:46.722 This was a zero day. That's good. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:46.722 --> 00:00:49.916 And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this. 00:00:49.916 --> 00:00:51.827 A post that read: "Goodbye." 00:00:51.827 --> 00:00:55.041 And she said, "I'm very sorry to tell you this, but 00:00:55.041 --> 00:00:57.785 my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me 00:00:57.785 --> 00:01:00.781 I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore. 00:01:00.781 --> 00:01:02.507 I really enjoyed doing this. 00:01:02.507 --> 00:01:05.737 Thank you for reading. Goodbye." NOTE Paragraph 00:01:05.737 --> 00:01:10.915 You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter) 00:01:10.915 --> 00:01:16.833 The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous, 00:01:16.833 --> 00:01:19.764 that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves 00:01:19.779 --> 00:01:21.065 the same day and said, "We would, 00:01:21.065 --> 00:01:23.231 we would never censor a nine-year-old." (Laughter) 00:01:23.231 --> 00:01:25.708 Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter) 00:01:25.708 --> 00:01:30.121 And this brings up the question, 00:01:30.121 --> 00:01:32.335 what made them think they could get away 00:01:32.335 --> 00:01:34.385 with something like that? (Laughter) 00:01:34.385 --> 00:01:39.102 And the answer is, all of human history prior to now. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:39.102 --> 00:01:42.650 (Laughter) So, 00:01:42.650 --> 00:01:46.575 what happens when a medium suddenly puts 00:01:46.575 --> 00:01:50.279 a lot of new ideas into circulation? NOTE Paragraph 00:01:50.279 --> 00:01:52.384 Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question. 00:01:52.384 --> 00:01:54.384 This is something we've faced several times 00:01:54.384 --> 00:01:55.740 over the last few centuries. 00:01:55.740 --> 00:01:57.725 When the telegraph came along, it was clear 00:01:57.725 --> 00:01:59.943 that it was going to globalize the news industry. 00:01:59.943 --> 00:02:01.432 What would this lead to? 00:02:01.432 --> 00:02:04.996 Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. 00:02:04.996 --> 00:02:07.806 The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear 00:02:07.806 --> 00:02:10.573 but see, literally see, what was going on 00:02:10.573 --> 00:02:12.890 elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? 00:02:12.890 --> 00:02:15.130 World peace. (Laughter) 00:02:15.130 --> 00:02:16.087 The telephone? 00:02:16.087 --> 00:02:18.682 You guessed it: world peace. 00:02:18.682 --> 00:02:23.656 Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. 00:02:23.656 --> 00:02:26.135 Even the prInting press, even the printing press 00:02:26.135 --> 00:02:29.264 was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce 00:02:29.264 --> 00:02:32.917 Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. 00:02:32.917 --> 00:02:35.401 Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, 00:02:35.401 --> 00:02:37.421 the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, 00:02:37.421 --> 00:02:39.779 the Thirty Years' War. All right, 00:02:39.779 --> 00:02:44.010 so what all of these predictions of world peace got right 00:02:44.010 --> 00:02:46.541 is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly 00:02:46.541 --> 00:02:49.467 come into circulation, it changes society. 00:02:49.467 --> 00:02:52.999 What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:52.999 --> 00:02:55.548 The more ideas there are in circulation, 00:02:55.548 --> 00:03:00.256 the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. 00:03:00.256 --> 00:03:05.029 More media always means more arguing. 00:03:05.029 --> 00:03:07.949 That's what happens when the media's space expands. 00:03:07.949 --> 00:03:10.852 And yet, when we look back on the printing press 00:03:10.852 --> 00:03:14.231 in the early years, we like what happened. 00:03:14.231 --> 00:03:17.475 We are a pro-printing press society. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:17.475 --> 00:03:19.445 So how do we square those two things, 00:03:19.445 --> 00:03:22.201 that it leads to more arguing, but we think it was good? NOTE Paragraph 00:03:22.201 --> 00:03:24.800 And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this. 00:03:24.800 --> 00:03:28.085 This is the cover of "Philosophical Transactions," 00:03:28.085 --> 00:03:30.707 the first scientific journal ever published in English 00:03:30.707 --> 00:03:32.589 in the middle of the 1600s, 00:03:32.589 --> 00:03:34.416 and it was created by a group of people who had been 00:03:34.416 --> 00:03:36.053 calling themselves "The Invisible College," 00:03:36.053 --> 00:03:38.257 a group of natural philosophers who only later 00:03:38.257 --> 00:03:40.862 would call themselves scientists, 00:03:40.862 --> 00:03:44.406 and they wanted to improve the way 00:03:44.406 --> 00:03:47.063 natural philosophers argued with each other, 00:03:47.063 --> 00:03:49.053 and they needed to do two things for this. 00:03:49.053 --> 00:03:51.537 They needed openness. They needed to create a norm 00:03:51.537 --> 00:03:53.396 which said, when you do an experiment, 00:03:53.396 --> 00:03:56.081 you have to publish not just your claims, 00:03:56.081 --> 00:03:57.507 but how you did the experiment. 00:03:57.507 --> 00:04:00.304 If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you. 00:04:00.304 --> 00:04:02.664 But the other thing they needed was speed. 00:04:02.664 --> 00:04:04.969 They had to quickly synchronize what 00:04:04.969 --> 00:04:07.423 other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise, 00:04:07.423 --> 00:04:10.280 you couldn't get the right kind of argument going. 00:04:10.280 --> 00:04:13.230 The printing press was clearly the right medium for this, 00:04:13.230 --> 00:04:15.816 but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow. 00:04:15.816 --> 00:04:18.678 And so they invented the scientific journal 00:04:18.678 --> 00:04:21.464 as a way of synchronizing the argument 00:04:21.464 --> 00:04:24.018 across the community of natural scientists. 00:04:24.018 --> 00:04:27.516 The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press. 00:04:27.516 --> 00:04:29.662 It was created by scientists, 00:04:29.662 --> 00:04:31.521 but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have 00:04:31.521 --> 00:04:33.691 a printing press as a tool. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:33.691 --> 00:04:35.931 So what about us? What about our generation, 00:04:35.931 --> 00:04:37.934 and our media revolution, the Internet? 00:04:37.934 --> 00:04:42.053 Well, predictions of world peace? Check. (Laughter) 00:04:42.053 --> 00:04:50.636 More arguing? Gold star on that one. (Laughter) 00:04:50.636 --> 00:04:51.947 (Laughter) 00:04:51.947 --> 00:04:56.294 I mean, YouTube is just a gold mine. (Laughter) 00:04:56.294 --> 00:05:00.389 Better arguing? That's the question. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:00.389 --> 00:05:02.433 So I study social media, which means, 00:05:02.433 --> 00:05:05.044 to a first approximation, I watch people argue. 00:05:05.044 --> 00:05:09.151 And if I had to pick a group that I think is 00:05:09.151 --> 00:05:12.944 our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people 00:05:12.944 --> 00:05:16.103 trying to take these tools and to press it into service, 00:05:16.103 --> 00:05:18.884 not for more arguments, but for better arguments, 00:05:18.884 --> 00:05:21.279 I'd pick the open-source programmers. 00:05:21.279 --> 00:05:23.541 Programming is a three-way relationship 00:05:23.541 --> 00:05:25.825 between a programmer, some source code, 00:05:25.825 --> 00:05:28.439 and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers 00:05:28.439 --> 00:05:33.141 are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions 00:05:33.141 --> 00:05:37.164 that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set 00:05:37.164 --> 00:05:40.202 of instructions that the computer knows how to execute, 00:05:40.202 --> 00:05:42.068 and that's if one person is writing it. 00:05:42.068 --> 00:05:44.167 Once you get more than one person writing it, 00:05:44.167 --> 00:05:47.251 it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite 00:05:47.251 --> 00:05:49.912 each other's work if they're working on the same file, 00:05:49.912 --> 00:05:52.094 or to send incompatible instructions 00:05:52.094 --> 00:05:54.535 that simply causes the computer to choke, 00:05:54.535 --> 00:05:57.494 and this problem grows larger 00:05:57.494 --> 00:06:00.263 the more programmers are involved. 00:06:00.263 --> 00:06:03.610 To a first approximation, the problem of managing 00:06:03.610 --> 00:06:06.336 a large software project is the problem 00:06:06.336 --> 00:06:09.992 of keeping this social chaos at bay. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:09.992 --> 00:06:12.467 Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution 00:06:12.467 --> 00:06:14.121 to this problem, which is to use something called 00:06:14.121 --> 00:06:16.101 a "version control system," 00:06:16.101 --> 00:06:18.310 and a version control system does what is says on the tin. 00:06:18.310 --> 00:06:21.704 It provides a canonical copy of the software 00:06:21.704 --> 00:06:23.256 on a server somewhere. 00:06:23.256 --> 00:06:26.162 The only programmers who can change it are people 00:06:26.162 --> 00:06:29.693 who've specifically been given permission to access it, 00:06:29.693 --> 00:06:33.460 and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it 00:06:33.460 --> 00:06:35.890 that they have permission to change. 00:06:35.890 --> 00:06:39.075 And when people draw diagrams of version control systems, 00:06:39.075 --> 00:06:41.440 the diagrams always look something like this. 00:06:41.440 --> 00:06:44.318 All right. They look like org charts. 00:06:44.318 --> 00:06:45.725 And you don't have to squint very hard 00:06:45.725 --> 00:06:49.190 to see the political ramifications of a system like this. 00:06:49.190 --> 00:06:53.666 This is feudalism: one owner, many workers. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:53.666 --> 00:06:56.990 Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry. 00:06:56.990 --> 00:07:02.380 It really is Microsoft's Office. It's Adobe's Photoshop. 00:07:02.380 --> 00:07:05.212 The corporation owns the software. 00:07:05.212 --> 00:07:07.526 The programmers come and go. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:07.526 --> 00:07:10.899 But there was one programmer who decided 00:07:10.899 --> 00:07:13.887 that this wasn't the way to work. 00:07:13.887 --> 00:07:15.149 This is Linus Torvalds. 00:07:15.149 --> 00:07:17.301 Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer, 00:07:17.301 --> 00:07:22.602 created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way 00:07:22.602 --> 00:07:26.114 the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem. 00:07:26.114 --> 00:07:30.738 Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license, 00:07:30.738 --> 00:07:34.484 is that everybody should have access to all the source code 00:07:34.484 --> 00:07:37.737 all the time, but of course, this creates 00:07:37.737 --> 00:07:41.044 the very threat of chaos you have to forestall 00:07:41.044 --> 00:07:42.622 in order to get anything working. 00:07:42.622 --> 00:07:45.104 So most open-source projects just held their noses 00:07:45.104 --> 00:07:47.784 and adopted the feudal management systems. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:47.784 --> 00:07:50.292 But Torvalds said, "No, I'm not going to do that." 00:07:50.292 --> 00:07:53.857 His point of view on this was very clear. 00:07:53.857 --> 00:07:56.390 When you adopt a tool, you also adopt 00:07:56.390 --> 00:07:59.979 the management philosophy embedded in that tool, 00:07:59.979 --> 00:08:03.115 and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work 00:08:03.115 --> 00:08:05.424 the way the Linux community worked. 00:08:05.424 --> 00:08:07.956 And to give you a sense of how enormous 00:08:07.956 --> 00:08:11.624 a decision like this was, this is a map 00:08:11.624 --> 00:08:15.113 of the internal dependencies within Linux, 00:08:15.113 --> 00:08:17.720 within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts 00:08:17.720 --> 00:08:22.165 of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going. 00:08:22.165 --> 00:08:25.743 This is a tremendously complicated process. 00:08:25.743 --> 00:08:28.535 This is a tremendously complicated program, 00:08:28.535 --> 00:08:31.200 and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this 00:08:31.200 --> 00:08:35.104 not with automated tools but out of his email box. 00:08:35.104 --> 00:08:37.577 People would literally mail him changes 00:08:37.577 --> 00:08:41.696 that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:41.696 --> 00:08:46.442 And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out 00:08:46.442 --> 00:08:49.252 how the community worked, he said, "I think I know 00:08:49.252 --> 00:08:53.419 how to write a version control system for free people." NOTE Paragraph 00:08:53.419 --> 00:08:59.314 And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control. 00:08:59.314 --> 00:09:02.338 It has two big differences 00:09:02.338 --> 00:09:04.401 with traditional version control systems. 00:09:04.401 --> 00:09:07.548 The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise 00:09:07.548 --> 00:09:10.834 of open-source. Everybody who works on a project 00:09:10.834 --> 00:09:14.505 has access to all of the source code all of the time. 00:09:14.505 --> 00:09:17.179 And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow, 00:09:17.179 --> 00:09:20.116 they use drawings that look like this. 00:09:20.116 --> 00:09:22.434 And you don't have to understand what the circles 00:09:22.434 --> 00:09:26.113 and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more 00:09:26.113 --> 00:09:29.208 complicated way of working than is supported 00:09:29.208 --> 00:09:31.929 by ordinary version control systems. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:31.929 --> 00:09:36.238 But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back, 00:09:36.238 --> 00:09:39.288 and this is Git's second big innovation. 00:09:39.288 --> 00:09:43.284 This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service, 00:09:43.284 --> 00:09:46.634 and every time a programmer uses Git 00:09:46.634 --> 00:09:49.795 to make any important change at all, 00:09:49.795 --> 00:09:53.104 creating a new file, modifying an existing one, 00:09:53.104 --> 00:09:57.778 merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature. 00:09:57.778 --> 00:10:00.921 This long string of numbers and letters here 00:10:00.921 --> 00:10:05.996 is a unique identifier tied to every single change, 00:10:05.996 --> 00:10:08.853 but without any central coordination. 00:10:08.853 --> 00:10:13.342 Every Git system generates this number the same way, 00:10:13.342 --> 00:10:16.684 which means this is a signature tied directly 00:10:16.684 --> 00:10:19.834 and unforgeably to a particular change. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:19.834 --> 00:10:21.770 This has the following effect: 00:10:21.770 --> 00:10:25.448 A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe 00:10:25.448 --> 00:10:29.150 can both get the same -- a copy of the same piece of software. 00:10:29.150 --> 00:10:32.976 Each of them can make changes and they can merge them 00:10:32.976 --> 00:10:35.911 after the fact even if they didn't know 00:10:35.911 --> 00:10:38.870 of each other's existence beforehand. 00:10:38.870 --> 00:10:42.369 This is cooperation without coordination. 00:10:42.369 --> 00:10:45.305 This is the big change. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:45.305 --> 00:10:50.515 Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great 00:10:50.515 --> 00:10:54.212 that open-source programmers now have a tool 00:10:54.212 --> 00:10:57.305 that supports their philosophical way of working, 00:10:57.305 --> 00:10:59.409 although I think that is great. 00:10:59.409 --> 00:11:02.177 I tell you all of this because of what I think it means 00:11:02.177 --> 00:11:04.371 for the way communities come together. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:04.371 --> 00:11:10.690 Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination, 00:11:10.690 --> 00:11:13.630 you start to see communities form 00:11:13.630 --> 00:11:17.882 that are enormously large and complex. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:17.882 --> 00:11:20.161 This is a graph of the Ruby community. 00:11:20.161 --> 00:11:21.690 It's an open-source programming language, 00:11:21.690 --> 00:11:24.688 and all of the interconnections between the people -- 00:11:24.688 --> 00:11:27.087 this is now not a software graph, but a people graph, 00:11:27.087 --> 00:11:29.189 all of the interconnections among the people 00:11:29.189 --> 00:11:31.532 working on that project — 00:11:31.532 --> 00:11:34.522 and this doesn't look like an org chart. 00:11:34.522 --> 00:11:37.942 This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet, 00:11:37.942 --> 00:11:40.550 out of this community, but using these tools, 00:11:40.550 --> 00:11:42.836 they can now create something together. 00:11:42.836 --> 00:11:47.201 So there are two good reasons to think that 00:11:47.201 --> 00:11:51.374 this kind of technique can be applied 00:11:51.374 --> 00:11:55.907 to democracies in general and in particular to the law. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:55.907 --> 00:11:57.765 When you make the claim, in fact, 00:11:57.765 --> 00:12:00.723 that something on the Internet is going to be good 00:12:00.723 --> 00:12:03.164 for democracy, you often get this reaction. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:03.164 --> 00:12:09.088 (Music) (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:12:09.088 --> 00:12:11.614 Which is, are you talking about the thing 00:12:11.614 --> 00:12:14.025 with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing 00:12:14.025 --> 00:12:16.654 you think is going to be good for society? 00:12:16.654 --> 00:12:18.789 To which I have to say, here's the thing 00:12:18.789 --> 00:12:22.150 with the singing cats. That always happens. 00:12:22.150 --> 00:12:23.883 And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet, 00:12:23.883 --> 00:12:26.463 I mean that always happens with media, full stop. 00:12:26.463 --> 00:12:28.503 It did not take long after the rise 00:12:28.503 --> 00:12:31.179 of the commercial printing press before someone 00:12:31.179 --> 00:12:34.492 figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter) 00:12:34.492 --> 00:12:37.534 You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books 00:12:37.534 --> 00:12:40.555 very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet 00:12:40.555 --> 00:12:42.723 people would pay for?" (Laughter) 00:12:42.723 --> 00:12:46.273 It took people another 150 years to even think 00:12:46.273 --> 00:12:53.033 of the scientific journal, right? So -- (Laughter) (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:12:53.033 --> 00:12:56.071 So the harnessing by the Invisible College 00:12:56.071 --> 00:12:58.456 of the printing press to create the scientific journal 00:12:58.456 --> 00:13:01.367 was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big, 00:13:01.367 --> 00:13:04.126 and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so 00:13:04.126 --> 00:13:07.424 if you're going to look for where the change is happening, 00:13:07.424 --> 00:13:09.440 you have to look on the margins. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:09.440 --> 00:13:14.904 So, the law is also dependency-related. 00:13:14.904 --> 00:13:18.313 This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code, 00:13:18.313 --> 00:13:21.393 and the dependencies of one law on other laws 00:13:21.393 --> 00:13:23.791 for the overall effect. 00:13:23.791 --> 00:13:27.223 So there's that as a site for source code management. 00:13:27.223 --> 00:13:29.125 But there's also the fact that law is another place 00:13:29.125 --> 00:13:31.399 where there are many opinions in circulation, 00:13:31.399 --> 00:13:34.907 but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy, 00:13:34.907 --> 00:13:37.484 and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around, 00:13:37.484 --> 00:13:39.553 there are millions and millions of projects, 00:13:39.553 --> 00:13:40.907 almost all of which are source code, 00:13:40.907 --> 00:13:43.592 but if you look around the edges, you can see people 00:13:43.592 --> 00:13:45.801 experimenting with the political ramifications 00:13:45.801 --> 00:13:47.414 of a system like that. 00:13:47.414 --> 00:13:49.224 Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables 00:13:49.224 --> 00:13:51.489 from the State Department, along with software used 00:13:51.489 --> 00:13:54.678 to interpret them, including my favorite use ever 00:13:54.678 --> 00:13:57.049 of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting 00:13:57.049 --> 00:14:00.064 naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose. 00:14:00.064 --> 00:14:05.960 (Laughter) 00:14:05.960 --> 00:14:09.032 Right. (Laughter) 00:14:09.032 --> 00:14:11.831 The New York Senate has put up something called 00:14:11.831 --> 00:14:14.238 Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub, 00:14:14.238 --> 00:14:16.624 again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity. 00:14:16.624 --> 00:14:19.290 You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see 00:14:19.290 --> 00:14:21.325 a list of bills they have sponsored. 00:14:21.325 --> 00:14:24.957 Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code, 00:14:24.957 --> 00:14:27.722 the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there 00:14:27.722 --> 00:14:29.171 not just to distribute the code, 00:14:29.171 --> 00:14:32.369 but with the very interesting possibility that this could 00:14:32.369 --> 00:14:36.924 be used to further the development of legislation. 00:14:36.924 --> 00:14:40.763 Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate 00:14:40.763 --> 00:14:44.949 last year in the Senate, saying, "It's strange that Hollywood 00:14:44.949 --> 00:14:48.073 has more access to Canadian legislators 00:14:48.073 --> 00:14:51.889 than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub 00:14:51.889 --> 00:14:56.365 to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?" 00:14:56.365 --> 00:15:00.117 And it includes this very evocative screenshot. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:00.117 --> 00:15:03.095 This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here. 00:15:03.095 --> 00:15:06.065 This shows you, for text that many people are editing, 00:15:06.065 --> 00:15:08.266 when a change was made, who made it, 00:15:08.266 --> 00:15:09.269 and what the change is. 00:15:09.269 --> 00:15:10.724 The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted. 00:15:10.724 --> 00:15:13.416 The stuff in green is the stuff that got added. 00:15:13.416 --> 00:15:16.198 Programmers take this capability for granted. 00:15:16.198 --> 00:15:19.123 No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature 00:15:19.123 --> 00:15:22.938 to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, 00:15:22.938 --> 00:15:25.468 even though those are the things done 00:15:25.468 --> 00:15:28.607 with our consent and with our money. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:28.607 --> 00:15:31.845 Now, I would love to tell you that the fact 00:15:31.845 --> 00:15:35.017 that the open-source programmers have worked out 00:15:35.017 --> 00:15:38.688 a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed, 00:15:38.688 --> 00:15:42.153 cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love 00:15:42.153 --> 00:15:44.324 to tell you that because those tools are in place, 00:15:44.324 --> 00:15:48.655 the innovation is inevitable. But it's not. 00:15:48.655 --> 00:15:51.648 Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information. 00:15:51.648 --> 00:15:53.551 Somebody put a question up on Quora saying, 00:15:53.551 --> 00:15:55.643 "Why is it that lawmakers don't use 00:15:55.643 --> 00:15:57.050 distributed version control?" 00:15:57.050 --> 00:16:00.671 This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter) 00:16:00.671 --> 00:16:02.762 (Laughter) (Applause) 00:16:02.762 --> 00:16:07.784 And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:07.784 --> 00:16:10.961 The bigger problem, of course, is power. 00:16:10.961 --> 00:16:14.131 The people experimenting with participation don't have 00:16:14.131 --> 00:16:16.700 legislative power, and the people who have legislative 00:16:16.700 --> 00:16:20.663 power are not experimenting with participation. 00:16:20.663 --> 00:16:22.208 They are experimenting with openness. 00:16:22.208 --> 00:16:24.068 There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have 00:16:24.068 --> 00:16:26.996 a transparency move, but transparency is openness 00:16:26.996 --> 00:16:30.901 in only one direction, and being given a dashboard 00:16:30.901 --> 00:16:34.071 without a steering wheel has never been the core promise 00:16:34.071 --> 00:16:37.482 a democracy makes to its citizens. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:37.482 --> 00:16:39.832 So consider this. 00:16:39.832 --> 00:16:42.418 The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions 00:16:42.418 --> 00:16:46.109 out into the public was a piece of technology, 00:16:46.109 --> 00:16:49.743 but the thing that kept them there was political will. 00:16:49.743 --> 00:16:52.017 It was the expectation of the citizens 00:16:52.017 --> 00:16:55.552 that she would not be censored. 00:16:55.552 --> 00:17:00.880 That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools. 00:17:00.880 --> 00:17:04.887 We have them. We've seen them. They work. 00:17:04.887 --> 00:17:05.938 Can we use them? 00:17:05.938 --> 00:17:11.064 Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this? NOTE Paragraph 00:17:11.064 --> 00:17:14.781 T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things 00:17:14.781 --> 00:17:16.861 that can happen to a culture 00:17:16.861 --> 00:17:20.504 is that they acquire a new form of prose." 00:17:20.504 --> 00:17:22.752 I think that's wrong, but -- (Laughter) 00:17:22.752 --> 00:17:26.411 I think it's right for argumentation. Right? 00:17:26.411 --> 00:17:29.766 A momentous thing that can happen to a culture 00:17:29.766 --> 00:17:32.580 is they can acquire a new style of arguing: 00:17:32.580 --> 00:17:39.250 trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right? NOTE Paragraph 00:17:39.296 --> 00:17:42.365 A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, 00:17:42.365 --> 00:17:44.252 in the last decade, in fact. 00:17:44.252 --> 00:17:48.305 It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost, 00:17:48.305 --> 00:17:51.604 and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy. 00:17:51.604 --> 00:17:53.590 The question for us now is, are we going to let 00:17:53.590 --> 00:17:55.116 the programmers keep it to themselves? 00:17:55.116 --> 00:17:57.165 Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service 00:17:57.165 --> 00:17:59.317 for society at large? NOTE Paragraph 00:17:59.317 --> 00:18:01.917 Thank you for listening. (Applause) 00:18:01.917 --> 00:18:06.055 (Applause) 00:18:06.055 --> 00:18:11.192 Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)