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I want to talk to you today about something

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the open-source programming world can teach democracy,

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but before that, a little preamble.

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Let's start here.

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This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot

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who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute.

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A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog

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called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera

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with her every day to school to document

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her school lunches.

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Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter)

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And, as sometimes happens,

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this blog acquired first dozens of readers,

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and then hundreds of readers,

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and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in

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to watch her rate her school lunches,

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including on my favorite category,

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"Pieces of hair found in food." (Laughter)

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This was a zero day. That's good.

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And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this.

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A post that read: "Goodbye."

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And she said, "I'm very sorry to tell you this, but

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my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me

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I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore.

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I really enjoyed doing this.

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Thank you for reading. Goodbye."

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You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter)

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The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous,

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that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves

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the same day and said, "We would,

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we would never censor a nine-year-old." (Laughter)

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Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter)

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And this brings up the question,

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what made them think they could get away

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with something like that? (Laughter)

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And the answer is, all of human history prior to now.

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(Laughter) So,

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what happens when a medium suddenly puts

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a lot of new ideas into circulation?

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Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question.

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This is something we've faced several times

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over the last few centuries.

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When the telegraph came along, it was clear

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that it was going to globalize the news industry.

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What would this lead to?

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Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace.

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The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear

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but see, literally see, what was going on

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elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to?

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World peace. (Laughter)

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The telephone?

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You guessed it: world peace.

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Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet.

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Even the printing press, even the printing press

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was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce

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Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe.

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Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses,

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the Protestant Reformation, and, you know,

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the Thirty Years' War. All right,

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so what all of these predictions of world peace got right

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is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly

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come into circulation, it changes society.

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What they got exactly wrong was what happens next.

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The more ideas there are in circulation,

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the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with.

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More media always means more arguing.

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That's what happens when the media's space expands.

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And yet, when we look back on the printing press

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in the early years, we like what happened.

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We are a pro-printing press society.

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So how do we square those two things,

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that it leads to more arguing, but we think it was good?

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And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this.

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This is the cover of "Philosophical Transactions,"

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the first scientific journal ever published in English

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in the middle of the 1600s,

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and it was created by a group of people who had been

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calling themselves "The Invisible College,"

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a group of natural philosophers who only later

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would call themselves scientists,

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and they wanted to improve the way

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natural philosophers argued with each other,

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and they needed to do two things for this.

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They needed openness. They needed to create a norm

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which said, when you do an experiment,

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you have to publish not just your claims,

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but how you did the experiment.

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If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you.

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But the other thing they needed was speed.

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They had to quickly synchronize what

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other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise,

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you couldn't get the right kind of argument going.

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The printing press was clearly the right medium for this,

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but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow.

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And so they invented the scientific journal

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as a way of synchronizing the argument

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across the community of natural scientists.

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The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press.

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It was created by scientists,

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but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have

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a printing press as a tool.

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So what about us? What about our generation,

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and our media revolution, the Internet?

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Well, predictions of world peace? Check. (Laughter)

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More arguing? Gold star on that one. (Laughter)

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(Laughter)

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I mean, YouTube is just a gold mine. (Laughter)

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Better arguing? That's the question.

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So I study social media, which means,

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to a first approximation, I watch people argue.

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And if I had to pick a group that I think is

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our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people

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trying to take these tools and to press it into service,

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not for more arguments, but for better arguments,

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I'd pick the open-source programmers.

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Programming is a three-way relationship

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between a programmer, some source code,

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and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers

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are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions

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that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set

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of instructions that the computer knows how to execute,

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and that's if one person is writing it.

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Once you get more than one person writing it,

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it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite

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each other's work if they're working on the same file,

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or to send incompatible instructions

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that simply causes the computer to choke,

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and this problem grows larger

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the more programmers are involved.

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To a first approximation, the problem of managing

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a large software project is the problem

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of keeping this social chaos at bay.

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Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution

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to this problem, which is to use something called

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a "version control system,"

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and a version control system does what is says on the tin.

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It provides a canonical copy of the software

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on a server somewhere.

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The only programmers who can change it are people

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who've specifically been given permission to access it,

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and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it

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that they have permission to change.

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And when people draw diagrams of version control systems,

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the diagrams always look something like this.

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All right. They look like org charts.

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And you don't have to squint very hard

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to see the political ramifications of a system like this.

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This is feudalism: one owner, many workers.

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Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry.

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It really is Microsoft's Office. It's Adobe's Photoshop.

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The corporation owns the software.

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The programmers come and go.

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But there was one programmer who decided

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that this wasn't the way to work.

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This is Linus Torvalds.

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Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer,

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created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way

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the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem.

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Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license,

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is that everybody should have access to all the source code

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all the time, but of course, this creates

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the very threat of chaos you have to forestall

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in order to get anything working.

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So most open-source projects just held their noses

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and adopted the feudal management systems.

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But Torvalds said, "No, I'm not going to do that."

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His point of view on this was very clear.

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When you adopt a tool, you also adopt

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the management philosophy embedded in that tool,

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and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work

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the way the Linux community worked.

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And to give you a sense of how enormous

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a decision like this was, this is a map

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of the internal dependencies within Linux,

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within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts

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of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going.

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This is a tremendously complicated process.

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This is a tremendously complicated program,

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and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this

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not with automated tools but out of his email box.

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People would literally mail him changes

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that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand.

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And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out

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how the community worked, he said, "I think I know

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how to write a version control system for free people."

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And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control.

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It has two big differences

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with traditional version control systems.

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The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise

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of open-source. Everybody who works on a project

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has access to all of the source code all of the time.

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And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow,

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they use drawings that look like this.

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And you don't have to understand what the circles

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and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more

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complicated way of working than is supported

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by ordinary version control systems.

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But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back,

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and this is Git's second big innovation.

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This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service,

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and every time a programmer uses Git

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to make any important change at all,

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creating a new file, modifying an existing one,

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merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature.

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This long string of numbers and letters here

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is a unique identifier tied to every single change,

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but without any central coordination.

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Every Git system generates this number the same way,

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which means this is a signature tied directly

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and unforgeably to a particular change.

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This has the following effect:

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A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe

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can both get the same -- a copy of the same piece of software.

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Each of them can make changes and they can merge them

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after the fact even if they didn't know

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of each other's existence beforehand.

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This is cooperation without coordination.

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This is the big change.

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Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great

0:10:50.515,0:10:54.212
that open-source programmers now have a tool

0:10:54.212,0:10:57.305
that supports their philosophical way of working,

0:10:57.305,0:10:59.409
although I think that is great.

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I tell you all of this because of what I think it means

0:11:02.177,0:11:04.371
for the way communities come together.

0:11:04.371,0:11:10.690
Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination,

0:11:10.690,0:11:13.630
you start to see communities form

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that are enormously large and complex.

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This is a graph of the Ruby community.

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It's an open-source programming language,

0:11:21.690,0:11:24.688
and all of the interconnections between the people --

0:11:24.688,0:11:27.087
this is now not a software graph, but a people graph,

0:11:27.087,0:11:29.189
all of the interconnections among the people

0:11:29.189,0:11:31.532
working on that project —

0:11:31.532,0:11:34.522
and this doesn't look like an org chart.

0:11:34.522,0:11:37.942
This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet,

0:11:37.942,0:11:40.550
out of this community, but using these tools,

0:11:40.550,0:11:42.836
they can now create something together.

0:11:42.836,0:11:47.201
So there are two good reasons to think that

0:11:47.201,0:11:51.374
this kind of technique can be applied

0:11:51.374,0:11:55.907
to democracies in general and in particular to the law.

0:11:55.907,0:11:57.765
When you make the claim, in fact,

0:11:57.765,0:12:00.723
that something on the Internet is going to be good

0:12:00.723,0:12:03.164
for democracy, you often get this reaction.

0:12:03.164,0:12:09.088
(Music) (Laughter)

0:12:09.088,0:12:11.614
Which is, are you talking about the thing

0:12:11.614,0:12:14.025
with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing

0:12:14.025,0:12:16.654
you think is going to be good for society?

0:12:16.654,0:12:18.789
To which I have to say, here's the thing

0:12:18.789,0:12:22.150
with the singing cats. That always happens.

0:12:22.150,0:12:23.883
And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet,

0:12:23.883,0:12:26.463
I mean that always happens with media, full stop.

0:12:26.463,0:12:28.503
It did not take long after the rise

0:12:28.503,0:12:31.179
of the commercial printing press before someone

0:12:31.179,0:12:34.492
figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter)

0:12:34.492,0:12:37.534
You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books

0:12:37.534,0:12:40.555
very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet

0:12:40.555,0:12:42.723
people would pay for?" (Laughter)

0:12:42.723,0:12:46.273
It took people another 150 years to even think

0:12:46.273,0:12:53.033
of the scientific journal, right? So -- (Laughter) (Applause)

0:12:53.033,0:12:56.071
So the harnessing by the Invisible College

0:12:56.071,0:12:58.456
of the printing press to create the scientific journal

0:12:58.456,0:13:01.367
was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big,

0:13:01.367,0:13:04.126
and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so

0:13:04.126,0:13:07.424
if you're going to look for where the change is happening,

0:13:07.424,0:13:09.440
you have to look on the margins.

0:13:09.440,0:13:14.904
So, the law is also dependency-related.

0:13:14.904,0:13:18.313
This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code,

0:13:18.313,0:13:21.393
and the dependencies of one law on other laws

0:13:21.393,0:13:23.791
for the overall effect.

0:13:23.791,0:13:27.223
So there's that as a site for source code management.

0:13:27.223,0:13:29.125
But there's also the fact that law is another place

0:13:29.125,0:13:31.399
where there are many opinions in circulation,

0:13:31.399,0:13:34.907
but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy,

0:13:34.907,0:13:37.484
and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around,

0:13:37.484,0:13:39.553
there are millions and millions of projects,

0:13:39.553,0:13:40.907
almost all of which are source code,

0:13:40.907,0:13:43.592
but if you look around the edges, you can see people

0:13:43.592,0:13:45.801
experimenting with the political ramifications

0:13:45.801,0:13:47.414
of a system like that.

0:13:47.414,0:13:49.224
Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables

0:13:49.224,0:13:51.489
from the State Department, along with software used

0:13:51.489,0:13:54.678
to interpret them, including my favorite use ever

0:13:54.678,0:13:57.049
of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting

0:13:57.049,0:14:00.064
naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose.

0:14:00.064,0:14:05.960
(Laughter)

0:14:05.960,0:14:09.032
Right. (Laughter)

0:14:09.032,0:14:11.831
The New York Senate has put up something called

0:14:11.831,0:14:14.238
Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub,

0:14:14.238,0:14:16.624
again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity.

0:14:16.624,0:14:19.290
You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see

0:14:19.290,0:14:21.325
a list of bills they have sponsored.

0:14:21.325,0:14:24.957
Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code,

0:14:24.957,0:14:27.722
the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there

0:14:27.722,0:14:29.171
not just to distribute the code,

0:14:29.171,0:14:32.369
but with the very interesting possibility that this could

0:14:32.369,0:14:36.924
be used to further the development of legislation.

0:14:36.924,0:14:40.763
Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate

0:14:40.763,0:14:44.949
last year in the Senate, saying, "It's strange that Hollywood

0:14:44.949,0:14:48.073
has more access to Canadian legislators

0:14:48.073,0:14:51.889
than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub

0:14:51.889,0:14:56.365
to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?"

0:14:56.365,0:15:00.117
And it includes this very evocative screenshot.

0:15:00.117,0:15:03.095
This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here.

0:15:03.095,0:15:06.065
This shows you, for text that many people are editing,

0:15:06.065,0:15:08.266
when a change was made, who made it,

0:15:08.266,0:15:09.269
and what the change is.

0:15:09.269,0:15:10.724
The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted.

0:15:10.724,0:15:13.416
The stuff in green is the stuff that got added.

0:15:13.416,0:15:16.198
Programmers take this capability for granted.

0:15:16.198,0:15:19.123
No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature

0:15:19.123,0:15:22.938
to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets,

0:15:22.938,0:15:25.468
even though those are the things done

0:15:25.468,0:15:28.607
with our consent and with our money.

0:15:28.607,0:15:31.845
Now, I would love to tell you that the fact

0:15:31.845,0:15:35.017
that the open-source programmers have worked out

0:15:35.017,0:15:38.688
a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed,

0:15:38.688,0:15:42.153
cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love

0:15:42.153,0:15:44.324
to tell you that because those tools are in place,

0:15:44.324,0:15:48.655
the innovation is inevitable. But it's not.

0:15:48.655,0:15:51.648
Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information.

0:15:51.648,0:15:53.551
Somebody put a question up on Quora saying,

0:15:53.551,0:15:55.643
"Why is it that lawmakers don't use

0:15:55.643,0:15:57.050
distributed version control?"

0:15:57.050,0:16:00.671
This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter)

0:16:00.671,0:16:02.762
(Laughter) (Applause)

0:16:02.762,0:16:07.784
And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part.

0:16:07.784,0:16:10.961
The bigger problem, of course, is power.

0:16:10.961,0:16:14.131
The people experimenting with participation don't have

0:16:14.131,0:16:16.700
legislative power, and the people who have legislative

0:16:16.700,0:16:20.663
power are not experimenting with participation.

0:16:20.663,0:16:22.208
They are experimenting with openness.

0:16:22.208,0:16:24.068
There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have

0:16:24.068,0:16:26.996
a transparency move, but transparency is openness

0:16:26.996,0:16:30.901
in only one direction, and being given a dashboard

0:16:30.901,0:16:34.071
without a steering wheel has never been the core promise

0:16:34.071,0:16:37.482
a democracy makes to its citizens.

0:16:37.482,0:16:39.832
So consider this.

0:16:39.832,0:16:42.418
The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions

0:16:42.418,0:16:46.109
out into the public was a piece of technology,

0:16:46.109,0:16:49.743
but the thing that kept them there was political will.

0:16:49.743,0:16:52.017
It was the expectation of the citizens

0:16:52.017,0:16:55.552
that she would not be censored.

0:16:55.552,0:17:00.880
That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools.

0:17:00.880,0:17:04.887
We have them. We've seen them. They work.

0:17:04.887,0:17:05.938
Can we use them?

0:17:05.938,0:17:11.064
Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this?

0:17:11.064,0:17:14.781
T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things

0:17:14.781,0:17:16.861
that can happen to a culture

0:17:16.861,0:17:20.504
is that they acquire a new form of prose."

0:17:20.504,0:17:22.752
I think that's wrong, but -- (Laughter)

0:17:22.752,0:17:26.411
I think it's right for argumentation. Right?

0:17:26.411,0:17:29.766
A momentous thing that can happen to a culture

0:17:29.766,0:17:32.580
is they can acquire a new style of arguing:

0:17:32.580,0:17:39.250
trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right?

0:17:39.296,0:17:42.365
A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes,

0:17:42.365,0:17:44.252
in the last decade, in fact.

0:17:44.252,0:17:48.305
It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost,

0:17:48.305,0:17:51.604
and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy.

0:17:51.604,0:17:53.590
The question for us now is, are we going to let

0:17:53.590,0:17:55.116
the programmers keep it to themselves?

0:17:55.116,0:17:57.165
Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service

0:17:57.165,0:17:59.317
for society at large?

0:17:59.317,0:18:01.917
Thank you for listening. (Applause)

0:18:01.917,0:18:06.055
(Applause)

0:18:06.055,0:18:11.192
Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)