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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

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that open-source programmers now have a tool

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that supports their philosophical way of working,

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although I think that is great.

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

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for the way communities come together.

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Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination,

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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,

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and all of the interconnections between the people --

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this is now not a software graph, but a people graph,

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all of the interconnections among the people

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working on that project —

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and this doesn't look like an org chart.

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This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet,

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out of this community, but using these tools,

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they can now create something together.

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So there are two good reasons to think that

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this kind of technique can be applied

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to democracies in general and in particular to the law.

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When you make the claim, in fact,

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that something on the Internet is going to be good

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for democracy, you often get this reaction.

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(Music) (Laughter)

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Which is, are you talking about the thing

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with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing

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you think is going to be good for society?

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To which I have to say, here's the thing

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with the singing cats. That always happens.

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And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet,

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I mean that always happens with media, full stop.

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It did not take long after the rise

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of the commercial printing press before someone

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figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter)

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You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books

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very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet

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people would pay for?" (Laughter)

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It took people another 150 years to even think

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of the scientific journal, right? So -- (Laughter) (Applause)

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So the harnessing by the Invisible College

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of the printing press to create the scientific journal

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was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big,

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and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so

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if you're going to look for where the change is happening,

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you have to look on the margins.

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So, the law is also dependency-related.

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This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code,

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and the dependencies of one law on other laws

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for the overall effect.

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So there's that as a site for source code management.

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But there's also the fact that law is another place

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where there are many opinions in circulation,

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but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy,

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and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around,

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there are millions and millions of projects,

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almost all of which are source code,

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but if you look around the edges, you can see people

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experimenting with the political ramifications

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of a system like that.

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Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables

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from the State Department, along with software used

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to interpret them, including my favorite use ever

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of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting

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naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose.

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(Laughter)

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Right. (Laughter)

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The New York Senate has put up something called

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Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub,

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again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity.

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You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see

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a list of bills they have sponsored.

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Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code,

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the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there

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not just to distribute the code,

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but with the very interesting possibility that this could

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be used to further the development of legislation.

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Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate

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last year in the Senate, saying, "It's strange that Hollywood

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has more access to Canadian legislators

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than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub

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to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?"

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And it includes this very evocative screenshot.

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This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here.

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This shows you, for text that many people are editing,

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when a change was made, who made it,

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and what the change is.

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The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted.

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The stuff in green is the stuff that got added.

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Programmers take this capability for granted.

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No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature

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to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets,

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even though those are the things done

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with our consent and with our money.

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Now, I would love to tell you that the fact

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that the open-source programmers have worked out

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a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed,

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cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love

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to tell you that because those tools are in place,

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the innovation is inevitable. But it's not.

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Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information.

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Somebody put a question up on Quora saying,

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"Why is it that lawmakers don't use

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distributed version control?"

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This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter)

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part.

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The bigger problem, of course, is power.

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The people experimenting with participation don't have

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legislative power, and the people who have legislative

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power are not experimenting with participation.

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They are experimenting with openness.

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There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have

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a transparency move, but transparency is openness

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in only one direction, and being given a dashboard

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without a steering wheel has never been the core promise

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a democracy makes to its citizens.

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So consider this.

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The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions

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out into the public was a piece of technology,

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but the thing that kept them there was political will.

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It was the expectation of the citizens

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that she would not be censored.

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That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools.

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We have them. We've seen them. They work.

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Can we use them?

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Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this?

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T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things

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that can happen to a culture

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is that they acquire a new form of prose."

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I think that's wrong, but -- (Laughter)

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I think it's right for argumentation. Right?

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A momentous thing that can happen to a culture

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is they can acquire a new style of arguing:

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trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right?

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A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes,

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in the last decade, in fact.

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It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost,

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and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy.

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The question for us now is, are we going to let

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the programmers keep it to themselves?

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Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service

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for society at large?

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Thank you for listening. (Applause)

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(Applause)

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Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)